Well, folks -- this is a long post. If you're interested in a curious item that throws the light of poetic truth on a curious puzzle in American religious history, read on. As Rod Serling used to say as he introduced episodes of The Twilight Zone: "submitted for your approval" -- and without further comment:
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Deconstructing Mormonism’s Sacred Grove: A Retrospective on Refutations of LDS Truth
Claims in Scholarly Literature (1877-2007)
Dave E. Dunnfernow, Ph.D.
Few of the truth claims among world religions have appeared more bizarre or more refreshing to those hearing its “good news” for the first time than the LDS claim to be the latter-day restoration of the Church that Jesus Christ founded while on earth. Depending on whether one is naïve or skeptical by nature, one may be compelled either to rush headlong into a simplistic solution to the schisms of the past two thousand years or be repulsed by the charms of yet another set of charlatans – particularly by smiling, corporate packaging in which the LDS message is delivered door-to-door.
Naturally, those who are seriously inclined to engage in the discussion must first either believe in Jesus Christ or at least be willing to intellectually entertain the notion of His divinity. Furthermore, they also must be willing to consider as plausible the notion that He created not just a church, but the Church, that it had a particular organization, that He intended for it to endure, yet inexplicably knew it would not and that He therefore undertook its restoration in upstate New York in the early 19th century, choosing Joseph Smith, Jr., a young, marginally literate farm boy, as its first “prophet, seer and revelator.”
This article will present, for the first time, a gathering of obscure scholarly observations produced over roughly the past century and a quarter which have variously illuminated the internal contradictions of Mormonism or offered enticing alternative theories invoking scarcely known source materials that coalesced into Mormonism (1) and continue to contribute to its ever-evolving mystique. In order to forego a recounting of what is historically accepted, as well as all that is asserted about its miraculous origins, it will be expected that readers are already sufficiently acquainted with the chief truth claims and historical details of the rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.
The arrays of observations made by the diverse group of international, independent scholars we shall examine certainly will not end controversy, but they are representatives of an assortment of reasonable counterclaims that address the chief tenets of Mormonism. Collectively, they constitute evidence against what should be patent absurdities; for indeed, if the claims Mormonism has been making for nearly two centuries were made afresh today, they would not be granted a hearing. Mormonism simply has enjoyed the advantage of a head start. It began when science was less equipped to counter them and religion, particularly in the expanding American frontier, grew as wild and uncultivated by reason as buffalo grass.
Before proceeding to examine the various articles listed in the bibliography, it will be of value to the less-informed readers to acquaint them with the salient fallacies of Mormon apologetics. One ubiquitous feature of Mormon apologetics is that it is simultaneously mercurial and anachronistic. Its proponents undercut history by as many curious, fallacious circularities as necessary, the underlying premise of which is that all the truths about God and His plan of redemption are, and always have been, the ones currently laid claim to by Mormonism. Whatever historical data do not fit are dismissed with the explanation that mankind’s historical record is incomplete and that therefore the details that would cohere with accepted history have been lost. This fallacious mode of argument does cohere with Mormonism; after all, the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written also went missing. Sometimes, in order to justify why Mormonism is so different from, say, the early Church, the Mormon apologist will cite, as if it were evidence, that God’s various dispensations of His Gospel were incomplete and imperfect because people were not ready for it. Never mind that the Son of God Himself had just finished setting it up. Even unbelievers can see this inconsistency. So, “absence of evidence” for the Mormon “historian” thus “is not evidence of absence.” According to this highly selective process, the prophets of the Old Testament knew what would be in these latter days and would feign to have revealed it, were it not for the wickedness of the people. To use a Mormon practice as a metaphor for Mormonism’s approach to history, anything in the past can be baptized for the dead and made to fit its revised or restored history. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, however.
Thus, when the soil of the Americas yields no archeological evidence to support the claims of ancient civilizations described in the Book of Mormon, this very significant lack of artifacts is erased in one brazen swipe across the moral and reasoning conscience by attributing the evidential dearth to the earthquakes that devastated America when Christ visited the continent after His resurrection (again, according to the Book of Mormon). And again, when it is pointed out that there is no geological record of such massive earthquakes in so short a span, no matter. The Mormon apologist can run to still lower intellectual ground and decree that rain and vegetation could cover up the evidence, or decide to sink it all beneath the waves by the dismissive observation, trivial, trite and yet true enough to catch the unwary observation that coastlines were not then as they are now. And so it goes: all objections to Mormonism’s truth claims are met by continuing to build a maze of increasingly elaborate and often internally contradictory excuses as the mouse of truth scurries to emerge. One by one, the truth claims of Mormonism are hurriedly propped up, ad hoc, as if by so many thin stilts of excuses straining to hold the Mormon edifice above the swiftly rising flood waters that contain either evidence to the contrary or reveal how Mormonism’s claims have no supporting evidence at all. These tactics will not surprise those who are familiar with that trick of forgers (and good fiction writers) that involves – surprise of surprises – lost, missing or newly discovered manuscripts. The difference between Mormonism and a clever novelist is not tactical, it is moral.
The articles to be examined will not be revealed and explicated in any way to suggest a hierarchy of severity, but chronologically. No attempt is made to decide for readers which fallacy is more egregious than any other. After all, if one is guilty of one point of the Law, he is guilty of them all. Nor are these the only sources to be found. They are merely the most interesting and thematically representative.
Writing in late nineteenth-century London, Kenneth Mackenzie compiled a six-volume collection entitled The Royal Masonic Cyclopaedia in 1877. In its day, this publication did not receive its due either among the general public or members of the Craft. Other publications, more “mainstream,” even with regard to their attitudes to esoteric aspects of Freemasonry, eclipsed it. However, following the Victorian Occult Revival and thanks to a renewed interest in wider and deeper studies than so-called knife-and-fork Masons usually study, Mackenzie’s work, like those of JSM Ward’s, have come into respectability.
One of his thousands of entries is entitled “Mormon Masonry.” In this brief entry, Mackenzie revealed what was then the “endowment” ceremony of the Mormons. It is quite different from the one practiced today in LDS temples. In fact, the temple ceremonies have changed much over the past 130 years -- to suit the tastes of converts who may be sensitive to older rituals (2). In Mackenzie’s exposé of 1877, the LDS endowment bore little resemblance to any Masonic practices past or present; however, a number of discrete points betrayed its debt to Freemasonry and other traditions instead of suggesting latter-day revelation as their source. Its borrowings from the anointing (as practiced by catechumens in the Roman Catholic Church for over a millennium and a half) further reinforce the evidence of Mormonism’s eclectic nature.
Mackenzie states:
"The Latter-Day Saints, with great shrewdness, have tried to harmonize their institutions with pre-existent forms of social life, and they have, therefore, a system of Masonry. This is called the Endowment […] each member of the body is then blessed according to its function […] This completes the lustration. A new name is next given […] the initiate is […] invested with a linen tunic; and a small square linen apron, ornamented with fig leaves […] Oaths are now administered, grips and pass-words communicated, and the initiates are admitted to the third degree of the Endowment, or first degree of the Order of Aaron. The second degree consists of the revelation of the Book of Mormon to man as a means of redemption, and oaths, grips and pass-words of this degree are given. From this degree the candidates are passed to the priesthood, third degree, or Order of Melchizedek. The fourth degree is the second degree of the same order […]” (497-8, italics added for emphasis).
Anyone even slightly familiar with Freemasonry will readily recognize, and if also a reasonable person, admit the borrowings: the lustrations of the Roman Catholic catechumen and the use of grips, passwords, oaths, etc., some of which are nearly identical to Masonic practice, albeit that they are used by Freemasons sans claims of divine origin or even the slightest suggestion that they might be efficacious for salvation as sacraments. Hence it is plain that the Mormons borrowed heavily from a fraternal ritual and recast it into a religious rite to match their own fancy. Brigham Young, the second LDS “prophet, seer and revelator,” declared that these signs and grips would be necessary in the next life to pass the angels that stand as sentinels, in order to enter the Celestial Kingdom. In his statement about the sentinels of the Celestial Kingdom, he was borrowing the concept of passing sentinels (of a very earthly, quasi-historical, militaristic flavor and thoroughly symbolic sort), along with the line “Holiness to the Lord” from the Royal Arch degree of the York Rite system of Freemasonry which in turn had taken it and fancifully adapted it from the Leviticus into their own admittedly contrived legends (3). Mackenzie revealed their motive in such “borrowings” when he observed that they “have tried to harmonize their institutions with pre-existent forms of social life.” Today such borrowings are more honestly called plagiarism.
Brigham Young also made some outlandish statements about life on the moon which, if he had made no claims to be a “prophet, seer and revelator” could be dismissed in good humor, as just one quainter, quirky nineteenth-century popular superstition. However, such cosmic blunders are inexcusable in one who makes such claims of communication with the source of all Truth.
Some readers will be familiar with the hollow earth theory. Most readers will probably immediately recall the exciting fictional works of Edgar Rice Burrows, H.G. Wells or Jules Verne in connection with it. However, most will be unaware of the connection it has with Mormonism. In this case, the connection is not one of source material for Mormonism’s development, but their common affinity for alternative histories, geographies and so forth. The hollow earth theory may have been foreshadowed by the wild speculations of the 17th-century Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, but it was an Albanian writer, Hadji Scharipf, who furnished the elaborate details of Earth’s inner geography and its inhabitants. In 1880, Scharipf published a curious monograph that shows its indebtedness to Freemasonry, but more importantly, it unwittingly reveals how an abuse of Masonic lore of hidden treasures beneath the Temple (which is an allegorical fiction) can lead to the creation of elaborate hoaxes when structurally similar tales are foisted on readers as truth (4).
Scharipf’s title contains the first known reference to Agarttha, a fictional place in central Asia that has become a commonplace in writings from the lunatic fringe. Agarttha is associated with the idea of the secret rulers and controllers of the world. It is the dwelling place of the “ascended white masters,” and “hidden” or “unknown superiors.” The title also reveals that Scharipf was acquainted with Masonic ritual’s references to traveling east and back to west. What matters most is the use of digging for treasure – whether of monetary or spiritual wealth. The allegory is an alchemical one. It has nothing to do with the planet earth, but with searching within oneself.
Finally, because the claims of the article on the hollow earth rest on lost and dubious records and testimonies, one is reminded of Joseph Smith, Jr.’s claims about the gold tablets God took back -- but which were seen by a group of men who were mostly all related to each other. Whether in their structure or discrete details, such treasure stories, with their accounts of digging in or through the earth, finding gold or other treasures are curiously too similar to the legend of the gold tablet found in the vault under the Temple, recognizable to all R.A.M.s and about which nothing further need be, nor can be, said. For those unfamiliar with that legend, another parallel instance in the public domain is the finding of Christian Rosenkreutz’s tomb by the Rosicrucians in the Fama Fraternitatis, published in the early 1600s and possibly intended to stimulate the creation of the organization simply by claiming it existed already. Mormonism’s fraud arises from its promoting fallacious interpretations of allegory as facts.
Readers may well recognize the name of Porter Rockwell as that of the personal bodyguard of Joseph Smith, Jr. It has not been possible to ascertain if the author of our next item for consideration is one and the same person. It seems unlikely. Smith’s bodyguard, even according to records in famously thorough Mormon circles, was more illiterate than Smith himself. Be that as it may, our Rockwell, writing in 1877, examines the geology of the Southwest where the Mormons had settled and, with the limited geological sophistication we ought to forgive him for, he relied solely on the Book of Mormon as his source to explain the severe broken landscapes of Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon and what is now Zion National Park. He attributes these abrupt rifts to the earthquakes that purportedly happened, according to the Mormon scripture, at the time of Christ’s crucifixion (5). As a New Testament analog to shore up his claim, he recalls the report that when Christ died in Jerusalem, there was an earthquake that caused damage in the Temple. Rockwell’s painstaking catalog is good for tourists who wish to sample a quirky, nineteenth perspective on history, but it is as geologically reliable as claiming, as some fundamentalist Ozark preachers do, that Arkansas is so named because it is where Noah’s Ark landed. Let us examine just one typical passage of Rockwell’s, peppered with paraphrases from the Book of Mormon. It seems that even our Rockwell needed some assistance in reading it, since his paraphrases are from an imperfect memory of texts he had heard read aloud (we have retained his orthography for its antiquarian, pioneer flavor):
"Behold these grete monumints of stone and clay! Yea, verrily, they do be speek and, yea, I declare unto you my testimony from the Holy Ghost that are the verry handywork of God All mighty who did smite the Nephites upon his deth on the Cross. And a grete darkness did cover the land for three days as we learn, in Thurd Nephi, for it came to pass that great earthquakes did rend the land with sundree damidge and many Nephites and Lamanites were slewn on a count a there many wickednessess. Behold, yonder arch was formed, saith the Spirit, by the rushing of waters from the canals the Nephites had formed afore their times of falling into darkness an a postussy. Yonder ridge, so cloven from the summitt above it sheweth His power and the extent of the destrukshun what He saw fit with which to destroy the wicked afore He come to preech His true gospell we find now re-stored to this verry land by the hand of His Prophet, Joseph Smith and led hence to Our Mountain Home by Brigham Young” (65-66).
Evidently, as Mormons spread beyond the continental US and Europe to preach to the “Lamanites,” interest in Mormon claims quickly reached Polynesia, where tales had long been extant of white explorers and “discovers” having been greeted with reverence. In Samoa for instance, Europeans were – and are – known as palangi because the white sails of their ships were at first interpreted as clouds on which they must have, as their word means, come from heaven. Turning palangi into white gods, and then interpreting the first encounters into cases of mistaken identity, in which a European captain might be identified as the Jesus of the Book of Mormon is the stuff the Mormon myth machine is good at.
One such researcher who labored in French Polynesia was Jean-Paul Lefevre, an eccentric Belgian whose real life story conjures up recollections of romantic tales of swashbuckling and high adventures always on the fringes of respectable society. An amateur, but ardent and detail-oriented ethnographer, Lefevre recorded the many parallels between the resurrection of Christ and ideas he encountered among the Polynesians from the Marquesas to Easter Island (Rapa Nui or, more anciently ‘O Te Pito ‘O Te Henua, which means The Navel of the World). Lefevre gathered and interpreted religious literature, mostly from moribund oral sources. His work resembles closely that of his near contemporary James Fraser who later wrote The Golden Bough.
Lefevre’s obscure article did not appear in France, but in pages of a local, or rather regional, historical revue (now defunct), called Rapa Nui Revue. It was published briefly (1878-1902) by what today we call ex-patriots, soldiers of fortune and jacks-of-all-trades living in the French archipelagos of the South Pacific who fancied themselves chroniclers of societies they had come to love.
In 1893 therefore, Lefevre’s article “Le texte Rongorongo e l’identité du Grand Dieu Blanc” primarily attracted the serious attention of his rag-tag, hard-drinking contemporaries in the South Seas. Curiously, the only extant copy of any of this journal’s short run was one issue brought to France by none other than the famous painter Gauguin, following his sojourn in Tahiti, in which, as luck would have it, Lefevre’s article is found (6).
Rongorongo is the name given to the writing system of the Rapanuians, now deemed undecipherable by scholars. It is the only writing system known to have existed among the Polynesian peoples found in the Polynesian Triangle (enclosed by Hawai’i, New Zealand, Easter Island), although the Tagalog people of the Philippines once used a script which the zealous Spaniards almost succeeded in wiping out, as they did the keys to deciphering the Mayan hieroglyphics. The two are quite unrelated, unfortunately, even though numerous root words in the spoken languages reveal enough affinities to speculate about some now-untraceable common roots in pre-history.
Lefevre’s tale speaks for itself and is a testament to his tenacity and good instincts as an ethnographer:
"The hieroglyphics (rongorongo) that fell into my hands were carved on a long stick, charred so badly (before it was carved on), making it impossible for me to ascertain from what sort of tree it had come, but I suspected it to be the toromiro, a hardwood plentiful on, and unique to, Rapa Nui. But this was of far less consequence than the script I beheld. The ceremonial stick, or ‘ao, was just over 1 m. in length and about four cm. in thickness, and covered with the Rongorongo script ‘round about and nearly from end-to-end.
"The person who presented it to me, an old woman, told me that she could not read it, but that her brother could and was anxious to reveal its contents before he died because he was distressed at the stories advanced by Mormon missionaries in their proselytizing and wanted to tell his story to me in the hope that it would dissuade his people from falling for new fables to replace their old.
"As we journeyed together, she related to me how he had been forced off of Rapa Nui as a small child with their parents aboard a Spanish slave ship bound for the mines of Peru, when a number of the captives managed to free themselves from their chains and mutiny, killing the Spaniards and throwing them to the sharks – after, she matter-of-factly related – setting aside those parts they deemed edible to sustain them during their return voyage to Rapa Nui.
"The Rapanuians had no ability to steer a ship, certainly not a European one, and had no knowledge of navigation, such as other Polynesians possessed, having been confined to land by a lack of wood with which to build ships. They surely would have perished had it not been for a Marquesan aboard. He had been pressed into service by the Spaniards to help them navigate. Spared by the Rapanuians because the close affinity of their language enabled him to reveal himself to them as a friend, he was able to return with them all, but fearing more raids by the Spaniards, transported them to Pape’ete.
"The old woman was born in Tahiti, after the events of which she spoke, but informed me that the stick had belonged to their father, who had told her brother to preserve it, and taught him to read it, or, as I later came to suspect, at least told him what it said. She informed me that a friend of her brother’s had told him of my interests and that she should oblige me to come to him; as he told her, by telling me that he too “is one who has traveled from sunrise to sunset”. It was an ambiguous phrase, particularly translated from Rapanui into French, but one so deliberately assigned to her to say that I was immediately desirous to introduce myself to him, confirm my own suspicions and hear his tale. To satisfy her curiosity as to her brother’s meaning, I explained that I had also voyaged to Rapa Nui, which is, of course, quite true.
"We at length arrived at the remote village where I found him reclining near a small stream (abundant with fresh water shrimp), in a shady bower she called the manavai, where indeed there were many plants within a stone structure. He was being attended by several people obviously anxious for his comforts, in anticipation, she explained for a koro, or party in his agèd honor.
"He took my hand, and by his manner I immediately recognized our mutual friendship… (7). Our mutual recognition excited some curiosity, as all present knew that we had never met before. His name, or rather nickname, was Ariki O Maori, or Chief of the Wise. Several of the children simply called him paparuáu, that is, grandfather – clearly his own part-Tahitian grandchildren, as they peppered their Tahitian with the Rapanuian language, as I judged from what short phrases I could discern.
"The tale he told me included all his sister had related up to his discussion of the content of the rongorongo script. He told me in brotherly earnest that the text revealed the tale of the Rapanuian’s first contact with white men, long before the arrival of the Spanish, the Dutch or any other Europeans. Shortly after the arrival of the first ships from the Marquesas archipelago to what is known as Rapa Nui, when, as he reported from his reading (or perhaps only from his recollection of his father’s reading), the island was a flourishing paradise of gigantic coconut palms, a small fleet of ships appeared on the horizon – ships of large square white sails with a large curved red cross upon them. The white sailors, or rather warriors, aboard them were hungry and had so little water that in a day or two more their supply would have been exhausted. At first, the Rapanuians thought they were aku-aku, or ghouls, because of their pale and starving appearance. Water and food were taken aboard the fleet – coconuts, chickens, breadfruit, and after several days they departed, grateful and gracious to their hosts. They disappeared on the horizon after sailing in a direction he interpreted as north, northeast by north. They left behind a handful of trinkets, “shiny, heavy, and pretty, but worthless yellow stones” which the Rapanuians turned into anchors for their small fishing rafts, but subsequently lost.
"Judging from the description, and the time frame for the settlement of Rapa Nui (based on genealogical chants), I concluded that somehow, a remnant of the Templar Fleet, which had sailed from New Rochelle with the Treasury in 1308, had succeeded in passing through the Straits of Magellan into the antipodal seas. As would have been their custom and wise practice when beyond their familiar northern skies, they probably dared not sail out of sight of land and had continued up the coast of South America. A storm therefore must have blown them westward at some point. Their arrival at Rapa Nui may have saved them, or merely staved off their deaths at sea or at the hands of other savages elsewhere.
"These white men, many of whom were blonde, all bearded and rather tall, sought to return to the eastern continent where food and fresh water might be more easily and regularly obtained. They carefully determined the island’s location celestially and made it known to the Rapanuians that if they failed to make land by the time almost half of their provisions were exhausted, they would return. This, he told me, was the origin of the story of the visit and promise of return, attributed to the Great White god."
Lefevre’s account gives a thinking person pause when viewed in light of the claims made by Mormons and non-Mormons (“ufologists” for instance) who seek fantastical explanations for phenomena that might as easily be explained by earthly events, remote as they might be. For, in this world’s world of possibilities, it is more likely that a remnant of the Templar Fleet arrived at the tiny island of Rapa Nui, took on supplies and figured out how to return, and that the relation of this singular event should spread throughout all the Polynesian Triangle, than that Jesus should come from the sky, visit several islands of the Pacific and promise to return.
By 1912, in the wake of statehood for Utah, the Mormons were no longer isolated in a distant territory. Professional scholarship turned to examine Mormon culture, politics and economics. The Marxist journalists Kauffman & Kauffman, a US-born couple in self-exile in London, examined Mormonism from an economic perspective. They demonstrated how the Mormons had begun to stray from their own exotic roots in order to obtain the benefits of capitalist society. The railroad had changed Mormon society and was the fundamental reason the LDS church was forced to re-examine its doctrines. It was an excellent case study in support of Marx because it demonstrated how a change in a technological infrastructure changes society. The Kauffmans cited as examples how Mormonism eliminated the United Order (involving common property), abandoned the practice of polygamy (8) and made other changes in order to mainstream. Thus, the deep revision to Mormon doctrine that occurred when it was convenient and even necessary for their survival at that time exposes the fraud of their prior truth claims (9).
In 1922, Benjamín Franco y Cabacungan examined at great length the curious parallels that might be drawn between Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent of the Mayan-Aztec pantheon, and the serpent which Moses lifted up on a staff in the desert (Num. 21: 6-9). At first glance, his parallels seem contrived, until one examines them from a more modern, Structuralist point of view.
In the biblical account, Moses set the brazen serpent on a staff to save from death those who had rebelled in the desert and had been bitten by the fiery serpents God had sent to punish them. All the afflicted person had to do was look upon it and live. An exegetical reading of this easily but uncomfortably equates the serpent on the staff with Jesus on the Cross. Jesus of course saves from death and sin, whereas the people in the desert were merely restored to life – but after repentance, and showing trust in God and His power. Therefore, the brazen serpent is clearly an Old Testament pre-figuration or foreshadowing of things to come.
In the case of the god Quetzalcoatl, he was believed to be the bringer of civilization, much like Thoth-Hermes or the pseudo-historical kings of Egypt. He likewise promised to return. He created the world by cutting his penis and using his blood – hence a foundational self-sacrifice – to create the first man by mixing it with cornmeal. In his eternal guise, or avatar of the sun, his emblem, his life ebbed as he gave off rays from himself, and thus human sacrifice was, theologically speaking, not only an act of self preservation but one that saved the world from destruction. The plumed serpent revealed his dual nature as one who gives and takes away – also a primary characteristic of the God of the Hebrews. The plumes reveal his creative, beautiful and loving nature as giver of life. The serpent represents his destructive force. In their synthesis, Franco y Cabacungan postulates an allusion, parallel or near-analogue to the hypostatic union, particularly when it is recalled that Queztalcoatl was not believed by the Mayans or Aztecs to have actually been such a creature, but rather a man-god whose nature is emblematized by it.
Such is the major line of Franco y Cabacungan’s argument in 1922. Naturally, he relies on the spirit, and even at times on the letter, of the relation of the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega who, writing as a converted Christian of royal Peruvian ancestry in the 1500s (his complete Comentarios or Historia del Perú were published posthumously in Cordoba in 1616), asserted that his people’s pagan theology was pointing toward the One God of the Christian faith. In this way, one can see how susceptible these accounts are of being exploited after the fact to invent a history – one that inserts Jesus in the place of these great white gods.
Nigel Wellington, a New Zealander who claimed in his diary to have meet Jean-Paul Lefevre, was the son of an English immigrant on the South Island and a Maori woman of the priestly caste. His knowledge of the Maori tongue, their customs and religious practices was profound. He studied in London and worked for a time under the direction and tutelage of Wallis E. Budge of the British Museum where he acquired his knowledge of ancient Egyptian. He returned to New Zealand after some disagreements with Budge that, unfortunately, seem to have had some race or class overtones, if Wellington’s diary is to be believed.
In 1934, he published his own comparative study of the Egyptian and Maori religions. He reports having become engrossed in the subject when he learned of the use of reed boats on the Nile, the curious linguistic fact that in both languages Ra means the sun, and that both cultures not only had superb astronomers but that in both cultures the heavens played a key role in every aspect of life. Wellington’s article independently echoes the Comentarios of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega written centuries earlier and a world away. In consonance with Budge, Wellington asserts that just as the Egyptian priests were monotheists (and that their ancient neighbors never realized it) (10), in like manner, the tahunga, or Maori shaman, were guardians of a monotheism hidden from the lower castes. The Mormon myth-making machine is quick to pounce on any detail as this, as any moderately astute visitor will recognize when viewing the impressive dioramas of the LDS church, such as those in Salt Lake City’s Temple Square. Any identical, parallel or analogous detail in Egyptian, Incan and Maori theologies, language or symbolism quickly can become fodder for this machine.
Another analogous and particularly knotty problem that regularly embarrasses their best apologists is found in an illustration in their Pearl of Great Price. Joseph Smith Jr. obtained it from a fellow who had obtained a poor quality mummy in Egypt along with some papyri. Just as he previously had exclaimed that Freemasonry was a corrupted ritual from the corrupted Egyptian priesthood, he proclaimed this papyrus to be a writing of Father Abraham, and set out to translate it. Thus, the LDS church now is stuck with the deliciously impossible task of explaining how it is that this authentic Egyptian fragment has nothing to do with Smith’s English “translation” with the title The Book of Abraham in that collection, but is simply a common funerary text. Gullible nineteenth-century peasants accepted the charlatan’s romantic claim of its Abrahamic origins and rushed to the baptismal fonts, then to the handcarts and on across the prairies, enduring great hardships for Mormonism. If, as Francis Yates has suggested, borrowing a famous line from Churchill about communism, that Freemasonry is “an enigma wrapped in an enigma,” then Mormonism may be said to be “a grand fraud of frauds nested one within the other.”
Herr Doktor Otto Schlegel, a genuine scholar of Near East antiquities unfortunately found his work could only be funded by the Nazi Party. Although he was caught up in some of der Fürher’s occult-oriented projects, he never lost sight of his academic integrity. Curiously, he seems to have picked up on the scholarly zeitgeist of Lefevre and Wellington, probably through fanciful Grail lore and good and bad literature dealing with the Templar legacy.
Re-evaluating literary, religious and linguistic data in conjunction with biodiversity schema (11), currents, winds and other natural phenomena, Schlegel took both intellectual timidity and rashness to task when he declared summarily:
"What documentation could be better than the most interdisciplinary vision of the past assisted by reason and reasonableness? The inward looking and inbred nature of most disciplines, left to themselves, do not yield great insights into Man’s past or even his present nature. There is a vast difference between a letter writer and a stamp collector. The glories of the Aryan race lie buried in thousands of years of cultural debris scattered throughout the world and is only now coming to light through our research that gathers from all sources like a skillful detective. The myopia of most disciplines results from the small planets on which they dwell, whose horizons are so near their huddled timorous minds that they may as well live on specs of dust.
In light of our research, little doubt can remain, even absent the sort of documentation so cherished by literary studies and the social sciences that the discoveries of the Poor Soldier Knights of Christ, however trivial they may actually were, grew in proportion to their fame prior to and their infamy following their trial and scattering upon their official demise. Furthermore, these Christian Knights, these Templars, particularly of the fleet, would have been capable of circumnavigating the globe long before Magellan. Their proximity to, and the frequent intellectual intimacy of, their Muslim counterparts would have resulted in the Templars’ obtaining such scientific literature as the celestial maps of the northern and southern hemispheres. There are intimations in later reports, anecdotal as yet, of the Chinese having performed just such a feat with a vast fleet. In fine, the Templars did not merely flee to Scotland; they penetrated the South Seas and traveled along the western shores of South America. It was the frequent contacts they had with the savages that resulted in Christian ideas being grafted onto the existing ones. The fame of these Templars grew in metonimic fashion: over time, rather than many, they became one person: the Great White God. This provides us further evidence of the power of the Teutonic culture, of our Aryan race’s ability to exert its enlightened rays over even the savages (74-75)."
Schlegel’s appeal to the Nazi propaganda machine has to be forgiven; he was, after all, dependent upon them for his funding. He pursued his own research interests astutely, as he knew his endeavors would outlast their regime. He sought to make his own intellectual legacy and reputation eternal and as much without blemish as his circumstances permitted. His conclusions provide additional corroboration of earlier, more fanciful and intuitive works such as Lefevre’s. In terms of rigor, Wellington’s stands in a middle ground. Finally, let us recall the Inca Garcilaso’s testimony two generations after the conquest of Peru; it serves as very early, and therefore pre-Mormon source, rendering Schlegel’s labors all the more admirable. As we shall see, there are other threads that curiously connect the Templars with the high seas long beyond their supposed demise – and into the so-called Golden Age of Piracy. Schlegel’s intuitions regarding the Chinese have been recently proven beyond a shadow of a doubt (12).
About a decade after Schlegel, in 1958, an East European exile named Ruph Eyon III, turned his scholarly gaze toward conjectural reconstructions of myths. His work, comparable in many ways to Mircea Eliade’s, involved the collection of oral myths of foundational sacrifices. Among them, the Freemasonic one about the murder of the quasi-legendary builder Hiram Abiff was considered an instance, not of foundational, but of dedicatory sacrifices (13). This classification is highly dubious, but his gathering of information about what sacrificial victims said and did prior to their immolation (most of whom are female characters), proves useful in light of our thesis. Eyon’s work is similar in method to the biblical scholars reconstructing the gospel Quelle, or Q. Significant textual similarities between his reconstruction of conversations from non-Hebraic sources are also found in Mormon ritual, revealing they drew from the same well, via Freemasonry. Mormon ceremonies, therefore, rather than being revealed or inspired rectifications of corrupted ancient rituals, are not Judaic, nor even Nilotic, but rather Indo-Aryan!
The nearly constant use of the number three in the stonemason lore and Freemasonic ritual finds a strong analog in the non-scriptural (that is, Mormon Temple) tale of Creation. Let it be remembered that any creation story is, par excellence, a foundation story. In the Mormon Temple creation drama, the phrase “let us go down” is repeated thrice, in echo fashion, among the three players: God the Father, Adam (called Michael, yet unimbodied) and Jehovah (the also yet unincarnate Son of God, i.e., He who will become Jesus), who collaborate to create the earth. The phrase is repeated in various ways, three times.
In Freemasonic ritual, including public ones, such as funerals and cornerstone-laying ceremonies, “three-times-three” is a common structural motif, as it is, unsurprisingly to Freemasons, in the oral traditions of Indo-European and Indo-Aryan building myths. Sometimes one of the builders is killed to ensure the stability of the structure (usually a bridge or a monastery in the stonemason ballads of Eastern Europe and India). In the Mormon scheme of things, Jesus is one of the builders and, nota bene -- He is later sacrificed. As time has gone by, the LDS church has altered the Temple rituals, dragging branches over many of the tracks that once could easily link Mormonism with anything but what the LDS church wants the world to see it as: the restoration of Jesus’ church, instead of the plagiarizing mongrel that it is.
Just prior to the demise of academic Marxism at the end of the Cold War many professors in the USA who were Marxist in their critical orientation scurried to mount any new (and politically safer) hobbyhorse and thus they rallied in favor of political correctness, gay, feminist, and Afro-centric studies, ad nauseum. In the twilight years of Marxism as a viable political solution, it retained its vigor as a tool of critique (and still does). In this transitional environment, DiCulo and Jibe published an intriguing examination of a popular superstition, the sacrilegious practice for divining purposes of spitting in the sacred environs of a church. As a framework to their thirty-odd pages of case-after-case similar extant, non- or even un-Christian practices, they brilliantly employed a Marxist historical perspective; infused with a feminist air (they were clearly testing the waters in the approach of the Culture Wars of the early 1990s).
DiCulo and Jibe examined the false accusation against the Templars of spitting on the Cross in the broader context of power relationships in feudal and religious cultures. The connection of this practice with Freemasonry lies partly in Freemasonry’s unsubstantiated legend of being a direct descendent of this outlawed Order, but most especially when it is remembered that most of the charges leveled against the Templars have been consistently leveled against the Freemasons – by the Roman Church. DiCulo and Jibe express their dislike and suspicion of Freemasonry since it excludes all but male monotheists, whom they faddishly vilify as a group whose privileges are unearned and who are responsible for oppressing the world. With their virulent attacks on male-dominated hierarchies, DiCulo and Jibe would be surprised (and hopefully embarrassed to learn) that they have a strange ally in Pope Benedict XV. When the current Pope was still known as Cardinal Ratzinger, he was head of the Confraternity of the Christian Faith, the successor agency to the Holy Inquisition, much as the KGB was replaced by the less ominous sounding Russian Security Agency or some such. One of his last research projects convinced him that the Templars had survived as an organized entity or as organized entities (of this there is considerable evidence, albeit scattered and disconnected) and that they were bent on revenge against the Church. I am certain that Cardinal Ratzinger is an excellent researcher in this area and we can trust that his access to records and archives was impressive, to say the least. But his last judgment is a paranoid opinion, even if it is a well deserved position to take with regard to the papacy, given the facts about the trial of the Templars and subsequent persecution of Freemasons even into the twenty-first century (14). DiCulo and Jibe make Ratzinger’s anti-masonic position at least coherent from the Church’s point of view, inasmuch as they give credence to the Templar legend of the origins of Freemasonry.
The connection this strange practice of spitting has with Mormonism, according to DiCulo and Jibe, is that J. Golden Kimball, one of its colorful nineteenth-century apostles, often used foul language about spitting and urinating. Mormon cultural lore has it thus:
"Sitting on a public works committee for the city, Golden fought against what he considered to be frivolous ‘improvements’; in one case, speaking against building a bridge across the Jordan River (west of Salt Lake) where an easy ford existed, he said, “We don't need a bridge over the Jordan; why, I can piss half-way across the Jordan.” The chairman of the committee gavelled him into silence and said “Brother Golden, I believe you're out of order!” “I know I'm out of order,” was his immediate comeback; “if I wasn't out of order, I could piss all the way across the Jordan River!” (Cheney, 120-121).
This outburst was deemed sacrilegious by his own Mormon peers, and once report of his outburst spread to “gentiles” or “non-Mormons” it was misunderstood as a sacrilegious reference to the Jordon of the Holy Land. This is one case where even the harshest critic of the LDS church can step aside and enjoy how ignorance of facts poisons all perspectives.
In 1990, marine archeology and historical sociology contributed to scholarship about Freemasonry. The finding of the Whydah was featured in National Geographic in May, 1988, although the wreck had been found in 1984 by Barry Clifford. Plank is the author of the seminal study linking pirates (nota bene, not piracy, per se) with Freemasonry. His article entitled “Mysteries of the Whydah” delved into this most intriguing find in marine archeology because it revealed and examined an archeological artifact that linked the two social phenomena. As fate would have it, the Whydah is the first and to-date the only pirate ship ever recovered. It sank off Marconi Beach (Massachusetts) in April, 1717. Of Masonic interest, Plank records:
"What makes this find relevant to Freemasonry is a pewter plate that was recovered. It bore a known London maker’s mark on the back and, crudely carved on the edge, but unmistakable, the Masonic Square & Compass – two months before the organization officially existed; the first Grand Lodge was formed June 24 that year, in London.
"Evidence of the long-suspected and yet undocumented connection between Freemasonry and piracy can be found in the very name of the vessel. While “Whydah” was the name of a port in West Africa (whence slaves were brought to the British colonies), it translates as “Widow Bird”, ostensibly named for a type of bird in Africa, but revealing and concealing, in typical Masonic fashion, its identification with the “Craft” (also known among seafarers, and pirates in particular, as the “Brethren of the Coast”). With respect to the percentage of Freemasons in other professions, the maritime trades have always had a disproportionate number of Freemasons in their ranks, on both sides of the law. The famous explorer Captain Cook was a Freemason, as was Commodore Perry, -- as were the notorious pirates Sam Bellamy, Edward Thatch (“Blackbeard”), Stede Bonnet and Thomas Cocklyn.
"Further proof can be found in Madagascar, where the pirates had an international base and even a graveyard, where the skull and crossbones are found carved on stones, along with the plumb, level and square. Most telling, intriguing and suggestive of further study is to note that the skull and crossbones was originally a Templar motif and that the Templars figure prominently in lore about the origins of Freemasonry. Similar grave stones are found in the remote northwest islands of Scotland, dating from the Templar period" (35).
Beyond the evidence Plank cites, there are testimonies from diaries of individuals who were taken captive by pirates. Our first example comes from the diary of Clement Conger. He is a descendant of Alexandria, Virginia’s last Lord Mayor, William Ramsay. He tells his own story:
"In the early 19th century, pirates captured Alexandrian William Bartleman, owner and captain of a small fleet of merchant ships sailing off the Barbary Coast. The pirates forced the crew to walk the plank and go down to a watery grave. Capt. Bartleman, in high nautical tradition, was the last one to start on that fateful passage. Just before he took the plunge, in desperation he gave the Masonic hand sign for help. “Brother Mason!” or some such, exclaimed the pirate captain. Not only did he spare the Alexandrian’s life, he also paid his way back to the Virginia port" (Diary of Clement Conger, Alexandria Historical League).
The second is from near the end of the age of piracy, from a story found in Halifax, Nova Scotia:
"In 1804, a young man by the name of John Aul came to Halifax in an armed brig of war which that year brought out a detachment of artillery to which he belonged. He determined to be made a member of the Order of Free and Accepted Masons if it were possible. He was recommended in the usual way to Virgin Lodge of Halifax, by a member of that Lodge, accepted and received his first degree, when his detachment was placed under orders to proceed to Jamaica. A Lodge of emergency was called and he obtained the two following degrees, and his Master's Certificate.
"The brig sailed at the appointed time, and had a pleasant voyage until within a short distance of St. Ann's, the port to which she was bound. Then there was reason to think there was danger, as the island was approached. The French had many fine frigates afloat in West Indian waters, and at early dawn all hands on board were aroused by the booming report of a gun. Coming on deck they beheld a fine large French frigate, so near that there was no possibility of escape. It was the discharge of one of her guns across the bow that had awakened them. It was decided to surrender.
"The French commander immediately sent a boat with an officer to board the brig of war, and in the inspection which followed, the officer found John Aul's Masonic certificate. He asked to whom it belonged. On finding out he politely bowed to John Aul, and told him that the officers of the ship would be put on shore on the point of land nearest to St. Ann's and allowed to take all their personal property with them. He expressed his regret that it was out of his power to land them nearer, and thereby save them the trouble they might experience in reaching their destination, a thing he would willingly have done were it not for the danger he faced in being captured by some of the vessels in the neighbourhood.
"The brig of war was of course, taken and the crew made prisoners, but the rest were safely landed at the cape. The foe was a Freemason! Mr. Aul was one of the oldest Masons in Nova Scotia at the time of his death."
Whether the two are connected historically or not, taken together, the evidence that seems to connect Freemasonry and piracy merely shows that the symbolism was in currency in early modern times and had ranged far and wide. There is therefore absolutely nothing to support Mormon claims of their Temple ceremony being revealed – and the apologetic claim made by Joseph Smith, Jr. and asserted to this day by the LDS church that Freemasonry was an ancient Egyptian corruption of the true Melchizedek priesthood. Such a claim strains credulity to the breaking point. When you hear hooves thundering across the plains of South Dakota, think horses, not zebras.
Public art, paid for by tax dollars, often reveals the influence of Masonic symbolism. The mosaic known as By Cycling Fish, commissioned by Chicago’s Performance Art Collective (1991), clearly reveals – and conceals – a Masonic motif: the Templar cross may be clearly discerned in the overlapping of the fish tails and, as if the connection with piracy were known by the artists, this emblem in turn is superimposed on an outline of an island – Madagascar. Such ubiquitous imagery makes one wonder why, instead of acknowledging the debt, the LDS church has been doctoring their official 19th-century photographs of Brigham Young in which his Square & Compass watch fob can clearly be seen.
Myriad articles showing the debt of Mormonism to a number of traditions, many of which are not religious per se, were published by Sonia Johnson in 1993 in Devoured by Locusts: An Anthology of Critical Mormon Studies. One in particular, by Craig Fabulous, deals with the Nephites, one of two supposed peoples in ancient America. In addition to heaping the usual scorn on the Book of Mormon’s claims with archeological, linguistic, geological, biological and ethnological data, Fabulous indulges in a brief aside regarding Mormonism’s claims about the antiquity of its Temple ceremony:
"The tale is told among Mormons that two missionaries (significantly unnamed), sent to Chiapas on missions, 'fell away from the church.' The Mormon word is 'apostatized.' It is usually a code word for 'fornication.'
"Having been excommunicated in the mission field, they were left to wander among the people and figure out a way to return to Utah [various places are mentioned in the different versions of this urban legend]. However, in their excommunicated state, they chose to remain there rather than face their home “wards” and their disgraced families. In the course of there travels, they “went native” and found themselves among the Mayans in a remote area near the border of British Honduras [now Belize], determined as they were to avoid the shame of their sins and live out their lives in the jungle.
"As a means of securing their sense of belonging, they submitted to the community ritual for making them a member of the [male] community. After they were led by their native American hosts into a darkened stone building in which only a few oil lamps had been placed on the floor around a small altar, they were astonished to see that the many of the things that had been “revealed” to them in the Temple prior to being sent into their mission field, were identical to the signs being revealed to them there, most particularly, the Square & Compasses embroidered with small stone beads on the deer skin shirts of the officiating 'priests.'
"This shocking discovery caused them such remorse and contrition that they hastily found passage back to Utah and begged to be reinstated as full-fledged members and gladly endured years of humiliation awaiting re-baptism, while they spread this cautionary tale laced with juicy Mormon apologetics.
"It is clear that what they encountered was nothing less – or more – than the vestiges of Freemasonic ritual. This fraternity spread through Mexico in the last days of her colonization by Spain, entering via Veracruz, from French sources. Father Hidalgo was a member, and Freemasonry became a way, during the revolt, of knowing who was friend and who was foe" (82-83).
The year 1993 also saw the return of scholarly interest to the Templar Fleet legends, but from a most unexpected quarter: the Castro government. Juan C. Díaz, head of the Enterprise for Translation and Interpretation in Havanna, evidently was the compiler of the document that fell into the hands of US intelligence officers and who in turn presented it to none other than the Joint Chiefs of Staff (15). According to well informed sources who have met and spoken with Díaz, he is fluent in Russian, Korean and English. In the 1980s, he worked in North Korea translating Russian documents on nuclear energy for the regime’s atomic aspirations. By the early 1990s, intelligence sources claim he had moved beyond the trenches of translation into the Cuban equivalent of the Directorate of Clandestine Services, in which he worked as an analyst. Interest was running high in pursuing any leads, however fantastic, to a new source of energy, purported to be more amazing than atomic energy. Such a power would have served Castro well, since his Soviet sponsors had fallen to creeping Capitalism and from their own corruption.
Díaz was captivated by a corpus of literature often ransacked by the Nazis in their search for the ultimate weapon: the Ark of the Covenant, for instance. In this case, the legends of Templar magic and power, their supposed feats of architecture and navigation, to say nothing of the immense wealth they purportedly took from the Treasury in Paris, were powerful incentives to him as he compiled his article. He reports that the “Templars possessed, due to an advanced knowledge of resins and other petroleum based substances obtained in the Near East, an ability to evade fleets on the surface by being able to convert their otherwise 14th-century vessels into submarines” (n.p.). Díaz’s holy grail consisted of the chemical aspects as well as the energy sources for such technology. He further claimed, certainly to his superior’s delight, that
"[...] the Caribbean basin, particularly in the warm waters between Jamaica and Cuba, soundings and sonar records indicate that descendents of this Templar fleet have established permanent submarine colonies from which they venture under modern flags, purchasing modern items by laundering the Fleet’s nearly inexhaustible stores of gold bars. Establishing contact with these fellow Latins, securing their loyalties and obtaining this lost technology would give the Revolution a significant advantage and leverage, not only in the Caribbean, but throughout the world" (n.p.).
The Díaz piece is valuable to our present context because it demonstrates the extent to which a regime or an organization will go, grasping at straws – or inventing them! – to establish their legitimacy or try to create an aura of mystery around themselves. The Freemasons have come by this aura legitimately as well as had it thrust upon them by detractors and conspiracy theorists. The Nazis, for instance, aped many Masonic practices; most notably, they manufactured a symbolic system and invested it with their own propaganda (16). Mormonism has lifted, sifted and altered masonic symbolism at random, re-baptizing (otherwise appropriating it by “baptizing it for the dead”) it, that is, investing it with their own religious, quasi science-fiction-cum-scripture message.
If the Masonic legend about the Templar origins of Freemasonry (or connection with its genesis) is not entirely true, we might do better to wish it were, so we can all have done with the bewilderment. The adherents of the most extreme, conspiratorial forms of this legend could then seek passage on board the mother ship – or hasten to Agarttha. As we have seen, speculations attempting to connect the two run wild with regard to the menhirs of Scotland, treasure supposedly buried on Oak Island, the pirate base on Madagascar and, as seen earlier, Easter Island. It is sobering to recall, as we have seen, that the studied opinion of the current Pope does in fact connect the Templars with Freemasonry, but not in such fantastical ways.
An article prepared by Brennan MacCannaugh and read in 1998, now in a private collection on the Isle of Man (itself a mystery worth exploring), was printed by the Kilwinning Societas Latomorum (the Latin name for Freemasonry!). In it, MacCannaugh explored the diffusion of symbolism such as we have found in these various sites and tried to make sense of them from a skeptic’s point of view. In other words, it tried to disprove every connection these sites have with each other and any supposed connection they have to Freemasonry, modern or pre-1717. No “unified theory” could be constructed to account for the similarities and in many cases precise details, without coming full circle and admitting some points of direct contact. These results chasten academics who are either fearful of speculation as well as those whom the great Mason and scholar Wallace McLeod refers to as “mystic nuts.” MacCannaugh strikes the golden mean – he uses only hard evidence and accepted history to explore the plausibility, or outlandishness, of any and all theories that do not connect the dots as the conspiracy theorists typically do, and comes up slightly empty handed, but without giving an ounce of credit to crackpot theories. His approach to Masonic history is one that, if taken by Mormons looking at their own, would reveal the enormous gaps of reasoning in the Mormon apologetic and would prove Mormonism to be a house of cards, no different in method and mindset from the crackpot theories about Freemasons controlling the world.
MacCannaugh observes the following about intellectual speculation and the obligation to be rigorous:
"While caution is always a good watchword, it is equally abusive to refuse to follow a path of investigation when a door opens to it as it is to overindulge by introducing personal interpretations. In the latest edition of the Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (AQC), a cautionary article appeared in which the author, quoting Hamill, John, AQC 101 (1988), p. 135, observed: “[...] there is a danger that ‘over-enthusiastic members will impose upon Freemasonry highly idiosyncratic interpretations not intended by the originators and achieved by taking similarities between masonic symbolism and symbolism in other fields to be actual correlations and evidence of actual links, interpretations that are alien to most members and at times distasteful [...]”. One must ask whether Hamill considers himself sure enough about what the originators intended or where they obtained their symbols as to pronounce such a categorical condemnation. Such statements cast a chill on what would be fruitful investigations by anathematizing them a priori. There can be no doubt but that Freemasonic symbolism did not originate in a vacuum, as so many capable researchers such as are cited herein have shown. The question is one of balance, and not imposing “idiosyncratic interpretations”, which this researcher has endeavored to avoid. See Washizu, Yoshio. Critical Reading of Masonic Literature." AQC 114 (2001), p. 208.
In 1999, the metalurgical researcher José Herrera turned his critical eye to examining Joseph Smith, Jr.’s claims of the divine origin of the Book of Mormon – in light of the technology required to make it. The golden plates, after all, would have been fabricated by human beings, even if the content on them were inspired. In Herrera’s approach, he takes a forensic view similar to that of a chemist involved in examining the papyri of the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi documents. He asks the question “If the Nephites and Lamanites derive from a Near East culture of the period of the captivity, what would have been the nature of their metalurgical technologies and the resultant products?” Herrera’s research noted the archeological fact that the Israelites did not possess technologies as advanced as their neighbors in Egypt or Babylonia. “The Israelites at the time of the Captivity were barely into the iron age and were essentially still a bronze age culture” (39). It is even less likely that a small population on the run from the Babylonians would have had included enough technically skilled people to preserve and subsequently transplant even the best of this bronze-age technology to the New World.
However, the New World cultures of the Inca and the Mayan and Aztec empires did possess technology sufficient to create surgical grade copper and extremely thin sheets of gold (for jewelry). Ancient tales in the Old World include references to gold sheets being used for some records, but again, they are not Israelites. Moses’ tablets were stone – and even then, they were written on by the finger of God. Mormonism would support its assertion about the Book of Mormon having been on gold plates by a dizzying series of loosy-goosy assertions: the Nephites recorded on gold sheets (after all, it says so in the Book of Mormon). And, verily, as it came to pass, the Aztecs could make gold sheets (even if they were all used only for jewelry), therefore, behold! Since the Book of Mormon (after all) says that the Nephites (and Lamanites) came from Jerusalem to America and that they used gold plates – and archeologists assure us that the Mayans and Aztecs did too, then these Native American peoples must be the descendents of these semitic people and therefore the Book of Mormon is true (17). The only worse circularity is found in the Book of Mormon -- about itself: it states that someday, a man named Joseph will translate it. Quite convenient.
Linguistic speculations about the nature of the language of God were common before the modern era. In fact, the modern science of linguistics, in its search for universal deep structures common to all languages can be viewed as a spruced up version of the quest for Ursprach formerly referred to, and still called in Mormon circles, the Adamic language. The term may be traced to at least one representative Western occult source: Henry Cornelius Agrippa von Nettensheim’s Three Books of Occult Philosphy (1531). In this compendium of late medieval lore, a distillation of Arabic, Hebrew, Greek and Babylonian magic, numerology, herbal, astrological medicine and chemical mumbo-jumbo, there are numerous “angelic” alphabets, talismans and so forth. This book, and others like it, distillations of Western occultism that were popular in the 19th century, explains how it came to pass that when Joseph Smith, Jr. was killed, he had on his person a piece of tin bearing a talisman that can be found in Agrippa’s book – one guaranteeing success in spiritual affairs and ministry. He would have done better, and shown his powers of prophecy even more, if he had been carrying one to make him impervious to lead projectiles.
In 2001, M. Jared explored the problem of another one of the Book of Mormon’s claims, namely, that a people even earlier than the Nephites, indeed, even earlier than Abraham, had come to America. The Jaredites, as they are called, one of whose prophets was called Corianton, was a group of people who were led from the Tower of Babel to the New World in submarines (for lack of a better term). Their leader had prayed that the language of his group would not be confounded. The use of the Tower of Babel and the Temple of Solomon respectively, as timeframes for the exodus of two groups of people from the Near East to America betrays its debt to Freemasonry and simultaneously point away from Joseph Smith, Jr. as the original author.
At an early, formative period of Freemasonry in the late Middle Ages and into the 18th century, the Tower of Babel was a major motif. The Temple of Solomon remains so to this day. Thus, more likely than Joseph Smith Jr.’s original authorship, is that a person living with the cultural baggage and lively concerns of the Revolutionary War period wrote or outlined major portions of the Book of Mormon. The original source manuscript of what Joseph Smith, Jr. and Oliver Cowdery turned into the Book of Mormon would not absolutely have to have been someone living during the eighteenth century, but whoever it was clearly was steeped in its concerns. Thus the discredited Spaulding Manuscript theory need not be resucitated to discredit Smith’s claims – Mormonism’s truth claims have sufficient problems without invoking Spaulding.
The chronological framework of the Book of Mormon is not apparent in the order of the printed text, of course, but it emerges when one reconstructs its historical chronology from the façade of the narration, the fabula from the sjuzet, to use a Russian Formalist distinction. The timing of the arrivals of the two immigrant groups to America -- the Jaredites and then the Nephites/Lamanites frame, like bookends, the entire span of the Book of Mormon’s purported history. The Jaredites arrive after the Tower of Babel and the Nephites/Lamanites arrive after the destruction of the first Temple.
In addition to this structuring device, which, by the way, would unlikely be of so great interest to any peoples recording their history, being so long removed from events in their lands of origin, one can discern passionate recastings of Revolutionary War period, as mentioned earlier. These include a banner on which the word Liberty is emblazoned during a war, the theme of revolution against tyranny, the overtly American slogan of “no kings to rule America,” exemplifications of the effects of excessive taxation, and so forth (18). All these signposts lead us, not to a small Israelistish family fleeing the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C., but to late 18th-century North America, with all the cultural baggage of Europe in tow. Certainly no one in his or her right mind today will claim or confess to believing in the literal, historical existence of a Tower built by ancient stonemasons whose ambition to erect it to heaven brought upon them the scattering of the people of the earth and the division of the family of mankind into different language groups. Race is conspicuously missing in the Genesis tale, suggesting the isolation of its original, ancient Near Eastern authors.
Returning to examine language, in 2002, the topic of angelic speech is directly examined in light of Mormonism’s claims. Seraf, in his “Corianton and Ursprach” points out the point-by-point borrowing of language from Agrippa in 19th-century Mormon writings, particularly in those of Brigham Young. It should be remembered that Young, the second LDS leader, is the principal architect of Mormonism’s Temple ceremony. Its heavy borrowing from, and subsequent transformations of Freemasonry’s esoterica have given Mormonism the patina of an occult movement, but one deliberately set adrift from its pedigree or cut from its moorings in Western civilization. Mormonism consists then of so many scattered objects, reassembled and reinvested with protean meanings.
The scholarly examination of Mormon apologetics would not be complete without the latest puerile attempt to dodge the solidity of modern science. A group of archeogeneticists collected DNA samples from people all over the world and discovered, to no surprise or consternation to anyone but the Mormons, that the Amerindian people are essentially Asiatic, with noticeable “outliers” pointing to Africa or Europe, but none to Semitic peoples. Pinga & Kosh attempted to refute this geneological impasse by resorting to the last refuge of shameless apologists: a counter charge of conspiracy. In their article, “The Genome Conspiracy: How Science Manipulated Genome Data on Native American Populations to Discredit the LDS Church,” they resort to all the outlier data and arguments about standard deviations, ranges of variance and so forth to obfuscate the central and resounding truth that batters away the foundational claim of the Book of Mormon regarding the original inhabitants of this continent. The conclusions advanced by the original scientists fall well within the standard and practices that make their conclusions reasonable, if not conclusive.
The Book of Mormon is an audacious fabrication whose defenders over the ages provide continuing proof of P.T. Barnum’s famous line: “There’s a sucker born every minute.” The scholars whose works we have reviewed in this brief article, even the most quaint and out of date ones, have explored how Mormonism’s claims could be otherwise explained and are a tribute to reason, to man’s quest for plausible speculation based on the careful weighing of evidence. Let us pray they outnumber the Mormon apologists.
----------END NOTES ---------------
1. The term Mormonism, originally pejorative but later embraced by the members of the LDS church, will be used to characterize the belief system and world or cosmic view characteristically held by its members. The acronym LDS will refer merely to the institutional or corporate entity of that church.
2. The mutability of the LDS temple ceremonies and even the evolution of the architectural styles of their regular and public meeting spaces, the wards and stake centers, are barometers by which the church’s efforts to mainstream may be measured.
3. The numerous contrivances of Freemasonry take great liberties with history and, being imperfectly known, are largely misunderstood by outsiders. They are not meant to be understood as history; they are woven into dramas whose purpose is to serve as moral allegories.
4. Dan Brown is a 21st-century heir of this “literary” tradition with his Da Vinci Code and its soon-to-be-released sequel in which, according to reliable sources, Freemasonry will feature prominently. It is clear that Brown is relying heavily (note we avoid saying plagiarizing) David Ovason’s The Secret Architecture of Our Nations Capital: The Masons and the Building of Washington, DC (London: Century Books, Ltd., 1999).
5. We shall not take up the thorny theological issue of what these massive earthquakes imply about the nature of the God who had just offered Himself as a loving sacrifice for the salvation of the world.
6. Jean-Paul de Clermont. “Les cahiers inconú de Gauguin en Tahiti.” Affairs Oceaniques. Vol. III, p. 25. Paris: Societé du Researche Polynesienne, 1943.
7. Mr. Lefevre’s pregnant ellipsis will seem odd until one realizes the subtext which he is attempting both to reveal to some, but conceal from most of his readers. It seems obvious that he and the old Rapanuian were Freemasons. It is not possible to tell to which Grand Lodge Lefevre was beholden. He could have been a member of the Belgian Grand Lodge (est. permanently in 1817), but it is as likely he joined in Tahiti under the Grand Orient of France which in 1834 established L'Oceanie Francaise (French Oceania). To the latter, most surely, Mr. Lefevre’s host belonged, for it was the only French Grand Lodge operating in the South Seas at the time. It also assures us the old man was able to speak French fluently. We are indebted to Mssr. de Clermont for his able and charming translation of this portion of Mssr. Lefevre’s account.
8. Polygamous marriages were still being contracted as late as the 1920s in northern Mexico. The Kauffman’s examination of the trial of US Senator Reed Smoot is particularly useful and reveal a strong Mormon tendency to sophistry and a willingness to evade the law in order to continue a controversial practice. This immoral philosophy is known as consequentialism.
9. Another major shift occurred on June 1, 1978 when the LDS church changed its policy about admitting blacks into their priesthood. This revealed the genuinely racist motivations of their previous apologetics and scripture wrangling to support the exclusionary practice.
10. “From the attributes of God set forth in Egyptian texts of all periods, Dr. Brugsch, de Rougé, and other eminent Egyptologists have come to the conclusion that the dwellers in the Nile valley, from the earliest times, knew and worshipped one God, nameless, incomprehensible and eternal […] The Egyptian religion is a pure monotheism, which manifested itself externally by a symbolic polytheism.” Budge, Wallis E. The Egyptian Book of the Dead. London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1895. xci-xcii. The second portion of the quote is Budge’s reporting of de Rougé’s “amplifying” Champollion-Figeac, writing in 1839.
11. Schlegel’s attempt to incorporate biodiversity and technical information into his otherwise humanistic study anticipates aspects of Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon Tiki.
12. Menzies, Gavin. 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. London: Bantam Press, 2003.Bibliography
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13. The name Hiram Abiff is biblical, but distorted. The “surname” of “Abi[ff],” “Abu” and other like Semitic forms mean “father” and thus complicate attempts to say that the Hiram Abiff of Freemasonic lore is the same Hiram as the one in 1 Kings 7: 13-14. This is of no consequence to Freemasonry, since, it must be remembered, and Freemasonic lore constitutes a body of consciously constructed allegorical myths, designed for moral and philosophical improvement, not theological or historical instruction. Freemasons make no attempt to force the myths to cohere among themselves, except loosely, and even less to correspond to external history. It is, indeed, a world unto itself.
14. In 2002 or 2003, the Universidad Pontífica in Uruguay fired all professors they suspected of being Masons (translation: “whom others were pointing the finger at”). Actual slaughter of Freemasons occurred under Franco, in Spain. For a more complete treatment of the behavior of the Roman Catholic Church through the civil governments that serve as her surrogates, see Jasper Ridley’s The Freemasons: A History of the World’s Most Powerful Secret Society. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001.
15. Rumor among AFIO members (American Federation of Intelligence Officers) has it that the Díaz document was purloined or “bought” during a trip he made to Washington, D.C. as a delegate to a UN working group on lexical database management in 1993 or 1994. The details are, of course, impossible to ferret out, as all lips are sealed.
16. One interesting Nazi appropriation of masonic symbolism may be found in their inversion of the left-handed swastika into a right-handed one. While the swastika is a very ancient symbol, so also is Freemasonry (whose existence prior to 1717 has to be admitted). It is difficult to say at what period the swastika became incorporated into masonic symbolic system, but be that as it may, it was commonly and innocently used by Masons prior to Hitler’s coming to power in 1933. What is important at this juncture is to note that the Kipling Society emblazoned it on their logo, one that superimposed it across the profile of an elephant’s head, until Kipling himself ordered it removed following the “election” of Der Fürher in order to avoid any hint of association of sympathy with the Nazi party.
17. As evidence mounted against any Semitic stock in the Americas, the Mormon position began to mitigate the oversight and claimed that the original Semites were a small, very small group who mixed with others in America who came via other routes. Since Moroni told Joseph Smith, Jr. that the plates would contain an account of the previous inhabitants of this continent, it is apparent that even angels can err by oversimplification.
18. When mid 19th-century German immigrants came to mid America, an area still dominated by their descendents, they often cited as their reason for coming to America her then well known reputation of having no kings. When asked why they were coming to America, they would respond with keine Könige dort (No kings there).
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