Historian Dan Vogel said the Book of Mormon was very anti-masonic in one of my previous interviews with him. Cheryl Bruno disagreed with that notion, saying the Book of Mormon was anti-spurious masonry. I asked Clair Barrus to weigh in on this issue. What does he think?
Clair: There are two forms of masonry, according to George Oliver, who has some fascinating parallels with what Joseph Smith’s Mormonism, in that there’s a spurious masonry, and then there’s pure masonry. The story goes clear back to the time of Adam. Well, God is the original Mason, and he architects the universe, and then he creates Adam.
GT: So this is a Masonic tale that you’re telling me, right?
Clair: This is a Masonic tale, yes. Then he creates Adam and then he tells Adam the true Word, the ineffable word, which is kind of the secretive name of God. He tells Adam, the word. It’s called in masonry, the word or the ineffable word. Then Adam passes that down, almost kind of like priesthood. He passes it down through his genealogical lines. It goes clear down to the time of Solomon and they end up with it and then and then they lose it. Long story short, the keeper of the word gets murdered and they lose the word and it’s lost. We’ll talk about this word here in a bit. But Cain breaks off and creates a spurious, evil, bad, misappropriated masonry, and he starts this line of adulterated masonry, spurious masonry, if I understand it, right. I’m oversimplifying, and I hope Cheryl’s not shaking her head, going, “Oh man, Clair’s kind of got it right.” But, this is not my area of expertise.
GT: When we post this, she can weigh in on it.
Clair: She can weigh in on it, yes. But that’s generally speaking, correct. So now you go to the story of William Morgan, 1826. He is going to publish an exposé of masonry. The masons supposedly freak out. William Morgan goes to jail in Canandaigua just a few miles south of the Smiths. Joseph Smith, Sr. happens to be serving time there for some debt. I think it is debt related issues. Then, later, the Masons bail out William Morgan. When he steps out of jail, they arrest him. They take them up to one of the Great Lakes. They toss him in, so the story goes. We don’t know the details, but this is kind of story that percolates out.
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GT: The thing that always bugs me is our founding fathers were masons. George Washington was a Mason. I believe Thomas Jefferson was a Mason, like everybody was a Mason. The Constitution used a lot of Masonic principles. So it’s interesting that in 1791, when George Washington is the president until, I don’t remember exactly the year that Andrew Jackson was elected, probably 1828, I believe.
Clair: Something like that.
GT: Somewhere around that timeframe. So we go from the founders of our of our nation are good masons to this William Morgan murder, and now they’re public enemy number one.
Clair: It was an overreaction. Sure. These masons were upset about William Morgan trying to expose their Masonic secrets. But the overreaction was bad and that happens in in the world all the time. Overreaction is often worse than what they’re originally reacting to. So in the Book of Mormon, you have this anti-Masonic stuff popping up. There’s two ways to interpret it. It’s either anti-masonry, or its anti-spurious masonry.
There are many types of masonry. Freemasonry has broken up into several different organizations. In our next conversation with Clair Barrus, he will tell us a little bit about these different organizations and how they differ from each other.
Clair: So it’s a little bit complicated. So the foundational masonry is Craft or Blue Lodge Masonry, that’s the first three degrees. These other things that branch out from that are not above it. This is considered top: Master Mason. There’s three degrees and you end up Master Mason.
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There’s York Rite and there’s Scottish Rite masonry. In America, different degrees would kind of get imported over from Europe where masonry was more established and would independently get started up here and there. Then as time went on, people would say, we better organize this group of degrees, and we better organize that group of degrees. So you have a building of what they called York Rite, cried even though there was another York Rite in England, but there’s an Americanized York Rite, and that’s primarily what I talk about. There’s a Scottish Rite that was more popular over there, but that was also here. They all tell similar stories. They all talk about temple. Masonry is all about temple, either temple grounds, or in the temple, itself. It can be different temples, but it’s all about temples. In York Rite, you have the foundational three degrees, the first three degrees of Craft or Blue Lodge Masonry, it’s called. And then you have a set of degrees called Royal Arch Masonry, another set of degrees called Cryptic Rite Masonry, and another set of degrees called Knights Templar Masonry. So that’s the York Rite, and each of those sets of degrees have interesting things. I think in particular, Royal Arch Masonry and Cryptic Rite Masonry have interesting parallels with Joseph Smith, and may have been influential.
Clair: So, can I tell you about Cryptic Rite Masonry?
GT: Yeah.
Clair: So Cryptic Rite Masonry comes from the word crypt. The rituals and the myth of Cryptic Rite Masonry has to do with Enoch, the prophet Enoch and mount Moriah, which later is where Solomon’s Temple would be built.
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Clair: Now let’s fast forward to Royal Arch Masonry, which is really the story of masonry in about 600 BC. [This is] about the time that the temple gets destroyed. There are temple ruins. Some people come, going through the temple rubble, masons find a stone lid, which is the lid that Enoch had created, which is the entrance to the cryptic temple. They open up that stone lid, they descend down into there, and there they find the Ark of the Covenant. There are actually nine chambers in this underground temple, and the Ark of the Covenant. So there’s a missing piece of the story. We don’t know how the ark got in there, but it does. This ought to sound familiar to Indiana Jones fans.
GT: Yes, I was just going to say [that.]
Is the story of Indiana Jones another masonic legend? It is interesting to see the ties between treasure digging, masonic legends, and Indiana Jones search for archaeological records, don’t you think? What are your thoughts about true masonry vs spurious masonry? Do you agree with Vogel or Bruno about anti-Masonry and the Book of Mormon?
Wheat & Tares 
It’s pretty clear that the Book of Mormon is anti-Masonic — or, to phrase it somewhat more gently, that the earliest readers of the Book of Mormon clearly saw it as anti-Masonic, as the anti-Masonic movement in the US was in full swing in 1830. Obviously, Joseph Smith came around to have very warm feelings for Masonry by the 1840s. So Mormonism, taken as a whole, is fairly ambivalent about it.
It is interesting how the prominent theme of the dangers of “secret combinations” in the Book of Mormon is so malleable and so convenient. In the 19th century it was anti-Masonic. In the 20th century it became an anti-Communist warning as announced by Ezra Taft Benson. In the 21st century it has morphed into sort of a general warning about conspiracies of any kind. It has become a generic conspiracy theory ready to be plugged into whatever specific theory the Mormon reader already believes.
After talking with Clair Barrus, Cheryl Bruno, and Don Bradley, I’m not so sure about that interpretation. I know Dan Vogel makes the case for the Book of Mormon being anti-Masonic, but I think Clair, Cheryl, and Don’s work are asking us to re-think the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon is anti-Masonic. In next week’s post, I will talk about some masonic connections to the Book of Mormon that I think should cause us to re-evaluate this position.
If Joseph Smith didn’t embrace Masonry in Nauvoo, would we be trying to nuance the Book of Mormon in a way that it doesn’t allow? Anti-Masons didn’t distinguish spurious and pure Masonry. They attacked Masonry and all secret works, which they considered antithetical to American sentiments. In Nauvoo, Smith was the one who labeled all Masonry as apostate priesthood.However, it would be wrong to interpret his introduction of the endowment as pure Masonry. Masonry itself was the corruption; there was no such thing as pure Masonry.
Thanks for weighing in Dan! I was hoping you would comment. Isn’t there plenty of evidence that Joseph was purifying the Masonic ceremonies?
Hi Rick, Sure, he kept the signs and penalties, but kept nothing of the lore and ceremony.So he appropriated some things, but it was an entirely different vision. Did he think he was purifying Masonry. I don’t think so. He rejected Masonry. Did Smith think he was restoring primitive Christianity, or did he think he was purifying Protestantism?
The so-called book that was passed down from Adam is the Book of Raziel. This was also passed lastly to Joseph which is how he learned to interpret dreams. This book is well known to the Jewish community and it is the grimoire of the Qabalah and some say the original Torah. Raziel is specifically honored in the household to ward off fires and other disasters. I uploaded a podcast on Raziel. It is on “The Fortuna Report” on YouTube if you would like to know more.
There is a very evident connection to LDS in that their white robes have Masonry symbols stitched into them. By the way, Joseph Smith met with a Jewish man in Nauvoo who taught him the Qabalah where there is also a relationship. Joseph Smith was very aware of the occult and desired to study it further. He acquired four Egyptian mummies that he believed had the papyrus of Abraham and Joseph. He also had several fragments of papyrus that he and several other men would spend time translating. I doubt the anti-masonry sentiment as Joseph Smith found the connection with Qabalah in my opinion.