Smith matters permanently, to America and the world, because of the fierce alchemy he underwent.
HISTORIANS TEND TO LOCATE Mormonism in the first decade of its development (the 1830s) on the side of Evangelical Antimasonry. (Apologists reject this, but for the wrong reasons—their rejoinder is a desperate attempt to buttress the book against reductionism of any kind.1 Anthony W. Ivins is a case in point.)2 Book of Mormon critic Dan Vogel quotes the financier of the first edition of the Book of Mormon, Martin Harris, who described it as an “Anti-masonick Bible.”3 (Harris served on the local Palmyra anti-Masonic vigilance committee before gravitating to Mormonism. His wife, Lucy, took umbrage to his shift in faith, burning the first 116 pages of the manuscript in a vain attempt to save her husband and their home, in the opinion of one LDS seminarian. When the Book of Mormon failed to sell, her worst nightmare came true, and they lost the farm.)4 W. W. Phelps, another prominent early Mormon and newspaperman, edited the anti-Masonic Phoenix, of Ontario, New York, before his conversion.5 Vogel cites these and other examples to underscore early Mormonism’s anti-Masonic bias. In his view, “it is a serious mistake to discount the virtually unanimous view of those in Jacksonian America that the Book of Mormon was describing and warning them of the political dangers of Freemasonry. If those in Jacksonian America were wrong about the book’s anti-Masonic politics, then the book fell far short of its intended goal (of plainness) since virtually everyone misunderstood its message” (p. 19).
Fawn M. Brodie was among the first to argue that the Book of Mormon should be seen as anti-Masonic. As she explains, “Joseph Smith was writing the Book of Mormon in the thick of a political crusade that gave backwards New York, hitherto politically stagnant and socially déclassé, a certain prestige and glory. And he quickly introduced in the book the theme of the Gadianton band, a secret society whose oaths for fraternal protection were bald parallels of Masonic oaths, and whose avowed aim was the overthrow of the democratic Nephite government.”6 Masonic apologists agree; S. H. Goodwin is one example.7 Another, James C. Bilderback, takes for granted that “the early books of the Mormon Bible definitely renounce the Masonic Brotherhood.”8
Eyewitness accounts and even learned Masonic opinion are not quite unanimous, however. In 1831, for example, non-Mormon Eber D. Howe published an article in the Painesville Telegraph accusing Mormons of being “republican jacks,” a term for Masonic sympathizers.9 Phelps, though described as an anti-Masonic newspaperman, was nevertheless considered to be a friend of Masonry by such prominent defenders of the order as Heinrich Opperman. In Opperman’s magnum opus, nine volumes in all, a fiction entitled Hundred Years: 1770–1870, he describes a brief layover in Salt Lake City by three Freemasons who report that the reason for Mormonism’s “borrowings from Freemasonry” is “their main apostle, W. W. Phelps,” allegedly a student of Freemason scholar Karl Christian Friedrich Krause of Gottingen.10 The characterization of Phelps as a disciple of German Freemasonry is intriguing but patently wrong.
So why did so many Masons—Royal Arch devotees in particular—convert to Mormonism in the early years? Mormon historian of Masonry E. Cecil McGavin notes that “many of the Mormon brethren had been admitted to Masonry before they joined the church.”11 Hyrum Smith, Newell K. Whitney, Heber C. Kimball, John C. Bennet, George Miller, Lucius N. Scovil, Elijah Fordham, John Smith, Austin Cowles, Noah Rogers, and James Adams—all members of Smith’s inner circle—were Freemasons. Of his Masonic vows, Kimball wrote, “I have been as true as an angel from the Heavens to the covenants I made in the lodge at Victor.”12 Many such Mormon Masons suffered no pangs of guilt vis-à-vis their erstwhile fraternal predilections.13 Some joined because they saw in the movement and its prophet a potential ally of Masonry. Adams, a slaveholder, joined in hopes of bringing Mormons into the Masonic fold. Any reticence on Smith’s part stemmed from his conviction that the introduction of Freemasonry among the Saints was more duplication than contradiction. Masonic historian Mervin B. Hogan agrees that Smith planned “to organize a competing coexistent Masonic Grand Lodge in Illinois.”14 How far back such plans went and whether the Book of Mormon stood in the way of, or paved the way for, a Mormon-Masonic rapprochement are the real questions.
Hogan, in an 1980 publication, Mormonism and Freemasonry: The Illinois Episode, argues that “the secret society of the Book of Mormon cannot be mistaken as, or construed to be, Freemasonry by anyone other than a totally uninformed person who is misled by the common but erroneous practice of designating oath bound organizations as secret societies.”15 “It must be readily acknowledged that Mormonism and Freemasonry,” he continues, “are so intimately and inextricably interwoven and interrelated that the two can never be dissociated” (p. 289). According to Hogan, moreover, “Freemasonry was a subject with which the Prophet felt personally thoroughly acquainted with,” and “the origin, growth, and rise of Joseph Smith’s modern phenomenon of Mormonism took place in the congenial, intimate domestic atmosphere of a family home which enjoyed a Masonic influence” (p. 268).16 Smith’s story, Brooke also agrees, “was deeply entangled in the popular hermeticism of the divining culture,” Freemasonry being an important point of entry.17 Smith had relatives in Vermont who were Masons. His father and older brother were Masons. There were two Royal Arch Chapters in Palmyra, and thirty-six Masonic lodges in the immediate vicinity.18 Oliver Cowdery, Smith’s chief scribe, was also a card-carrying Royal Arch Mason, according to one contemporary source.19
Perhaps Smith became a Mason in 1830 and kept it a secret. In the wake of the Morgan affair, being too candid about one’s ties to the order could prove problematic. No record of such an initiation (before 1842) has ever been found, but the New York record is silent concerning the membership of some of the order’s most distinguished Masons. There are also reasons to suspect that when Smith became a Master Mason in 1842 at the lodge in Nauvoo, Illinois, it was in the nature of a resumption of duties rather than an investiture. He was raised to the sublime degree of a Master Mason only two days after petitioning the lodge, for example.20 The shortness of that initiation may constitute enough circumstantial evidence of prior knowledge of and sympathy for the cause of manhood, if not membership per se. Masonic law states categorically that only after a minimum of “one month’s service” as an Entered Apprentice and the same as a Fellow Craft can one be raised to the level of Master Mason.21 Not only the rituals and oaths but the lectures, odes, scriptural passages, Masonic paraphrases, and symbolism must be committed to memory. The thirty-day probationary period normally allotted was barely time to master the essentials of a single degree. It is possible, however, that the 1842 initiation was in fact an honorary ceremony. Albert G. Mackey explains that honorary membership is “conferred only as a mark of distinction on Brethren of great talents or merits, who have been of service, by their labors and their writings, to the fraternity … and amounts to no more than a testimonial of the esteem and respect entertained by the Lodge.”22
As Ivan J. Barrett says, “Joseph Smith … was promoted three degrees practically ‘upon sight,’ a rare procedure reserved for kings, presidents, and potentates.”23 The Nauvoo Lodge was of York lineage, Grand Master of Illinois Abraham Jonas officiating at an out-door installation ceremony held on 15 March 1842 and despite strong opposition from (York) Masons (Scottish Rite Masonry not as yet a fixture that far west) in neighboring Quincy. By all accounts, the irregular (speedy) manner in which Nauvoo’s Masons added to their numbers, forced Jonas to withdraw his support, issuing an injunction to cease all such labor. One reason for the ensuing suspension was the membership of John C. Bennett, who, it seems, had fallen out of favor. (He was also partial to the higher degrees of the Scottish and Egyptian Rites.) The rapidity with which investitures took place accords with the practice of modern Scottish Rite Masons, which in hindsight Mormons were putting to good use. It is revealing, for example, that Smith was accused of establishing a women’s lodge, the Relief Society. Given that he waited most of his life before finally gaining entrance, the experience proved disappointing, since he proceeded with the construction of the massive Nauvoo temple, where an even more sublime order of priesthood and set of adoptive rituals (of clandestine Scottish and Egyptian derivation) would come to fruition.
The Mormon prophet, we know, spent his formative years in perhaps the only Masonic apprenticeship open to someone of his age and class: that of village “money digger.” Most of his family also dabbled in the occult, even his mother, Lucy Mack Smith. As D. Michael Quinn has shown, the Smiths blurred the lines between magic and religion, faith and science, despite the best efforts of the local clergy to dissuade them.24 However, as my attempt at translating the Smith family tracing board suggests, they were a little too conversant in the iconography and grand omnific verbiage of Templarism to be seen as mere magi. Winning the faculty of Abrac, or the use of magical incantations such as “abracadabra,” one of the magical practices exercised by the Smiths, appears in Masonic sources as part of the higher liturgies. And although apparently magical furnishings in the home suggest that the Smiths practiced magic for its own sake and that Freemasonry was a sidebar,25 some of the empirical evidence for the Smiths (root and branch) as practitioners of ceremonial magic is strikingly Masonic. For example, that the senior Smith was a known “rodsman” would have made him a Lodge Deacon, since the rod is the Masonic insignia of that office. In Pennsylvania, the rod that Lodge Deacons carried was also called a “wand,” tipped with gold no less, which they displayed on parade (2:863–864). There were several kinds. One bent at the top, resembling a snake, an allusion to the story in the Old Testament of Aaron, Moses’ mouthpiece, who turns his rod into a serpent and back again. The object Joseph Sr. carried with him might also have been a Masonic divining rod (a pedum in Masonic parlance), the insignia of a Royal Arch Master or Moderator. “The rod of the Rose Croix,” Clegg explains, “is straight, white, like a wand, and yet may be used as a helping or leaning staff” (1:289). Joseph Sr.’s ceremonial dagger, mentioned in Quinn,26 which one might use to draw magic circles and conjure spirits, could also have had Masonic (Templar and Scottish) significance, as a sidearm denoting a particular office.27 Joseph Jr. owned the cane shown in figure 17a, ostensibly to steady himself (he had a limp); however, it may have also served as a badge of Masonic office. Not only does it resemble a Masonic divining rod, or “pedum,” but the insignia on the side (which Quinn tells us is simply astrological) depicts a Templar crown and what appears to be a Royal Arch. Another important piece of empirical evidence, collected in the course of Quinn’s exhaustive discussion of Smith’s debt to the magic worldview, is a medallion showing a dove clutching a twig in its beak. This too, is Masonic, another emblem of the office of Deacon.
The real question, however, concerns Smith’s knowledge and opinion of Masonry in the early years of the church he founded in 1830 that, according to many, was mainly intended for Christian Primitivists. At first simply calling it the Church of Christ in these days, Smith changed the name a mere four years later to the Church of the Latter-day Saints, which in 1838 became the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.28 It has always been tempting to see in the designation “Latter-day Saint” an afterclap of Puritanism (to borrow from Emerson); however, it seems altogether Catholic and medieval, the church that Smith founded in April 1830 being both a church of Jesus Christ and a Commandery of Knights Templar or Medieval Latter-day Saints. The new name ought to have made his Templar intentions quite clear, to any, that is, with (Masonic) understanding. Zion’s Camp, an armed march of Mormons under Smith in 1834, which after much dissension and even a plague of cholera suffered the ultimate humiliation of having to relinquish arms before a single shot could be fired in retaliation for mob violence perpetrated against fellow Saints (pp. 277–294), can be seen as a latter-day, Templar-like crusade in both word and deed. “Camp” has a very specific Masonic usage, the name for a Consistory of Sublime Princes of the Royal Secret, that is, the Thirty-second Degree of the Scottish Rite. The tracing board and apron of the degree include an imaginary Masonic camp.29
FIGURE 16 Divining Rod, or Pedum
Robert I. Clegg, Mackey’s Revised Encyclopedia of Freemasonry (Richmond, Va.: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply, 1966), 1:289.
FIGURE 17 Closeups of Joseph Smith Jr.’s Serpent Cane
D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1987), figs. 37, 38. By permission of photographer D. Michael Quinn
FIGURE 18a Joseph Smith Jr.’s Dove Medallion
D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature, 1987), fig. 39. By permission of photographer D. Michael Quinn
FIGURE 18b The English Templar Deacon Robert Crucifix
Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John C. Yorston, 1911), 3: 272b.
There are also a few literary clues to Smith’s early Masonic self-understanding and hidden Templar agenda—or not so hidden, in the case of Zion’s Camp—that seem to have escaped detection. Enoch is one of the code names he went by—which is Masonic in itself.30 While this is not remarkable for someone raised in a Templar home and partial to the advanced degrees and esoterica synonymous with the Scottish Rite, it could also, of course, be simply biblical in origin. Gazelam, however, another of Smith’s code names, is not a proper name that appears in the Bible. First appearing in connection to Smith in a revelation on the establishment of a storehouse for the poor, its origin is anyone’s guess. Still, it bears a striking resemblance to Gibalim, a Masonic corruption of the Hebrew Giblim. For Masons, it can only mean “stone squarer,”31 although the classical Hebrew meaning is “a concrete boundary marker,” whereas in Talmudic sources it is used in connection with mixing with lime or kneading (as bread).32 For Smith’s sake, one hopes that Gazelam is simply a corruption of Gibalim and hence code designating the Mormon prophet as one of Solomon’s latter-day stonecutters. For Gazelam could also be translated as “robber”: in Talmudic writings, the root gzl refers to one who “takes without paying.”33
Indeed, some of Smith’s dearest followers would accuse him of ecclesiastical and financial malpractice, the first such challenge to his leadership coming on the heels of Zion’s Camp. That said, and in all fairness to the Mormon prophet, the only sense in which he was a robber might relate to matters Masonic and ritualistic. And one hastens to add that his mythopoetic larcenies are like Robin Hood’s: he might be accused of stealing from the rich in order to give to the poor.
His so-called First Vision, as I discuss in the following chapter, can be seen as the testimony of a Royal Arch Mason and/or Christian Knight rather than that of some disgruntled Evangelical outsider. Consider, for example, the Masonic origins of Charles G. Finney’s epiphany. We know that Finney was a Master Mason—he had joined a local Connecticut lodge in 1813, moving to New York in 1818 and affiliating himself with a lodge there—and a Masonic secretary in good standing, among other things. Finney would be forced to choose between his newfound Evangelical piety and erstwhile fraternalism a year or so before the Morgan affair, taking a harder and harder line against the order as time passed. As Carnes has shown, however, his conversion account is rife with Masonic analogue.34 This may explain why it took him so long to renounce his Masonic oaths, only publishing a retraction—albeit scathing—in 1869, in a work entitled The Character, Claims, and Practical Workings of Freemasonry.35 And if Finney could be a closet Mason, then why not Smith, too? Both men had a vision of the Almighty in a grove of trees near their homes that delivered them from the valley of the shadow of spiritual death; both stories owe a debt of some kind to Masonic piety and ritual. Finney would come out strongly against the very society of men who had brought him into the light. Smith was no less critical of the Masonic standing order but proceeded with a very different end in mind. Rather than jumping from the Masonic frying pan into the Evangelical fire, Smith attempted a revitalization of Masonry (a synthesis along Royal Arch / KnightsTemplar and proto-Scottish lines), becoming a Master Mason (of some stripe) in 1842 and then instituting an androgynous lodge of his own (of the radical European and French kind) in the succeeding months.
This doesn’t alter the fact that it still seems most unlikely that Smith was a Mason before 1842—though not through lack of trying. For starters, he walked with a slight limp, the result of an intrusive bone operation in his youth. This alone disqualified him to join his father and brother as their Masonic equal: Smith did not quite measure up to the fraternity’s idea of a real man. The reigning Masonic monitor of the day states: “Lawful Material to the Mystic Temple of Masonry must consist of free-born, of lawful age (twenty-one years and upward is the American usage); mentally, morally, and physically perfect…. Unlawful Material,” it further states, “consists of females; minors; slave born persons; those whose minds are impaired by age; irreligious libertines (scoffers at religious sentiment); atheists; idiots and deranged persons. To these are added the immoral; the lecherous; the disobedient to law, human and divine; the indiscreet in confidential communications; the halt, maim [sic], and blind; the eunuch; the parsimonious; the contumacious; the unintelligent; the brawler, and the violent.”36 Such strictures ensured that “the applicant for Masonic light shall have the senses, members, and powers as will enable him to give and to receive all the means of Masonic recognition, according to the strictest Masonic forms” (p. 276). One anonymous black ball was all it took for a candidate to be out forever.37 The Mormon prophet had little recourse but find a backdoor (if not a trapdoor) into the lodge of his choice. On the other hand, it does seem possible that his father and brother, already in the order, might have been able to convince their fellow lodgers to turn a blind eye to Smith’s bum leg.
His work as a local money digger (largely a labor of necessity) did not speak well for him, either, especially since in 1826 a Bainbridge justice of the peace convicted him of disorderly conduct and found him guilty of being an “impostor.”38 With a criminal record, Smith had no chance of becoming a Mason as the order blackballs known offenders—unless, of course, father and brother were able to call in a favor or two more.
As a brief aside, there may be more to the use of the word “impostor” to describe Smith and what he tried to pull on Josiah Stowel, the farmer who brought him up on charges and yet had hired him to find buried treasure. “Impostor” has a Masonic meaning and usage. It is used to describe those who, quoting Clegg, “never having been initiated, yet endeavor to pass themselves off for regular Freemasons, or Freemasons who, having been expelled or suspended from the Order, seek to conceal the fact and still claim the privileges of members in good standing.”39 It is possible that there was a Masonic component to the Bainbridge trial, that Stowel hauled Smith on the carpet for impersonating a Templar, not for money digging as such. “Charlatan” is another common pejorative with a specific Masonic meaning: “one who seeks by a display of pompous ceremonial, and often by claims to supernatural power, to pervert the Institution of Freemasonry to the acquisition of mere gain, or the gratification of a paltry ambition” (1:195). Was Smith’s conviction an example to other would-be Masonic impostors and charlatans?
Durfee Chase, a contemporary of Smith’s, a Palmyra Royal Arch Mason, and another money digger, was expelled in 1825 for “unmasonic conduct.” Brooke speculates that Chase was expelled for “divulging the ritual secrets of the Royal Arch to the money-digging circles,” perhaps to his sister Sally in particular.40 The Mormon prophet and the entire Chase family of Palmyra, especially Sally, argued over a “brown seer stone” that Smith discovered on their property while digging a well and to which he credited the discovery of the golden plates. Sally and other local treasure hunters thought Smith ought to share the wealth. Smith had other plans, publishing his “translation” as the Book of Mormon and then returning the plates to their original hiding place at the behest of an angelic being named Moroni (or possibly Nephi) who had been instrumental in the whole process.41 That he rejected pleas to use the plates for personal gain suggests that at worst he was guilty of exercising poor judgment in the company he sometimes kept and in the work he was sometimes obliged to take (more or less as he tells it).
To add to obstacles standing between him and Masonic standing, Smith turned twenty-one (of Masonic age) at the height of the anti-Masonic controversy and scandal surrounding the disappearance of renegade Royal Arch Mason Captain William Morgan. The Morgan affair gave Evangelicals all the fuel they needed to bring down their (Royal) arch rivals as the Second Great Awakening trudged on. Most lodges found it easier to close than to respond in kind. In the state of New York, membership fell from 30,000 to 300. Vermont and Illinois Masonry was decimated; not a single lodge remained open when all was said and done. The brethren met in absolute secret in a futile attempt to keep the movement from dying out completely, the 1840s marking the first real attempts at recovery and resumption of normal Masonic activities.42 But by then, everything had changed in favor of the emergent Evangelical consensus.
The precise day, month, and year when Smith should have become a Mason, he discovered the golden plates (instead?). He would put the Masonic legends of the metal plates of Enoch and long lost book of the Law to good use, perhaps in hopes of proving wrong the Masonic elites who had tried to keep him down. Yet, as Robert Freke Gould suggests in his multivolume Masonic history, Smith’s achievement was certain to prove problematic all the same:
Foolish and unnecessary as it will always appear to destroy the original beautiful simplicity of the Craft, the great evil of these innovations lies in their destruction of an important principle. Freemasonry is founded upon the perfect equality of all its members…. But in almost every one of these new systems, with scarcely an exception, the governing power is autocratic and irresponsible … those of the lower classes have no voice whatsoever in the administration of their affairs or in the election of their rulers. This one consideration alone precludes these systems from ever being entitled to call themselves Masonic. They are not and never can be Freemasonry. They are simply separate societies, all of whose members happened to be Freemasons.43
Still, Smith had little choice, all things considered, but to invent a Masonry of his own in the wake of the Morgan affair, a thesis that has much going for it when one considers that other young Masonic prospects at the time did precisely that—one of them the father of American ethnography, no less, Lewis Henry Morgan. One biographer hit the nail on the head when he described Lewis (no relation to William) Morgan as not “a born ethnologist” but “made one by a secret society.”44 Morgan hoped to transform a literary secret society of which he was already a member into a new branch of Royal Arch Masonry, adding Indian legend to the ritual of manhood. Morgan’s father, Jedidiah, was a prominent Mason. Worshipful Master of the Scipio lodge, he contributed significantly to the building of the Royal Arch temple in Aurora, New York (only thirty-two miles from Palmyra). He died the same year William Morgan disappeared. Lewis, eight at the time, would not come of Masonic age for another thirteen years. But when the time arrived for him to begin his ascent up the ranks of manhood, as Carnes explains, he “could not have joined his father’s Masonic lodge, which ceased meeting during the Antimasonic uproar” (p. 96). And so he did the next best and only thing, establishing in 1840 his own “Indian lodge,” which went by the name of the Order of the Iroquois and proposed the knitting of individuals into a single civil and social system based on thinly veiled Masonic principles.45 Morgan even invited esteemed ethnologists and friends of his father—William Leete Stone, a Mason and the author of The Life and Times of Red Jacket, and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft—to dialogue on the substance of his Masonic-inspired reclamation of Indian spirituality. He lost heart, though, in part because his studies seemed to take the place of Masonry. Adoption by the Hawk clan in 1846 did little to disabuse him of academic ambition. Not only would he disband the Order of Iroquois, but he vainly attempted to conceal his role in its creation from his colleagues and the public in general.
FIGURE 19 An Ancient Lodge of Freemasonry
“Before the erection of temples our ancient brethren held their lodges on a high hill or in a low vale, the better to observe the approach of cowans and eavesdroppers ascending or descending.”
Robert Freke Gould, A Library of Freemasonry (London: John D. Yorston, 1911), 1:52b.
Morgan’s Order of Iroquois gave rise to numerous Masonic ritual celebrations of Native American character, a stream of male ritual celebrations of the “primitive men’s house.”46 One such was the Improved Order of Red Men, founded in 1834, that began as a working-class drinking society but later became a male temperance movement that hoped to attract a better class of people into the organization. It grew to some 350,000 strong by 1900, with annual receipts in excess of one million dollars. Carnes explains that the order’s “Adoption degree implied that the life of the paleface had come to an end. As a Red Man he would chart a more ‘serene’ course through life” (p. 102).
The parallels between Morgan and Smith are many. Not unlike Morgan, who abandoned his nascent Masonry for the greater light of academic study, Smith, too, underwent a kind of personal alchemy, transmuting from rural money digger to (Masonic) prophet of God. Both men were intent on keeping their Masonic activities a secret lest these prove problematic in the eyes of their peers. Of course, both published works of Native history. But where Morgan’s League of the Iroquois is an achievement befitting a scholar, Smith’s Book of Mormon is the work of a seer and revelator of unshakable Masonic faith and vision.