Signs, grips, oaths, and tokens used in Mormonism are so similar that one can't escape the suspicion Smith "borrowed" these Masonic practices, especially since he became a Mason on March 15, 1842 (Documentary History of the Church 4:550-551).

The Mormon church complex is sustained by beliefs, rites, and ethics focused on temples that span the world. The fact that no temple existed in 1830, when the church was founded, except those portrayed in the Bible, emphasizes the expansive potential of an invented tradition like the LDS Church is one. To these visible and socially powerful 'expressions of innovation‘ we might add the socially invisible temple garments that dedicated Mormons wear as underclothing and which furnish a daily, tactile expression of commitment. As "inventions," these are far more difficult to align with biblical or traditional Christian practice. They did not exist at the church's foundation, but depend for their status on the fact that Joseph Smith (1805-44) was, in founding the church, accepted as a "prophet, seer, and revelator."

Scientology and the teachings of Don Juan are just a few of many other (be it  much later) contemporary innovations, that rely on invented traditions. The most common cases of inventing sacred traditions may, in fact, be those in which the crucial legitimating events are projected centuries if not millennia into the past.

Hence the scriptures of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- Day Saints, are published for the first time in the 1830s, by LDS members, understood to be faithful translations of originals composed many centuries earlier by Mormon, a fourth-century prophet of the lost race of Nephites, or by such biblical figures as Moses and Abraham.

Thus, the authority gained by projecting one's tradition into a legendary past, can serve several purposes. It strengthens cohesion within the group, by allowing individual members to identify with a common history: the shared veneration of Joseph Smith becomes an integrated part of what it means to be a Scientologist Mormon. It provides the doctrines and practices with an aura of plausibility: if the scriptures of the LDS church are ancient documents, the distinct theology of Mormonism is presumably also the original teaching transmitted to the first generations of Christians, before these doctrines were misrepresented by other denominations. And, with the LDS church again as an apt illustration, inventing one's history enables religious innovators to shape the tradition of which they are part by ascribing at times radically new ideas to ancient, founding figures.

While the Hermetic world that would become so prominent in his later worldview  was encountered by Joseph Smith (1805-1844) during his  early years, he as we shall see, was fascinated by Freemasonry until he himself  joined a lodge at last in 1842. He would clearly be acquainted with the story of Enoch's plates of gold and their found-and-lost-again history in the age of Solomon. He would likewise know something of the mystical revelations of the celebrated Swedish author and visionary of the period, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), who, in Smith's nineteenth-century upstate New York environment, had become something of a Hermetic household magus. But he would also be a cunning man and a lover of Indian lore. And, in the midst of all of this, he would anguish as a religious seeker struggling with the discordant messages of Christian evangelical preachers around the era's revival fires.

Here it could be noted, following Hobsbawm's point that "all invented traditions use history as a legitimating of action," the Mormon case, including its own "ritualization of history," is simply more recent. (Introduction, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, p. 12. See also).

Other Masonic parallels that helped create the new religion include among others; the  degrees of glory, sacred treasures hidden in the earth, the exaltation of mankind in the presence of deity, interest in ancient Egypt and Israel, emphasis on the creative role of a supreme being, symbolic clothing, and secret means of recognition. Both traditions have made extensive use, architecturally and otherwise, of motifs such as the beehive, square and compasses, handclasps, sun, moon, and stars. Even more mundane features of Mormonism, such as administrative structure and ritual secrecy, bear the unmistakable imprint of the Fraternity.

As early as 1832, Smith had declared that he was Enoch the Prophet. In so doing he paved the way for an association between himself and the secret and buried (Masonic) knowledge thought to descend from Adam to Enoch to Solomon. When, like Solomon, he was linked to the discovery of golden plates in the depths of the earth, he added a link, too, to the chain of associations he was forging. When he also claimed the "Urim" and "Thummim" by means of which to translate the inscriptions on the plates, he echoed a biblical language-the name of the jewels or stones that formed the center of Aaron's "breastplate of judgment" - made familiar in public Masonic discourse.1

When, likewise in the early 1830s, he proclaimed a restored biblical priesthood of Melchizedek, his revelation followed a formula central to Royal Arch Masonry (both the Canandaigua and Palmyra lodges were Royal Arch) in acknowledging the passage of the priesthood from Adam to Enoch to Solomon.

As Smith's emerging theological and ritual creations took concrete shape, his restored priesthoods found in newly built temples appropriate spaces in which to exercise function and authority. Solomon's temple rose again in each Mormon foundation, and from one point of view what Smith was doing was bringing a renewed and Plurified Masonry-a "true Masonry" -to his followers. It was only a matter of months after Smith himself had become a Mason that his elaborate endowment rituals were initiated. Indeed, writing in the Mormon journal Dialogue, Michael W. Homer cites the "candor of Smith and others" regarding the "close connection between Freemasonry and Mormonism." Early Mormon leaders, Homer argues, "recognized this connection and did not consider it too sacred or controversial to discuss." "In the eyes of his family and his closest followers;' John Brooke in his turn writes, "Smith's endowment rituals of 1842-3, the foundation of a new Mormonism promising a progression into godhood for the faithful, signaled the restoration of the hermetic promise of a pure Gnostic Freemasonry." Even if Brooke's study on the whole may obscure the biblical and Christian legacy (beyond the Radical Reformation) that Smith's Mormonism also incorporated, his work is telling and important here.2

In a comprehensive rehearsal of Mormon temple borrowings from Royal Arch Masonry, Brooke points to elements as varied as the pulpit veils in the Kirtland, Ohio, temple of 1836 and the temple endowment ritual that, by the early 1850s, Brigham Young was said to have called "Celestial Masonry." The ceremony was complex, intricate, dramatic, and richly combinative, and it would be too simple to attribute its creation to a single source, as significant as Masonry was for Smith and a good number of his followers. Still, the lengthy rite featured grips, signs, passwords, the prevalent form of the Masonic five points of fellowship, and other clues to provenance. Brooke notes in the rituals the "striking similarities with Masonic symbolism," especially the symbols used in "the York Rite, which was established at the Nauvoo Lodge." He cites also the "temple garments, very similar to Masonic ceremonial garb" with "an apron with Masonic compass and square," a motif repeated on the temple veil. "The language of the tokens and penalties of the Mormon priesthoods had exact parallels in Freemasonry," Brooke summarizes, "progressing from parallels with the first three degrees of Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason to parallels with the Royal Arch and the higher degrees." Besides the near-simultaneous work of Homer, Brooke has other, earlier company in the connections he notices. "The observant Craftsman cannot be long among the Mormon people without noting the frequent use made of certain emblems and symbols which have come to be associated in the public mind with the Masonic fraternity;' S. H. Goodwin wrote by 1924. He went on to supply a clear bill of supporting evidence in the temple ritual and its accoutrements. Moreover, it is hard to discount the "twenty-seven parallels between the ritual of the Masons and the Mormon Temple ceremony" that Jerald and Sandra Tanner have cited, along with the observations of a series of church insiders before the appearance of Homer's lengthy essay.3

To Connect the dots between Smith and Freemasonry, as I have been doing here, is well enough. But the task of historical recovery involves a deeper archaeology of Mormon foundations. In the vaults of Smith's memory and attachment were links that identify the Mormon founder with a broad Hermeticism that he and many of the people who joined him inherited from the received vernacular world of his culture and time. The order of Melchizedek was not the ritual ground of Masons only. Nearly a century before the dedication of the Kirtland temple, Ephratans were celebrating the restored order of Melchizedek, and in Smith's own time so were the communitarian societies of the Shakers and the Rappites, all with demonstrable ties to Hermeticism.

No early-nineteenth-century schoolmaster ever handed Smith a copy of the Corpus Hermeticum, so far as the historical record can reconstruct. But, as Brooke has succinctly argued, "Smith arrived at an approximation of many of its fundamental points by a process of reassembling scattered doctrines available in dissenting and hermetic sources." Brooke is ready to acknowledge the role of "what Mormons would call revelation" in the process, although he notes that others would regard the work as one of ("powerful") human imagination.4 Indeed, in an ironic echo of the central myth of the sixteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah with its narrative of a cosmic "breaking of the vessels" and scattering of light, Smith, as it were, picked up the scattered pieces of light in his world in order to repair and reconstruct a Hermetic whole.5

In so doing Smith addressed what Brooke calls a "prepared people," as his own reconstructions of the Atlantic journeys of the survivors of the Radical Reformation demonstrate. As the previous chapter noted, Brooke reads a German-style Hermetic inscription on the culture of the mid-Atlantic colonies. He also points, in telling terms, to southeastern New England sectarians as important conduits for this Hermetic teaching. "With their own connections running back to the radical experience of the English Revolution," he notices, "the New England sectarians were receptive to the systematic hermetic perfection of the German sectarians; certainly they were themselves the reservoir of a great proportion of the fragments of occult belief and practice floating around seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England." Among them could be counted the "ancestors of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, as well as quite a number of other Mormon forebears."6

Out of the complex cultural amalgam available to Joseph Smith, he shaped a theology that resonated clearly with a Hermetic past. "Mormon concepts of the coequality of matter and spirit, of the covenant of celestial marriage, and of an ultimate goal of human godhood;' says Brooke, displayed "striking parallels" with "the philosophical traditions of alchemy and hermeticism, drawn from the ancient world and fused with Christianity in the Italian Renaissance." And if a prepared people where conduits to bring Smith to his new creation and in turn to receive it, so, too, was the print culture of upstate New York. With newsprint and even bookstores surprisingly accessible, the "enduring, revitalized texts" sat ready for popular consumption by Joseph Smith and his contemporaries.7 Thus text disclosures of Freemasonic secrets fanned out into a world of other and further disclosures. Read from a metaphysical perspective, perhaps none was so significant for the Hermetic content of Mormon theology as the texts that revealed the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg.

Swedenborg was born in 1688 into a Lutheran family with a mining background in Stockholm, Sweden. His father would become a bishop in the church at Skara by 1718, and as part of the appointment the family-then Swedborg was ennobled and its name changed to the familiar form. By that time, the future mystic and seer (who had completed studies at Uppsala University in 1709) had been serving for about two years as Extraordinary Assessor in the Royal College of Mines, and he would continue to do so until 1747. He also spent some fifty years in the House of Nobles-one of four "estates" in the Swedish legislature. A significant technological and scientific resource in his time, Swedenborg made discoveries in fields as varied as metallurgy and the biology of the cerebral cortex and the nervous system. More than that, he achieved renown as an original and precocious thinker who seemed a veritable Leonardo da Vinci of the north. And if human consciousness and metals dug from the earth formed the poles of Swedenborg's professional interest, they prefigured what was to come. Beginning in 1743 and 1744, he began to experience a series of voice-visions that led him in trance to other worlds both celestial and infernal. He would become a master and adept of altered states and an archaeologist of the deep recesses of the human mind. By this time, too, he had already been steadily and intensively writing on philosophical themes, understanding them in the tangible, material terms that would yield books with titles like Principles of Chemistry (1720), the three-volume Philosophical and Mineralogical Works (1729-1734), and the two volume The Economy of the Animal Kingdom (1740-1741)-this last what Sig Synnestvedt calls Swedenborg's "search for the soul."8

Echoing the received Hermeticism of northern Europe, in the alchemy of his own mind Swedenborg transmuted philosophy into theology. The decade and more from 1747 to 1758 saw the composition and publication of his twelve-volume Arcana Coelestia, his earliest major work of theology. With its title signifying the "heavenly secrets" that he, as Christian initiate, would reveal concerning the biblical books of Genesis and Exodus, the work extended over seven thousand pages. Here and in later writing, Swedenborg promulgated the age old theory of correspondence, the coincidence of worlds in which the "as above" was replicate a in the "so below“ In formulations that echoed one another in a series of heavenly and earthly registers, he conflated heaven and earth, spirit and matter, and energy and form. Worlds urged into other worlds, and connecting them was a spirit influx from above, which permeated all that was below as its source and sustenance. "Communication by correspondences is what is called influx," Swedenborg wrote, and the term became well-nigh ubiquitous in his works. "The life of everyone, whether man, spirit or angel," he testified, "flows in solely from the Lord," a Lord who "diffused himself through the universal heaven, and even through hell."9

Thus the Christian Trinity was subsumed into a God who manifested himself in Jesus Christ as the principles of inexhaustible love (the Father), divine wisdom (the Son), and divine and sanctifying energy (the Holy Spirit). This Christ himself summarized and subsumed all of humanity. The spirit world that Swedenborg visited many times and recorded for readers in his Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell (1758) was populated by angels who were "wholly men in form, having faces, eyes, ears, bodies, arms, hands, and feet." Meanwhile, "heaven in its whole complex" reflected a "single man" -an "arcanum hitherto unknown in the world." This Hermetic divine man, or Christ-man, summarized the existence of the angel-men of the heavenly sphere, where they dwelled in two kingdoms, the "celestial" -a higher kingdom of those who received "the Divine of the Lord more interiorly" -and the lower, and less interior, spiritual kingdom. Still more, Swedenborg identified three heavens - the celestial, the spiritual, and the natural- and he detailed the heavenly life in various societies in which mansions, table settings, clothing, and flower gardens all took concrete form and color for the benefit of readers. A cryptic script common to the life of heaven employed secret Hebraic characters, in which "every letter involved arcana of wisdom," its secret writing strikingly reminiscent of Christian Kabbalistic themes.10

Strikingly, there was sex in Swedenborgian heaven, as his later Conjugial Love (1768) would carefully explain. The "love of the sex" was a love that "especially remains," wrote Swedenborg, "because a man is a man after death and a woman is a woman, and because there is nothing in soul, in mind, and in body, that is not masculine in the male and feminine in the female." 11

 This sexual love was raised and transmuted in its spiritualized form as "conjugial" love, and the distinctions between the two formed at least part of the burden of Swedenborg's work. Finally, in "conjugial" love as in all else, heaven existed as a progressive place in which "every society" would "daily" become "more perfect;' as would "heaven in general." The angels in Swedenborg's heaven were thus continually "perfected in wisdom;' a process that went on into eternity. Here no requirement for redemption existed in the traditional Christian sense. In a theological universalism that would surely have vernacular echoes in America, Swedenborg announced that "the Lord casts no one into hell; the spirit casts himself down."12

Swedenborg, in effect, had articulated in one form or another a number of the major tenets of Mormon theology as Joseph Smith put it forward through his revelations. D. Michael Quinn has detailed the presence in the Palmyra library of a popular reference work on religion, with editions from 1784 through 1817, which recounted Swedenborg's personal testimony of a spirit calling. As early as 1808, the Swedenborgian confession of spirit calling and angelic communication had appeared at Canandaigua, where the notorious Mason William Morgan was later jailed, on the front page of the Western Repository.13 Meanwhile, Swedenborgians published their own pamphlets and tracts to spread their message to a rural audience in early-nineteenth-century America. Thus it would be harder to argue against a familiarity with Swedenborgian teaching on the part of Smith than to argue for it. Indeed, he himself in the late 1830s was said to have admitted to a Mormon convert his acquaintance with the Swedish seer: "Emanuel Swedenborg had a view of things to come, but for daily food he perished.“ 14

Whatever Swedenborg's daily spiritual ration, he spoke a theological language that reappeared in the new Smith teaching. Swedenborg's anti-Trinitarianism, to be sure, was replaced in Mormon theology by a tritheism in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit continued to be distinct and separate.15 However, Swedenborg's cryptic heavenly writing-with its echoes of hieroglyphics, secrets, Kabbalism, and Hermetic lore-found echoes in the "Reformed Egyptian" text that Smith's golden plates announced to the world. Moreover, the careful correspondences of the Swedenborgian cosmos were refracted in a Mormon light in which heaven was, indeed, an earthlike place and earth itself shone with the borrowed light of the heavenly world. "There is no such thing as immaterial matter," declared Joseph Smith in a revelation in 1843. "All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes." Still further, the heavenly realm was inhabited by a God suspiciously similar to Swedenborg's Divine Human and to the Hermetic vision in general. In a funeral oration for his friend King Follett in 1844, Smith announced to fellow-Mormon mourners: "I will tell you & hear it 0 Earth! God who sits in yonder heavens is a man like yourselves." "That God if you were to see him to day," he continued, "you would see him like a man in form, like yourselves." And if God was a man, humans were themselves potentially divine. Adam had been formed in God's "image and talked with him & walkd with him," and so humans needed to learn to make themselves "God, king and priest," going from "a small capacity to a large capacity" until they arrived "at the station of a God." Almost a year earlier, in the context of a revelation on the eternity of marriage, Smith had already affirmed the same of the future state of glory: "Then sha-lol they be Gods, because they have no end .... Then shall they be Gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.“ 16

Beyond that, the Mormon cosmos existed as three worlds that refracted differing degrees of glory and also reflected a Swedenborgian and generally magical, perhaps Agrippan, ambience. (With Agrippa meaning the author of The Occult Philosophy)

As early as 1832, the "natural" heaven of the Swedish seer was paralleled by Smith's "telestial" one, a place of severely limited beatitude where those whom contemporary evangelicals would clearly call sinners could safely dwell. Swedenborg's "spiritual" heaven found a correlate in Smith's "terrestrial" realm, for the virtuous who were Gentiles; that is, non-Mormons. And Swedenborg's "celestial" and highest heaven was echoed in Smith's version of the same, a paradise where Mormons ruled as Gods, where they eternally progressed and grew ever more perfect, and where, as Smith's revelation would later unfold, the "conjugiallove" that Swedenborg had averred for the heavenly order brought bliss to the eternally wedded just.17

Both the Swedenborgian vision and the Smith revelation point back toward a larger Hermetic universe, in which the Father-Mother God prevailed. The coniunctio, or conjoining, of the metaphorically male and female elements in alchemical vessels produced the pure gold of the philosopher's stone. Kabbalistic speculation, in its turn, presented a divine "En Sof" who had revealed himself as two - the male element, the seed of wisdom, and the female, its womb. In the writings of the revered Jacob Boehme the dual deity likewise ruled. The androgynous Adam, as a primordial being, had been shaped in the image and likeness of God because necontained originally within himself both seed ("limbus") and womb ("matrix").18 Here in America, Conrad Beissel's eighteenth-century community at Ephrata, Pennsylvania, had been heir to Boehmian beliefs about the androgyny of God and, originally, of Adam. There were still, in the 1820,s German-language productions of Boehme's writings at Ephrata, probably by descendants of the founding members of the group or their associates.19
Meanwhile, other utopian groups in the early nineteenth century-the Rappites, or Harmonists, and the Shakers-were also teaching their version of the FatherMother God.

As early as 1839, Smith apparently had caught the outlines of this "conjugial" vision, since he was reported to have invoked an "eternal Mother, the wife of your Father in Heaven." Smith's "theology of the conjunction," however, encompassed polygamous marriages and plural wives. His thirty-two marriages, eighteen of them likely accomplished under astrologically auspicious signs, bore witness to what Brooke has called an "institutionalized antinomianism" in the Hermetic tradition. If the mystical coincidentia oppositorum was necessary for divinizatid'n and if, as in Smith's revealed secret, godliness was progressive-with the God of scriptures still limited and humans in a process of heavenly becoming -then more sex meant more divininity.16 Indeed, the progress of Smith's theology wrote large the progress already present in Swedenborgianism and-Hermeticism in general- a quest for increasing perfection that could be successful on earth as above. Here the Swedenborgian formulation of divine influx appeared in the Mormon revelation in a new key. Meanwhile, Smith's teaching of the eternity of matter and the preexistence of souls articulated a version of Hermeticism only vaguely suggested, if at all, in the Swedenborgian teaching of a pre-Adamite humanity. The teaching stretched the road of progress from a murky past into a never-ending future.18

In the distinctly American coniunctio of Joseph Smith and Mormon revelation, there were whispers of the sexual magic that some future metaphysicians would later explore. The message was clear: heaven was a place of bliss, and a place of bliss was a place of bodies. Spiritual marriages had something to do with flesh. Here, in a higher, better materialism, the old Calvinist God who avenged the blight of sinners was effaced in favor of a milder, more lenient-and more limited-deity. As Fawn Brodie declared, Smith "had taken a long step toward Universalism, for even the 'liars, sorcerers, adulterers, and whoremongers' were guaranteed telestial glory, and only a handful of unregenerates called the Sons of Perdition were to be eternally damned."19 But here, too, the bodies of bliss were enlightened bodies, and the enlightenment came-not through the rationalism of the eighteenth-century European and American philosophers but through the reformation of magic. Joseph Smith had conjoined a folk magic of dowsing and treasure-seeking to the high Hermetic tradition of magic that Masonry, Swedenborgianism, and other and related sources had mediated to him.

Smith grew up in a family with a long tradition of magical belief and practice. Vermont was what D. Michael Quinn has called a "treasure-digging mecca" when Joseph Smith Sr. lived there, and in the western New York to which he eventually relocated, he found a congenial environment for magical practice, as Palmyra's local newspaper in the 1820s revealed. Even some clergy apparently carried dowsing rods in this nineteenth-century world, and Christianity blended seamlessly into the magic of the folk. The "magical milieu of the Smith family," Quinn summarizes, "included seer stones, astrology, talismans, a dagger for drawing magic circles of treasure digging and spirit invocation, and magic parchments for purification, protection and conjuring a spirit." There were, indeed, sophisticated magical artifacts in the Smith family, and it was clear that the family practiced ritual magic. Joseph Smith's Masonic brother Hyrum-with whom he was later to be assassinated in Carthage - possessed at the time of his death a magic dagger and three parchments, or lamens, used for ceremonial magic work.20

Joseph Smith himself was, by any standard, a cunning man. What was new, however, was that Smith (and others like him) was a cunning man not simply in a rural countryside but in a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing environment.

By 1822, a section of the Erie Canal linking Rochester to Utica, New York, had been completed, and the canal ran through one end of the village of Palmyra. As the economy of exchange boomed in commercial venues, so it did in goods of the spirit. With books, newspapers, and people with metaphysical knowledge readily available, a would-be magus could quickly absorb a varied portfolio in the magical trade. By the time the Book of Mormon appeared, Smith had already acquired a reputation as a local money-digger and treasure-hunter, employing the familiar divinatory techniques of English country magic.

To accomplish his work he used a stone to "see" what needed revealing, and he was sought out for his skills. At one time, in fact, he was part of a company of money-diggers who traveled around to various places in New York and Pennsylvania seeking old Spanish and Indian treasure in the earth. By 1826, these activities had gotten him in trouble with the law, when the nephew of a treasure-seeking client thought that his uncle was being swindled and swore out a warrant for Smith's arrest. Tried at South Bainbridge, New York, as a "disorderly person," Smith was as a result convicted, but as a first offender he walked away. What is especially interesting about the case, however, is how much it revealed about his magical practice, its connection with old lore about the simultaneous obstinacy and slipperiness of buried treasure, and the level and degree of its magical sophistication. Smith, who worked for Josiah Stowell along with others, claimed that he found treasure but could not extract it, and this for magical reasons. He needed to wrest the bounty from its guardian spirit, and so he engaged, albeit unsuccessfully, in a repertoire of magical actions that reportedly included magic circles, zodiacal consultation, and even animal sacrifice.21

Smith could also use a forked divining rod, and he did so apparently with his early convert Oliver Cowdery in the 1820s. There was, in fact, an earlier history to their relationship and use of the rod. In Middletown, Vermont, the fathers of the two had been friends and members together of Nathaniel Wood's New Israelites, a group that came under the influence of a charismatic diviner who urged them to seek secret prophecy and miracle-working root medicines with the help of the rod.22 The move of the Smiths and the Cowderys to New York did nothing noticeable to dampen their faith in dowsing. Indeed, a revelation from 1829 addressed by Joseph Smith Jr. to Oliver Cowdery alluded to his "gift." "Doubt not," Smith assured his friend, "for it is the gift of God, and you shall hold it in your hands, and do marvelous.works."23

For the period nearly a decade earlier, Quinn has invoked the "apparent magical context for Smith's first vision" in 1820. Read a certain way, the vision's heavenly pronouncement to Smith that all of the sects were wrong was an endorsement of magical practice as a replacement. This line of inquiry points to the spiritual territory that Jan Shipps has trodden in her well-known reconstruction of the discovery and translation of the Book of Mormon.24 The puzzle of the prophet can be solved with convincing ease if one follows Smith in the elision of material and spiritual treasure. One should dig for gold, yes, but-for a New World alchemist of the earth-the gold should be the philosopher's stone of a new religion.

When Smith sought the plates of the Book of Mormon on the Hill Cumorah for the first time in 1823, they proved as hard to get as the treasure of magical lore that exonerated his later failure in the Josiah Stowell project. In fact, the juxtaposition of the two "treasures" illumines the combinative magical project to which Smith committed himself in pursuit of the plates. Quinn has documented the earliest accounts of uncanny events leading to their discovery-newspaper reports that spoke of Smith's thrice visitation "by the spirit of the Almighty in a dream" who informed him of a "golden Bible" in the earth. In an elaborate reconstruction of "favorable" astrological progressions and ritual magic instructions for spirit invocation in a generally Agrippan framework, Quinn has also argued that Smith was actively engaged in necromancy or psychomancy. The hours during which Smith communicated with the spirit "corresponded exactly with instructions for the successful magic invocation of spirits." Hence the claimed appearance of a spirit later identified as the angel Moroni represented "the dramatically successful result of ritual magic."25

In this reading, the English country magic of the cunning folk, represented in seer stones and dowsing rods, has gone decidedly high and has come trailing Hermetic nuances. Still further, Smith's inability to carry away the treasure year after year until 1827 evokes folkloric motifs regarding treasure guardians who prevented its acquisition. It evokes, too, a tradition of enchantments that made the treasure forever elusive, slipping away as it was almost within grasp. The inability, however, also suggests an initiatory period during which the adept must undergo testing and be purified before treasure can be possessed. Thus, as Quinn has observed, Smith "dramatically expanded the religious dimensions inherent in folk magic." 26

After the treasure was at last claimed, the conflation of religion and magic continued in the translating practice of Smith. Officially, the Drim and Thummim - with their biblical and also culturally Masonic associations - provided the source of vision to enable Smith's task. More intimate accounts, though, point to a Smith who typically worked in a different fashion with a seer stone he especially favored. For example, David Whitmer reported that Smith "would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine."27 Even more, the declaration that the material to be translated was written in hieroglyphics, in "Reformed Egyptian," hints of the ancient home place of Hermes Trismegistus and, as well, the preoccupations with secret language in the Kabbalah, in Masonry, and even in Swedenborg. So the Book of Mormon echoed a magical tongue with-contained in that formula-the power of the revealed secret to aid and assist nineteenth-century Americans. As Quinn has suggested, the presence and subtlety of these magical allusions "may explain why religious seekers from folk religion were attracted to Mormonism from 1830 on, and why these seekers, for what may have been the first time, seemed to feel at home in an organized religion."28

Smith himself did not stop employing seer stones after 1829, and Brigham Young, too, endorsed their use. Moreover, Smith habitually wore or carried as a pocket piece a magical silver Jupiter talisman (in Smith's astrological chart, Jupiter was his ruling planet) to bring wealth and good fortune28 But the Smith who used seer stones and possessed an auspicious magical talisman was also a young man who had woven into his magical and religious practice the haunting memory of the indigenous dwellers in the land. Joseph Smith could not forget the Indians, and their ghosts trod in his mind and in the countryside around him in New York. Even the heavily edited, official version of Lucy Mack Smith's story of his life recounted: "During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them." 30 The Book of Mormon, we recall, claimed to reveal the true beginnings and the history of the Indian peoples on this and the South American continent. Indeed, the "spirit" who had come to Joseph Smith three times in 1823 had come with the message that a record of ancient Indian history was contained in the golden plates. Such an announcement was congruent with what Dan Vogel has called the "persistent legend of a lost Indian book" abroad in the region during the early national period.31

Smith's ventures into money-digging, as I have noted, often involved digging for Indian treasure, and thus Indian mounds were often the sites of his and his associates' labors. Nor did he and his friends have a hard time finding locations. Both the New England that Smith's father left and the New York State in which he himself lived possessed landscapes dotted with mounds and memorials of Indian provenance.32

One of  the core rituals of Mormonism, Endowment constitutes the major rite of passage into a distinctive status, one that differentiates what may be called "temple Mormons" from "chapel Mormons," those dedicated people who engage in temple ritual and are committed to the theology driving it, and those involved only in local Mormon chapel or "ward" life but not in temples. This theological innovation of Endowment can be focused in a single word, "sealing," a term that is introduced in the Book of Mormon as an alternative to "binding" in biblical texts that describe how Jesus gave Peter power to "bind" things on earth that would, henceforth, be "bound" in heaven. "Sealing" as a word comes to function as a condensed symbol within Mormonism, uniting layered depths of meaning within itself.

The strength of its significance  lies in a combination of two factors. First, where "sealing" is used in the Bible, it refers to an act of God, whereas in the Mormon context , it became an action of man. Second, sometime in 1831, Joseph Smith, perhaps in response to concerns of his assistant Sydney Rigdon, received a revelation that introduced the "innovation" of the high priesthood. In November 1831 these various concepts came together in a priesthood ritual allowing one to "seal (people) up unto eternal life" (Doctrine and Covenants 68:2, 12: see also 1:8-9). Thus Mormon priesthood bearers themselves could perform a ritual paralleling what a strict Calvinist, for example, reserved solely to God. This can be seen as one precursor to the endowment ceremony which would eventually be performed in the Kirtland temple in January 1836. It was also then that Joseph Smith received a vision of "the celestial kingdom of God" with all its wonder and glory; "God and his Son upon the throne ... father Adam, and Abraham and Michael," and along with them his own father (still alive and in the same room as him at the time), his still-living mother, and the long-dead brother, Alvin.

Suffice it to say here that Alvin's appearance in a vision at one creative moment of Joseph's thought may well have been the crucial precursor for a later innovation of considerable subsequent consequence. While space forbids a detailed description of the development of these Endowment rites in association with later rites of washing with water and anointing with oil, it is important to note the influence of Freemasonry upon the fuller development of Endowment rites, which incorporate verbal vows and covenants aligned with secret hand and body clasps and the development of special temple clothing; Joseph Smith became a Mason in March 1842. To some critics of Mormonism who deploy obvious similarities that indicate direct borrowing, this period in Joseph's life offers sharp evidence to dispel any special or revelatory nature of the temple rites.

The  conservative Mormon  perspective argues, that God had revealed certain rites to humanity when in its infancy in Eden, rites that had been forgotten and attenuated over time but which had been retained in Masonry. Accordingly, far from Mormons borrowing their rites from Masons, it is seen as the other way around, whereby  Masons possess only a pale shadow of the true rites, rites that God restored in their fullness through Joseph Smith. It is Restoration, not innovation, that prevails. Here one can only note that while Masonry was itself a classic form of invented tradition, its influence on Mormonism was grounded in quite a different sense of its authenticity and origin.

But it is not only the past that may involve invention of tradition, for the future can also present new opportunities to define realities afresh, as in the contemporary debate over whether Mormonism should be described as a "world religion." This argument has its roots in various attempts at classifying the nature of Mormonism as a tradition similar to or different from its American religious origin"33, and was revitalized in 1984 when sociologist Rodney Stark argued that Mormonism was set on a path to become the next "world religion" after Islam on the basis of its growth rates.34

Church leaders did not ignore this academic debate, and have dwelt upon it as part of their own self-definition and as a means of considering future organization and planning. (LDS Almanac, 2001-2002: pp. '48-52).  Paradoxically, leaders wish to assert the Christian identity of Mormonism while also differentiating the church from other Christian churches. The status of sharing the description of being Christian is desired, but does not extend to a sharing in the identity of other churches.

Currently, Mormon church finances are not public  - not even to its members - but the church, which asks members to give 10 percent of their income, is believed to be one of the richest in the world. In 2006, the church scattered more than 53,000 missionaries around the world.

According to the Salt Lake Tribune today: With the shrewdness of a politician, Hinckley downplayed the more controversial aspects of LDS history.
 

1. See John Stanford, Urim and Thummim: A Discourse Delivered before Hiram Lodge, No. 72, on St. John's Day, Dec. 27, 1800 (Mount Pleasant, NY: Russell Canfield, n.d.). See, also, Exod. 28:30 and Lev. 8:8. John Brooke has likewise described a series of Mormon artifacts with Freemasonic associations (see Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 157-58).

2. Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 166, 194, 198, 252 (the phrase "true Masonry" was Heber Kimball's in 1858); Michael W. Homer, "'Similarity of Priesthood in Masonry': The Relationship between Freemasonry and Mormonism;' Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 27, no. 3 (Fall 1994): 3 (I am indebted to D. Michael Quinn for calling this article to my attention); Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 166-67. Jan Shipps has called Brooke's work "flawed" and has faulted its subtitle The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 16441844 as an overstatement. "In failing to point to all that the Saints took from the Bible," she argues, Brooke's work neglected "definitive components of that cosmology and an ingredient in the LDS [Latter-day Saint] mix that is absolutely critical to explaining Mormonism's appeal." See Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), ll, 213.

3. Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 220,253,249; Goodwin, Mormonism and Masonry, 50, 54-59; Tanner and Tanner, Changing World of Mormonism, 536-47; Homer, "'Similarity of Priesthood in Masonry,'" 1-113.

4. Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 204.

5. On the Kabbalah oflsaac Luria (1534-1572), see Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), 3d ed. (1954; rpt., New York: Schocken, 1961), 244-86.

6. Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 33,45.

7. Ibid., xiii, 29.

8. See, for example, Sig Synnestvedt, "Life of Emanuel Swedenborg," in Sig Synnestvedt, ed., The Essential Swedenborg: Basic Teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (New York: Twayne, 197°),21,24. For another brief bibliographical view of Swedenborg, see Jane K. Williams-Hogan, "Swedenborg: A Biography;' in Erland J. Brock et al., eds., Swedenborg and His Influence (Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Academy of the New Church, 1988), 3-27. For a full-length biography, see Inge Jonsson, Emanuel Swedenborg, trans. Catherine Djurklou (New York: Twayne, 1971).

9. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen (1758), trans. J. C. Ager (1852; rpt., New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1964),111; Emanuel Swedenborg, Arcana Coelestia; or, Heavenly Mysteries (1747-1758): 2888, in Synnestvedt, ed., Essential Swedenborg, 126.

10. Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, 39, 31, 14, 13, 17, 139. For another and fuller view of Swedenborgian heaven and its relation to modernity, see Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 181-227.

11. Emanuel Swedenborg, The Delights orWisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love after Which Follow the Pleasures of Insanity Pertaining to Scortatory Love (1768), trans. Samuel M. Warren and rev. trans. Louis H. Tafel,1856; rpt., New York: Swedenborg Foundation, 1980), 56.

12. Swedenborg, Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell, 36, 151, 291, 353.

13. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 12-13.

14. Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 206.

15. See Sterling M. Me Murrin, The Theological Foundations of the Mormon Religion (1965; rpt., Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1974), 17-18.

16. Joseph Smith, The Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of LatterDay Saints, ed. Orson Pratt (1880; rpt., Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1971), 131:7; Joseph Smith, Funeral Oration for King Follett, as recorded by Wilford Woodruff, as quoted in Brooke, Refiner's Fire (emphasis in Brooke), 235; Smith, Doctrine and Covenants,132:20.

17. Smith, Doctrine and Covenants, 76: 50-98. See, also, Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 199-200; and Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 175.

18. See Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, 156-243; Jacob Boehme, The Three Principles of the Divine Essence, in Jacob Boehme, The Works of Jacob Boehme, trans. G. Ward and T. Langcake, 4 vols. (London: M. Richardson, 1764-81), 1: 68, 171. See, also, Catherine L. Albanese, "Mormonism and the Male-Female God: An Exploration in Active Mysticism," Sunstone 6, no. 2 (March-April 1981): 52-58.

19. We have been able to locate three German-language productions at Ephrata: one in 18n-1812, another in 1822, and a third in 1824. See Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker, American Bibliography: A Preliminary Checklist for 1811 (New York: Scarecrow, 1962), 35-36; Richard A. Shoemaker, A Checklist for American Imprints for 1822 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1967), 31; and Richard A. Shoemaker, A Checklist for American Imprints for 1824 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1969), 37-38.

20. Brooke, Refiner's Fire, 258, 281, 262-63; Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 60-62.

21. See Mary Ann Meyers, A New World Jerusalem: The Swedenborgian Experience in Community Construction (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1983), 23.

22. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 118.

23. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 22, 25, Ill, 78-79. For another discussion of the magical ambience of the Smith family-and a psychologized (family systems) reading of its conflicts and their role in helping to shape Joseph Smith Jr. as a prophet, see Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City:
Signature, 2004), esp. 35-52.

24. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 44-45; Dan Vogel, Indian Origins and the Book of Mormon: Religious Solutions from Columbus to Joseph Smith ([Salt Lake City:] Signature, 1986), 12-13.

25. See the brief account in Stephen A. Marini, Radical Sects in Revolutionary New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 54-55.

26. Smith, Doctrine and Covenants, 8:8.

27. Quinn, Early Mormon1sm and the Magic World View, 27; Jan Shipps, "The Prophet Puzzle: Suggestions Leading toward a More Comprehensive Interpretation ofJoseph Smith," Journal of Mormon History 1 (1974): 3-20.

28.Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 114, 118-23, 122, 119.

29. Ibid., 51.

30. David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (1887), as quoted in Vogel, Indian Origins, 16.

31. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 191. Generally, and especially in comparison with the work of John L. Brooke (Refiner's Fire), Quinn has deemphasized the explicitly Hermetic provenance of Smith's magical world.

32. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 197, 202, 64-72; Tanner and Tanner, Mormonism, Magic, and Masonry, 2-5; Tanner and Tanner, Changing World of Mormonism, 88-91.

33. Jan Shipps, Joseph Smith and the Making of a Global Religion, in John W. Welch (ed.), The Words of Joseph Smith (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2006), pp. 293-305.

34. Rodney Stark, "The Basis of Mormon Success: A Theoretical Application," in James T. Duke (ed.), Latter-Day Saint Social Life (Salt Lake City, UT: Bookcraft, 1998).

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