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The documented link between the LDS Church and the Masonic lodge: Joseph Smith's initiation as a Freemason at Nauvoo in 1842, the temple endowment introduced weeks later and its well-documented parallels to Masonic ritual...
The documented link between the LDS Church and the Masonic lodge: Joseph Smith's initiation as a Freemason at Nauvoo in 1842, the temple endowment introduced weeks later and its well-documented parallels to Masonic ritual, and the Masonic and esoteric symbols carved openly on the Salt Lake Temple.
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William Morgan, a Freemason in western New York, was arrested on minor pretexts after announcing plans to publish a book exposing Masonic rituals, then vanished and was presumed murdered by fellow Masons. The affair ignited the Anti-Masonic movement across the region where the young Joseph Smith was growing up. The Anti-Masonic Party, formed in response, became the first significant third party in American politics.
The Anti-Masonic Party nominated William Wirt for president, becoming the first third party in American history to hold a national convention and run a presidential candidate. The party won about 8 percent of the popular vote and carried Vermont. This intense national suspicion of Freemasonry formed the cultural backdrop of Joseph Smith's youth in upstate New York, more than a decade before he himself became a Mason.
Illinois Grand Master Abraham Jonas granted a dispensation authorizing the formation of a Masonic lodge in Nauvoo, the Mormon settlement led by Joseph Smith. The dispensation specifically named Smith and Sidney Rigdon as men who could be balloted on for the three degrees of Ancient York Masonry as quickly as the rules allowed. This unusual arrangement set the stage for an extraordinarily rapid initiation the following spring.
Grand Master Abraham Jonas came to Nauvoo, installed the new lodge's officers, and initiated Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon as Entered Apprentice Masons. The next day, March 16, both men were passed to Fellowcraft in the morning and raised to the rank of Master Mason that same afternoon, completing all three degrees within about 24 hours. This pace was highly irregular by ordinary Masonic practice, which normally required weeks or months between degrees.
Joseph Smith introduced the temple endowment, a sacred ceremony of washings, anointings, and covenants, to a small group of Church leaders in the upper room of his Red Brick Store. This came less than eight weeks after Smith's own initiation into Freemasonry. Historians, including Mormon scholars, have documented close structural parallels between the new ceremony and Masonic ritual, including specific signs, tokens, grips, and penalties; Latter-day Saint tradition holds the endowment was received by revelation and represents a restoration of ancient temple ordinances rather than a copy of Masonry.
The Illinois Grand Lodge suspended Nauvoo Lodge after other lodges complained that it was initiating far more members than any lodge in the state and doing so against standard Masonic policy. The suspension was lifted that November after negotiations, but the underlying tensions over Nauvoo's practices did not go away. It was the first of two suspensions the lodge would face in two years.
As the endowment ceremony was developed and extended to more participants through 1842 and 1843, it came to include distinctive ritual clothing, secret names, and specific handclasps or grips used to identify initiates, alongside the signs and tokens already given. Scholars on both sides of the debate agree these elements closely resemble Masonic degree ritual in form, while differing on whether this reflects borrowing, adaptation, or independent revelation restoring older practices.
Within months of its founding, Nauvoo Lodge initiated far more members than any other lodge in Illinois, reportedly surpassing a thousand Masons in its first year as converts to Mormonism sought initiation alongside their new faith. Other Illinois lodges complained that Nauvoo was conferring degrees too quickly and too cheaply, violating standard Masonic practice. The rapid growth alarmed the state Grand Lodge and became a recurring source of friction.
At its annual meeting, the Illinois Grand Lodge under newly elected Grand Master Alexander Dunlap suspended Nauvoo Lodge for a second time, again citing irregular practices. When a Grand Lodge representative was sent to collect Nauvoo Lodge's dispensation, its members refused to relinquish it. On November 2, 1843, the Nauvoo Lodge voted to defy the suspension and continue meeting and conferring degrees.
A mob stormed the jail where Joseph and Hyrum Smith were held and shot them both dead. Eyewitness accounts by John Taylor and Willard Richards record Joseph Smith's final words as "O Lord, my God!", which some contemporaries, including Zina D. H. Young, believed was Smith giving the Masonic grand hailing sign of distress, a call for aid that any Mason present was bound by oath to answer. Many men in the mob and in Hancock County generally were themselves Masons, and the signal, if intended as such, was not heeded.
Months after Joseph Smith's death, the Grand Lodge of Illinois passed a resolution formally withdrawing all fellowship from Nauvoo Lodge and two related lodges, Helm Lodge and Nye Lodge, declaring their members clandestine Masons. This ended any formal recognition of Mormon Freemasonry in Illinois and closed the chapter on the Nauvoo lodges, though thousands of Latter-day Saints had already been initiated by that point.
The Nauvoo Temple, completed as Latter-day Saints were being driven from the city, incorporated sunstones, moonstones, and starstones on its exterior along with other symbolic carvings. These celestial motifs, along with the endowment ceremony performed inside, established a visual and ritual vocabulary that would reappear on later Utah temples, particularly the Salt Lake Temple decades afterward.
As Latter-day Saint leaders organized the provisional State of Deseret, they chose the beehive as its central emblem, drawing on a Book of Mormon term for honeybee associated with industrious settlement of a promised land. The beehive was adopted to represent cooperative labor and thrift among the pioneers. It would go on to appear on the Utah territorial seal, later the state seal and flag, and eventually on the Salt Lake Temple itself.
The beehive symbol first appeared on the official seal of the newly created Utah Territory, formalizing an emblem the Mormon settlers had already adopted for the earlier State of Deseret. The symbol persisted through statehood and remains on Utah's state seal and flag, and Utah is still nicknamed the Beehive State.
Brigham Young broke ground for the Salt Lake Temple, beginning a construction project that would take 40 years to complete. The building's eventual design incorporated an extensive program of symbolic carvings, including several elements that observers have long identified as Masonic in origin or parallel, alongside distinctly Latter-day Saint motifs.
After four decades of construction, the Salt Lake Temple was dedicated in a series of 31 sessions beginning April 6, 1893, with Church President Wilford Woodruff offering the dedicatory prayer. The finished building displayed an all-seeing eye, two clasped right hands, sunstones, moonstones showing lunar phases, starstones, and a large beehive, carved into its exterior stonework. Researchers on multiple sides of the debate have documented that several of these symbols, notably the all-seeing eye and clasped hands, were standard Masonic emblems in wide use during the nineteenth century.
Among the Salt Lake Temple's exterior stonework are five-pointed stars carved with a single point downward rather than upward. Architectural plans show these were designed to match similar inverted stars used earlier on the Nauvoo Temple. Critics of the Church have pointed to the inverted pentagram as an occult symbol, while Latter-day Saint sources describe the stars as astronomical and symbolic of the priesthood and the heavens rather than as an esoteric emblem.
Utah became the 45th state, carrying forward the beehive emblem first used by the provisional State of Deseret and the Utah Territory onto its official state seal. The beehive's continued use tied the new state's civic identity directly to the cooperative ideals of the early Mormon settlement, even as the symbol's earlier associations with the temple's exterior carvings remained visible in Salt Lake City.
Between 1921 and 1927, the LDS Church modified the endowment ceremony to remove explicit spoken descriptions of the three penalties, which had depicted methods of execution including throat-slitting, heart removal, and disembowelment, replacing the wording with the phrase "rather than do so, I would suffer my life to be taken." The physical gestures accompanying the penalties, closely resembling gestures found in Masonic degree ritual, were retained unchanged at this stage.
Latter-day Saint author E. Cecil McGavin published "Mormonism and Masonry," one of the earliest book-length treatments of the relationship from within the Church. McGavin argued that any similarities between the endowment and Masonic ritual reflected the restoration of ancient temple ordinances rather than direct copying, an interpretation that would remain the Church's general position in later official statements. The book went through further editions in following years as the topic continued to draw interest from both Church members and outside historians.
Mervin B. Hogan, a Latter-day Saint and active Freemason, spent decades researching and publishing detailed studies of the Nauvoo Masonic lodges using original lodge minutes and Grand Lodge correspondence. His work, produced from within both traditions, became a key primary-source basis for later historians examining the documented links between early Mormon leadership and Freemasonry, regardless of their conclusions about what the connection meant.
Historian D. Michael Quinn published "Early Mormonism and the Magic World View," situating Joseph Smith's religious development within a broader nineteenth-century milieu of folk magic, hermeticism, and esoteric societies that included Freemasonry. Quinn, then a Latter-day Saint historian, argued for a documented pattern of cultural borrowing and synthesis rather than treating Mormon ritual as wholly self-contained, a position that drew both scholarly interest and institutional criticism.
The LDS Church eliminated the penalty oaths and their accompanying gestures from the temple endowment entirely, along with the five points of fellowship performed at the veil, the Adamic phrase spoken in the prayer circle, and the wording requiring wives to covenant obedience to their husbands. The removed penalty gestures had been among the ritual elements most frequently cited by historians as directly paralleling Masonic degree ceremonies. Church leaders did not publicly detail the reasoning, and the change was communicated to members through updated temple instruction rather than public announcement.
Historian Michael W. Homer, writing in the independent journal Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, laid out documentary evidence connecting the endowment ceremony's structure and language to Masonic ritual practice known in Nauvoo in 1842. Homer's approach became characteristic of a body of scholarship, by both Latter-day Saint and non-Mormon historians, that treats the parallels as well documented while remaining more cautious about characterizing Joseph Smith's intent or theological meaning.
The University of Utah Press published Michael W. Homer's "Joseph's Temples: The Dynamic Relationship between Freemasonry and Mormonism," a full-length scholarly treatment drawing on lodge minutes, correspondence, and temple records. Homer documented extensive structural parallels between the endowment and Masonic degree ritual while framing the relationship as a dynamic, evolving one rather than a simple act of copying. The book is widely cited by both Latter-day Saint and non-Mormon scholars as the most detailed documentary treatment of the subject, even as interpretations of its meaning, borrowing versus restoration, continue to differ.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published an official history topic essay on "Masonry" acknowledging that Joseph Smith and other Church leaders were Freemasons in Nauvoo and that the endowment introduced in 1842 shares elements of language and structure with Masonic ritual. The essay presents the Church's position that the ceremony's substance came through revelation to Smith and represents a restoration of temple worship rather than a borrowing from Masonry, explicitly attributing this as the Church's interpretation while noting the documented historical overlap in timing and form.