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Warfare in the Book of Mormon > Notes on "Gadianton Masonry"
Just how likely and safe the environmentalist view actually is can be debated. (We are perhaps entitled to ask just how many “normal” people have written scriptures and founded world religions.) Certainly, if one presupposes that Joseph Smith could not have had access to revelation, or to a historically authentic ancient text, it is the obvious alternative. Fawn Brodie, reminiscing in 1975 about her famous biography, No Man Knows My History, recalled that “I was convinced before I ever began writing that Joseph Smith was not a true Prophet.”5 With this attitude — she calls the Book of Mormon a “first novel”6 — she was obliged to explain the book on the basis of Joseph’s mind, his experience, and the contents of his nineteenth-century environment, however inadequate that basis might be. Since she could not allow him any real contact with ancient or heavenly realities, she had no alternative.
“Since the odd contents of the volume lamentably or ludicrously fall before every canon of historical criticism,” Walter Prince blandly asserts, “scholars have not thought it worth while to discuss the notion of its ancient authorship, unless briefly for pragmatic and missionary purposes.”7 “There seems very little doubt today,” Professor O’Dea dubiously declares, “as to Joseph Smith’s authorship of the Book of Mormon.”8 By this he means to say that such hypotheses as are represented by the Spalding manuscript theory have died the death. But clearly, for him and others of his general persuasion, the other alternative, Joseph Smith’s own story of the coming forth of the book, is simply unthinkable.
One of the primary exhibits in the prosecution’s attempt to prove the Book of Mormon a product of nineteenth-century frontier obscurantism involves what O’Dea describes as “the many references to Masonry in the work.”9 Prince knows a large number of passages “plainly referring to Masonry under the guise of pretended similar organizations in ancient America.”10 If this exhibit is only one instance of the “anachronism of feeling and reference [which] is evidence of late origin to the critic,” it is certainly among the most important to the case and one of the most complacently accepted by the prosecution’s partisans.11 Thus, it clearly merits closer examination for its plausibility and logic. This paper will look into the alleged presence of Freemasonry in the Book of Mormon.
Alexander Campbell was perhaps the first environmentalist critic of the Book of Mormon, as is shown in his famous statement, “This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies; — infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of free masonry, republican government, and the rights of man.”12 Without going into the details of his accusation, one might ask, When were most such questions not discussed in the history of Christianity?
Campbell, publishing on 10 February 1831, was the first who seems to allege that the Gadianton bands of the Book of Mormon reflect the Masonry of Joseph Smith’s day.13 But just how seriously he took this equation is not clear, since he also describes the Zoramites as “a sort of Episcopalians” and exclaims mockingly of Mormon as a military commander that “He was no Quaker!”14 In other contexts, however, he makes a more serious implied criticism when he satirically surmises that Mormon must have been informed of the Arian heresy by an angel and when he terms the early Nephites “believers in the doctrines of the Calvinists and the Methodists.”15 Clearly, his intention was to link the Book of Mormon with things modern rather than things ancient. But his statements on the alleged derivation of Gadiantonism from Freemasonry are little developed and not at all rigorous, and, indeed, Campbell later adopted the Spalding theory and abandoned the comparison. Resuscitating the idea that the Book of Mormon was suffused by Masonry was left to later critics of Mormonism.
In the next few pages, I shall review the main similarities noted by Fawn Brodie, Robert Hullinger, David Persuitte, and Dan Vogel, four of the theory’s chief modern devotees, between the Gadianton robbers of the Book of Mormon and the Masons of Joseph Smith’s America. I shall then examine those purported similarities for significance and cogency.
What, then, are the main parallels adduced by our sources?
7. “If any doubt remains,” asserts Persuitte, “that Joseph had the Masons in mind when he described the Gadiantons of The Book of Mormon, it should be removed by allusions in that book to the Masons of his own time.”39 He then proceeds to cite some of the prophecies and warnings of the Book of Mormon concerning “secret combinations” in the last days.
Is such a transformation plausible? It cannot, of course, be wholly ruled out. Nevertheless, there are some facts in the life of Joseph Smith and his family that make such an inference seem less than inescapable. First of all, the transformation from his alleged anti-Masonry to his universally admitted involvement in the craft cannot have taken twelve years. Instead, the sources seem to allow only thirty-three months. In a letter addressed to the Saints at Quincy, Illinois, and additionally signed by Hyrum Smith, among others, Joseph warned members of the Church of “the impropriety of the organization of bands or companies by covenant or oaths by penalties or secrecies.” “Let the time past of our experiance and suferings by the wickedness of Doctor Avard suffise and let our covenant be that of the everlasting covenant as is contained in the Holy writ. and the things that God hath revealed unto us. Pure friendship always becomes weakened the verry moment you undertake to make it stronger by penal oaths and secrecy.”45 This letter was dated 20 March 1839. Noting that Hyrum Smith was among the signers is important, since, as I shall discuss below, he had joined the Masons already in 1823.
Is a complete about-face on the issue of Freemasonry plausible in the space of just over two and a half years or less? It cannot, still, be ruled out. But is it not more plausible to assume that the kind of secret society condemned by Joseph and Hyrum Smith in their letter of 20 March 1839 and by the Book of Mormon, published in 1830, had, in their minds, no direct connection with Freemasonry?49 This is no small question.
Furthermore, that both Gadianton robbers and nineteenth-century Masons swear to uphold one another in crimes is merely the accusation that enemies of a secret, oath-bound society might be predicted to make — and both groups undeniably had enemies. What is needed is something more specific to link the two. However, this is not forthcoming. In fact, even on this score the dissimilarity between Gadiantonism and Freemasonry (as it was perceived by its foes) is striking.
What is one to make of these obvious parallels? Since the as yet unborn Baroness Orczy did not write the Book of Mormon, and since Joseph Smith did not write The Scarlet Pimpernel, probably nothing. What we see here are merely the promises of secrecy, loyalty, and mutual assistance generically common to groups involved in dangerous clandestine activity. A significant number of significant shared details would be needed to demonstrate the likelihood of a genetic relationship, but these are presently available in neither the case of Baroness Orczy nor that of the Freemasons.
Furthermore, use of the word in this sense, although it may seem rather peculiar to modern Americans, has an old and very honorable pedigree. It appears numerous times in the works of Shakespeare, for example. The word is used precisely in the sense of “conspiracy” in King Henry VIII, where the Duke of Buckingham reveals Cardinal Wolsey’s attempted treachery to the king: “This cunning cardinal the articles o’ the combination drew as himself pleased .“66 John Milton, in his Animadversions (1641), writes scornfully of “a combination of Libelling Separatists” and then, in the Eikonoklastes of 1649, denounces “Mysterie and combination between Tyranny and fals Religion.” (In a discussion of “Theevs and Pirates” in the same work, he expressly equates “combination” with “conspiracy.”)67 Such examples could be multiplied indefinitely.
In an 1850 decision, Marshall v. Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Co., 57 U.S. 314, the United States Supreme Court warned against agents who are “stimulated to active partisanship by the strong lure of high profit” and denounced “any attempts to deceive persons entrusted with the high functions of legislation by secret combinations or to create or bring into operation undue influences of any kind.” Such conduct was said to have “all the injurious effects of a direct fraud on the public.” Half a century later, in Hayward v. Nordberg Mfg. Co., 85 F.4 (6th Cir., 1898), the fraud of practicing deceit on the legislature was characterized as an attempt to deceive by “secret combinations,” citing the language in Marshall v. Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Co.
In Hoffman v. McMullen, 83 F.372 (9th Cir., 1897), the court ruled on an agreement in restraint of fair competition, holding that “where there is a secret combination, call it partnership or any other name,” the natural effect is the equivalent of fraud.
These opinions show that the phrase “secret combination” was commonly used in the second half of the nineteenth century, and over a wide geographical area, to describe any kind of secret agreement, coalition to exercise undue influence on the legislature, agreement in restraint of trade, secret business transactions, secret societies, and many other things. The phrase appears in catch-all pleonastic lists where the court is attempting to prohibit all forms of pernicious, secretive actions. These usages clearly demonstrate that the phrases “secret combination” and “secret combinations” were understood broadly in the nineteenth century.
In fact, a survey of my own home library (lasting less than an hour) turned up one highly interesting specimen from precisely the period in question. (And since my collection concentrates on Islamic studies and classical philosophy rather than on nineteenth-century Americana, one can imagine what someone better equipped and with more time might turn up.) On 25 June 1831, Frederick Robinson, a journalist and Massachusetts legislator, wrote a letter to attorney Rufus Choate attacking bar associations as “monopolies in the practice of law.” His language in doing so is directly relevant to our present concerns.
The root of this aristocracy, which saps the liberties of the people and has branched out and covered the land, is in our colleges. Into these you are initiated in infancy; your seclusion from the world and your pursuits being different from the rest of society naturally excites your vanity, ambition, and pride; and even in infancy you look upon yourselves as a “superior order,” as the future lawyers, doctors, priests, judges, and governors of mankind; and you look upon the rest of the world as inferior—plebeians, laborers, educated only for manual employment. You are there permitted even in infancy to form secret associations, “Phi Beta Kappa Societies,” etc., in which you are taught to recognize each other by signs and grips and passwords, and swear to stand by each other through life.
“You say that the bar is a ‘necessary evil,’ ” Robinson concludes.
The themes in Frederick Robinson’s letter are so close to those sounded in the Book of Mormon that an environmentalist would want to cite it as a source — had it not been written more than a year after the publication of the Nephite record. And it has no reference to Freemasonry. Note the appearance in this final paragraph, in close succession, of the terms “secret bar association,” “combination,” “conspiracy,” “secret society.” Can any reader of the letter doubt that, for Robinson, the terms were essentially equivalent? Can anyone doubt that his not using the exact phrase “secret combination” was pure chance? Can anyone doubt that a more extensive search in period writings will locate precisely that phrase?
But what of Dan Vogel’s assertion, based upon Doctrine and Covenants 42:64, that fear of Masonic “secret combinations” drove the Saints from New York to Ohio? First of all, we should note that Vogel offers no evidence whatsoever for his contention. Furthermore, there are plenty of reasons for the move other than invoking some supposed anti-Masonic paranoia among early Mormons: For instance, directing members of the Church scattered across several states was difficult for Joseph Smith; more members were in Ohio than in any other state; membership in Ohio was growing more rapidly than elsewhere. Finally, persecution and physical harassment were growing in New York. The move thus seems quite a natural one.
Thus, to at least some Latter-day Saints of the nineteenth century, “secret combinations” were simply those organizations or mobs that persecuted the Saints of God, “condemning the righteous because of their righteousness” (Helaman 7:5), acting in secret to carry out their evil designs. And the Saints had abundant scriptural warrant for such a view. On the other hand, there is no reason to suppose that the “secret combinations” alluded to in the Doctrine and Covenants have any connection at all with Freemasonry.
Is there any reason to doubt that neither the secret society Joseph and Hyrum denounced in their 1839 letter to Quincy, nor the “secret combination” they referred to in this proclamation of 1843, had the slightest connection with Freemasonry? And is there any reason, therefore, to suppose that the “secret combinations” of the Book of Mormon do? Furthermore, is it not apparent that the Book of Mormon’s negative attitude toward “secret combinations” continues to be shared by Joseph Smith not only thirty-one months before, but also more than a year after, his public involvement with Freemasonry? Where, then, is the evidence of his alleged conversion from anti-Masonry in the late 1820s (during the translation of the Book of Mormon) to pro-Masonry in the 1840s (when he was revealing the ordinances of the temple)?
The contention of item #5 — that the devil’s flaxen cord is the Masonic Cable-Tow — hardly seems specific enough to justify much weight being placed upon it. After all, animals are commonly led by the neck in cultures the world over, and the image seems a natural one, as in the example of the two long-necked beasts on the so-called “Narmer Palette” (ca. 3100 B.C.) from Hierakonopolis, which is now in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo. Even more to the point, the image of leading human captives by means of a rope around the neck is virtually universal in ancient art, and so must have been common in real life as well. The examples that come immediately to mind are Egyptian ones, like the Semitic captives from Syria/Palestine depicted upon the second pylon of Ramses III’s mortuary temple at Medinet Habu, or the many prisoners shown in the triumphal monument of Sheshonk I (the biblical Shishak, who looted Jerusalem in the tenth century B.C.) at the temple of Karnak, or the victorious return of Seti I from Syro-Palestine shown again in the Karnak temple. Similar illustrations from the non-Egyptian art of the ancient Near East could also be multiplied indefinitely and without difficulty.
The Bible abounds with such imagery, too. “Loose the bonds from your neck, O captive one, Fair Zion!” says Isaiah, promising the restoration of Israel, “For thus said the Lord: You were sold for no price, and shall be redeemed without money” (Isaiah 52:2-3, Jewish Publication Society translation). Besides, the Book of Mormon mentions the flaxen cord only once, while the image of Satan leading his dupes is a ubiquitous one. He “leadeth them away carefully down to hell” (2 Nephi 28:21) and he secures them with “his everlasting chains … his awful chains, from whence there is no deliverance” (2 Nephi 28:18, 22). Where is the Masonic parallel for the chains?
A Near Eastern parallel that seems at least as close as the purported Masonic one is the “cord of fibre” [habl min masad] about the neck of Abu Lahab’s wife in Sara 111 of the Qur’an. The nickname “Abu Lahab,” or “Father of Flame,” was applied to Muhammad’s uncle cAbd al-cUzza b. cAbd al-Muttalib for his (quite unfamilial) opposition to the message of Islam, and as a none-too-subtle hint of his ultimate infernal destination. So too was his wife Jumayl bint Harb b. Umayya promised punishment in the afterlife. E. W. Lane writes that the habl min masad of our passage came to be thought of in Muslim folklore as “a chain seventy cubits in length, whereby the woman upon whose neck it is to be put shall be led into hell.” (Here is a “chain”!) Masad, he says, is basically “the fibres that grow at the roots of the branches of the palm-tree.”89 Will we therefore claim a tie between Masonry and the Qur’an because both use cords to lead captives?
Likewise, the parallel of item #6 — that both Freemasons and Gadiantons posed a threat to the institutions of their homelands — is too broad to prove anything by itself. What the Gadianton robbers here are said to share with the imagined Masonic threat of the 1820s would also be common to the Bolsheviks, the First Continental Congress, the Egyptian Free Officers, and the followers of Oliver Cromwell. (The robbers are, indeed, and quite significantly, closer still to the Catilinian conspiracy of the late Roman Republic and to the famous Chinese Boxer rebellion. I plan to discuss these two movements in a sequel to the present paper.) Taken in connection with other parallels, this one might have significance — but its validity most definitely rests upon the validity of those other parallels, which is not at all well established.
The comparison Prince made between the allegations, on the one hand, that Masonic judges had given light sentences to their fellow Masons in the Morgan murder trial, and the description in 3 Nephi 6:29, on the other hand, of those who, because of their Gadianton oath, “deliver those who were guilty of murder from the grasp of justice,” is an interesting one. The comparison would be far more interesting still if we had an account of any early Latter-day Saint who had made the same comparison. To my knowledge, we do not.
The lambskin parallel between the Masons and the Gadiantons, item #4, is an intriguing one at first glance. However, the Book of Mormon places no great emphasis on the lambskin mentioned in 3 Nephi 4:7, where it is simply one among a number of elements of clothing the Gadiantons wore. Indeed, it is mentioned only once in the entire book. (In view of Alma 51:33-52:1, which tells us that the weather was hot in the first month of the year in Nephite territory, it is possible that the events of 3 Nephi 4:7, occurring in the sixth month, took place during the cold season. Is this significant?) Clearly the proto-Gadianton conspirators of Helaman 1-2 have no distinctive manner of dress. Nothing in their clothing distinguishes them from the mass of people in the Nephite capital. Further, the description of the Lamanites as “wandering about in the wilderness with a short skin girdle about their loins and their heads shaven” is a staple in the Nephite text (see Enos 1:20; Mosiah 10:8; Alma 3:5; 43:20; 49:6). Apparently the Gadiantons, being now self-exiled in the wilderness, have adopted the dress of the Lamanites who share that wilderness with them. Manifestly, Persuitte is putting far too much weight on the item.
Furthermore, the difficulty grows yet more daunting when one considers the possibility that the entire Smith family, and not just Hyrum, was involved in attempts “to win the faculty of Abrac” at least indirectly by its Masonic lore.108 This is, admittedly, a controversial issue. Quinn attempts to downplay the Masonic connections of “Abrac,”109 while others have denied altogether the involvement of the Smith family in such things. I do not pretend to have the definitive answer to this dispute, but I do note that, if the Smiths were involved in Masonic practices during the 1820s, they would seem unlikely anti-Masons during the same period. Some writers have attempted to have things both ways.
And having Joseph then turn around in the 1840s to steal his most sacred ritual from the Masons involves a rather implausibly sudden — and utterly undocumented — turnaround. Because he is aware of this difficulty, presumably, Hullinger offers a compromise. “Joseph Smith,” he claims, “condemned current expressions of Masonry, but accepted it as a truly ancient form of God’s way of maintaining relationships from Adam onward.”110 But if, as we have seen, the Gadianton-Freemasonic parallel is problematic, evidence for the proposition that the Book of Mormon is a tract for the reform of Masonry is utterly invisible.
Whenever we encounter something new, we bring it into our mental inventory by assimilating it to things that we already know. This is the very essence of language, by which a limited number of lexical items, words, and a much more severely limited number of letters or characters serves on the whole quite adequately to describe both remembered and fresh experience. All language is metaphor. And in the nineteenth century, Masonry was an almost ubiquitous phenomenon, a readily available metaphor. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s early tale “A Scandal in Bohemia,” for instance, Freemasonry serves simply to represent the easy intimacy of the late Victorian working class, so different from the reserve and formality of their social superiors. “There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men,” Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. Watson, explaining the disguise he had adopted in order to observe the flat of Miss Irene Adler.113 And the implicit comparison continues to be made today. “Terrorists are building new alliances,” writes Rushworth Kidder in the Christian Science Monitor. “Isolated groups are beginning to come together in what John Newhouse, a New Yorker writer, has dubbed ‘a freemasonry of terrorism.’ ” 114 Obviously, nobody means by such statements that any real connection exists between a Masonic lodge in Wisconsin, say, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the Japanese Red Army Faction.
It is hardly surprising therefore that some saw Freemasonry in the Gadianton robbers. (After all, several astronomers saw Schiaparelli’s illusory Martian canals.) The question is whether we should continue to be bound in our understanding of the Book of Mormon by a metaphor with such limited appropriateness. Certainly we should not conclude that the Gadianton robbers are a figment of someone’s nineteenth-century imagination simply because a handful of historians could distort them to make them fit the Procrustes bed of other modern imaginations, any more than we should conclude that the Assassins were fictional.
Richard Bushman has pointed out that the critics of the Book of Mormon who have wanted to link it to Joseph Smith’s nineteenth-century New York environment have tended to focus on similarities between the Gadiantons and the Masons, while overlooking the considerable differences. Alexander Campbell is a case in point.
Conditioned by anti-Masonic rhetoric, he understandably reacted to familiar elements in the story, but readers approaching from another perspective might have noted quite different aspects of the Gadianton bands. They could with equal ease be perceived as modern terrorist guerrillas, dissenters at war with the old order, penetrating villages on the margins of official control, undermining from within, and attacking openly when they had strength. Viewed in context, the Masonic-like oaths and covenants were secondary to direct attacks on government through assassinations and military raids.
Another Latter-day Saint response to the alleged identity between Gadiantonism and Freemasonry has been to assert the secularism of the Gadianton movement and to deny it any real ideological character.124 “A frequent charge against Masonry,” notes Ostler, “also absent from the Book of Mormon, was that it displaced Christianity by being a religion in itself…. Book of Mormon bands of robbers were not a quasi-religious fraternity, but rather resemble bands of robbers and insurgents in the ancient Near East identifiable in legal materials from early Babylonia to Josephus.”125 As I hope to show in the near future, this assertion will have to be modified — but in a way that does not necessarily weaken it. Indeed, although I doubt that many truly secular mass movements are to be found anywhere in the ancient world, I am also convinced that the multi-faceted Gadianton phenomenon can profitably be examined from a secular perspective — provided that it is not exclusively or reductively so. To examine it along one such line of inquiry is, indeed, the burden of my essay on “The Gadianton Robbers as Guerrilla Warriors” in the present volume.
Thus, the annalists and editors of the Book of Mormon deliberately attempt to present us with a one-sided view of a many-faceted movement. Even so, however, Ostler is correct in noting that the side they choose to present is not the side that the Palmyra milieu would have suggested to Joseph Smith had he merely been spinning out a naive anti-Masonic fiction.
Notes1. Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel (New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1974), 27.
2. Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1984), 128. Briefly stated, the Spalding theory alleges that the real author of the Book of Mormon was a lapsed clergyman named Solomon Spalding (or Spaulding), whose manuscript romance about a group of sailors blown off course to the New World was stolen after his death by Sidney Rigdon and conveyed to Joseph Smith. The two of them, or Rigdon alone, or Rigdon and Oliver Cowdery, or any combination of the preceding with Parley Pratt, added a religious overlay to what had been a mere secular yarn and published it as a purported scripture. This theory was born in 1833 and given publicity the following year by Eber D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (Painesville: n.p., 1834). However, Spalding’s manuscript was rediscovered and published in 1885 and proved to bear only the slightest resemblance to the Book of Mormon. No reputable scholar today holds to the Spalding theory. On the whole, its advocacy is left to such people as the notorious “Dr.” Walter Martin, recently deceased. For analyses and summary information on the matter, see Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 442-56; and Lester E. Bush, Jr., “The Spalding Theory Then and Now,” Dialogue 10 (Autumn 1977): 40-69. A critical review of one recent reincarnation of the Spalding theory is L. Ara Norwood, “Review of Vernal Holley, Book of Mormon Authorship: A Closer Look,” in Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1 (1989): 80-88.
3. Thomas F. O’Dea, The Mormons (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1957), 32.
4. Ibid., 24. Some of the traces of early New York that O’Dea sees in the Book of Mormon are discussed on 26-27,31-32,39. With his identification of “revival exhortation” (23) and “slightly concealed revival meetings” (28), as well as his discovery that “the doctrine of the book is wholeheartedly and completely Arminian” (28), O’Dea seems pretty well to have set the research agenda for at least one contemporary critic of Book of Mormon historicity.
5. Cited in Newell G. Bringhurst, “Fawn Brodie and Her Quest for Independence,” Dialogue 22 (Summer 1989): 79.
6. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 413.
7. Walter F. Prince, “Psychological Tests for the Authorship of the Book of Mormon,” American Journal of Psychology 28 (July 1917): 373.
8. O’Dea, The Mormons, 266, n. 1. He does acknowledge that the question is a “not-quite-solved historical problem.” At the risk of smugness, one might point out that, if the answer “4” were excluded as the possible sum of 2 and 2, the question “2 + 2 = ?” would long remain “not-quite-solved,” as well.
10. Prince, “Psychological Tests,” 376.
11. The phrase is from O’Dea, The Mormons, 40.
12. Alexander Campbell, “Delusions,” Millennial Harbinger 2 (10 February 1831): 93.
13. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mortnonism, 128. See Campbell, “Delusions,” 88-90, for examples.
16. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 63. For her general discussion of the issue, see 63-66. Other descriptions of the episode occur at Robert N. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism: Why Joseph Smith Wrote the Book of Mortnon (St. Louis: Clayton, 1980), 100­104; Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 128­29, 231-32; David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1985), 174; Blake T. Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue 20 (Spring 1987): 73-74.
17. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 65.
18. Ibid., 65. Richard L. Bushman has cast serious doubt on the alleged equivalence of Nephite and American governments, with particular reference to O’Dea. See Bushman, “The Book of Mormon and the American Revolution,” in Noel B. Reynolds, ed., Book of Mormon Authorship: New Light on Ancient Origins (Provo: Religious Studies Center, 1982), 189-211.
19. See Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 64 (note).
20. Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins, 177.
21. Prince, “Psychological Tests,” 380, 385, 387.
22. Theodore Schroeder, “Authorship of the Book of Mormon: Psychologic Tests of W. F. Prince Critically Reviewed,” American Journal of Psychology 30 (January 1919): 67-68, 72. One of the names toyed with by the unfortunate Professor Prince, “Psychological Tests,” 383, is, however, worth reexamining: “To us,” Prince writes, “the Old French and Spanish name Isabel is richly grotesque considered as that of a descendent of Israelitish stock living in America some 2,000 years ago. The source of its adoption is clear almost to demonstration.” What is that source? Why, it is a vague memory of the Castilian queen Isabella who financed Columbus. Since she was a Roman Catholic, and since Roman Catholicism is “the scarlet woman” to ultra-Protestants like Joseph Smith, “Isabel” becomes literally a practicing “harlot” in Alma 39. But is this really the source? I would suggest that the name “Isabel,” far from justifying ignorant laughter, actually points to the roots of the Book of Mormon in an ancient text with Near Eastern connections, as follows: The “Jezebel” of 1 Kings in the Old Testament has long given that name a bad reputation — such that it would have been quite an appropriate name to bestow upon a harlot. In fact, the Book of Mormon does give that name to the harlot — only it does so in a manner arguably more accurate than could have been found in the King James Bible known to Joseph Smith. “Isabel”, (cf. the modern German transliteration “Isebel”) is, in my opinion, a far better rendering of the Hebrew “Izebhel” than is the KJV”Jezebel” with its misleading consonantal “j” (and better, even, than the Septuagint Greek and Vulgate Latin “Iezabel,” which are presumably responsible for the KJV’s rendering of the name). Thus, the name “Isabel” is unusually appropriate for its Book of Mormon context, but Joseph Smith could not have gotten it directly from his Bible.
23. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 65; see also the incautiousness of O’Dea, The Mormons, 35.
24. L. Hicks, “Tubal-Cain,” in George A. Buttrick, ed., The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, 4 vols. and supplement (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1962-76), 4:718.
25. On the other hand, Brodie is able to summarize the endowment ceremony as “essentially fertility worship” (No Man Knows My History, 279), so that there is really no way of knowing what she might have seen in the Book of Mormon text to suggest Tubal Cain to her. If we were to apply to her the method she practices on Joseph Smith, we might explain this useful bit of invented evidence by reference to “the unusual plasticity of [her] mind” (see ibid., 70), or to her “marvelously fecund imagination” (ibid., 44). “Mrs. Brodie is at her best when there is no evidence whatever to cloud her vision,” David H. Donald, the Charles Warren Professor of Amer­ican History at Harvard, once observed of another of her works. “Then she is free to speculate.” For an enlightening collection of non-Mormon critical responses to Brodie, see Louis Midgley, “The Brodie Connection: Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Smith,” BYU Studies 20 (Fall 1979): 59-67.
29. Prince, “Psychological Tests,” 374. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism, 105-10, also tries to tie Masonry to the Book of Mormon generally, but his arguments are wholly unpersuasive.
30. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 65; Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins, 177-78; Campbell, “Delusions,” 88-89.
31. Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins, 176. This may be the drift of Brodie’s inaccurate allusion to Tubal Cain. See n. 17, above.
32. Ibid., 176; Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism, 114, n. 30 and 31. See also the references given at Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion,” 73.
33. Dan Vogel, “Mormonism’s ‘Anti-Masonick Bible’,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 9 (1989): 18.
34. The identification is implicit at ibid., 27, and has been made explicit to me by Vogel in conversation. Doctrine and Covenants 42:64 should be read, according to Vogel’s argument, in connection with D&C 38:12-13, 28-29, 32; 45:63-64; 84:117-19.
35. Persuitte, Joseph Stnith and the Origins, 177.
37. Ibid., 172-80; Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 65. See also references at Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion,” 73.
38. Prince, “Psychological Tests,” 377-78. The Book of Mormon quotation is from 3 Nephi 6:29.
39. Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins, 178; cf. Campbell, “Delusions,” 90.
40. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism, 113.
41. That Martin Harris had at least a little bit of anti-Masonry in his background is evidenced at ibid., 101; cf. D. Michael Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 161.
42. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonistn, 130.
43. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 184, provides references on the theory that the Latter-day Saint temple endowment is a plagiarism of Freemasonry. He rejects such an idea (on 184-86, 190), as do I.
44. Schroeder, “Authorship of the Book of Mormon,” 70. I am not aware of anyone making such an “admission” as that referred to. I certainly would not. For Schroeder’s opinion on the origin of the Book of Mormon and for his estimate of Joseph Smith, see ibid., 66.
45. Dean Jessee, The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1984), 405. Following Jessee, I have left the spelling of the original unchanged.
46. J. Christopher Conkling, A Joseph Smith Chronology (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1979), 156, 158.
48. For his activities during this period of somewhat less than two months, see Conkling, Joseph Smith Chronology, 162-65.
49. See Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 161.
50. Jessee, Personal Writings, 405.
51. I use here the translation given by Stephen Benko, in his Pagan Rome and the Early Christians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 55. The two citations come, respectively, from Octavius 8 and 9. I am grateful to my friend William Hamblin for helping me to locate these references to secrecy in the early Christian church.
52. Minucius Felix, Octavius 9: Occultis se notis et insignibus noscunt. Here I use the translation of Gerald H. Rendall (London: Heinemann, 1966), 337. For a discussion of secrecy in early Christianity, with references, see Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 126- 27.
53. Benko, Pagan Rome and the Early Christians, 60.
54. See ibid., 65; also Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis, tr. and ed. Robert M. Wilson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 214.
55. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 129, 131.
56. Orczy, Scarlet Pimpernel, 27, 61-63, 81, 109, 153, 177.
57. See Max H. Parkin, “Mormon Political Involvement in Ohio,” BYU Studies 9 (Summer 1969): 484-502, esp. 495.
59.A point noted, obliquely, by Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 131.
60. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 162-64.
61. See Rudolph, Gnosis, 275. More will be said on this matter in another projected article.
62. Ibid., 162; see 161, 163-64, 166, 178-79.
63. Quinn, Early Mortnonism and the Magic World View, 161; see 164.
64. Italics in the original.
65. John Bouvier, Bouvier’s Law Dictionary and Concise Encyclopedia, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (Kansas City: Vernon Law, 1914), 1:528. Compare similar definitions at Henry C. Black, Black’s Law Dictionary, rev. 4th ed. (St. Paul: West, 1968), 333, which was originally published in 1891, and Walter A. Shumaker and George F. Longsdorf, The Cyclopedic Law Dictionary (Chicago: Gallaghan, 1912), 168. Both of these dictionaries offer “conspiracy” as a synonym.
66. Shakespeare, King Henry VIII, I, i, 169 (references are to act, scene, and line). Its corresponding verb occurs in the same sense at Macbeth, I, iii, 111. On the other hand, the term is used more neutrally at Twelfth Night, V, i, 382; King Henry V, II, i, 109; Julius Caesar, IV, i, 43; and King Lear, V, i, 29. The connection of the word with oaths and oath-making is illustrated by the duke’s remarks at Measure for Measure, IV, iii, 145.
67. Dan M. Wolfe, gen. ed., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82), 1:676-77; 3:509, 574.
68. See, for example, in the Federalist Papers 13, 16, 25, 26, 59, 70, 73, and 77 (all by Alexander Hamilton), and in the Federalist Papers 49, 51, and 55 (by James Madison).
69. For the latter three documents, see Mortimer J. Adler, ed., The Annals of America, 21 vols., index (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Bri­tannica, 1968-1974), 6:248-51, 251-56 (“Labor Unions and Conspir­acy”), 10:333-34 (“Secret Labor Organizations”). Compare Adam Smith’s remarks (first published in 1776) in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations 1:8 (“Of the Wages of Labour”).
70. Jerreld L. Newquist, ed., Gospel Truth (Salt Lake City: Des­eret Book, 1987), 42.
71. Richard Lloyd Anderson, “The Rise and Fall of Middle-Class Loyalty to the Roman Empire: A Social Study of Velleius Paterculus and Ammianus Marcellinus,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1962, 116-23.
73. Vogel, “Mormonism’s ‘Anti-Masonick Bible’,” 18, n. 3.
74. Professor John W. Welch of the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University undertook the search at my request and summarized the results. I am grateful to him for his assistance. In every case cited that follows, the emphasis on the phrase “secret combination” is mine.
75. See A. D. Neale and D. G. Goyder, The Antitrust Laws of the United States of Atnerica: A Study of Competition Enforced by Law, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 16-18, 86 n. 1, 330, 333, 458-60.
76. Ibid., 37, 39, 45, 247, 333 (“combination to eliminate competition”), 333 n. 1, 336, 341.
77. Joel Hills Johnson, “Autobiography,” typescript in Harold B. Lee Library of Brigham Young University, 8.
78. Orson F. Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball, 2nd ed. (Salt Lake City: Stevens and Wallis, 1945), 101.
79. The text is in Adler, Annals of America, 5:441-47, italics added; see also 7:124-27. Note that Robinson was a Jacksonian Democrat, see ibid., 5:598. Vogel, “Mormonism’s ‘Anti-Masonick Bible’,” would have us believe that fear of “secret combinations” was a hysteria peculiar to anti-Masons, who were uniformly anti-Jackson (since Andrew Jackson was a high-ranking Mason).
80. It is striking that the modern Greek translation of the Doctrine and Covenants renders the “secret combinations” of 42:64 by tnystikai synotnosiai, using the same word (synotnosia) as that used for the “conspiracy” to murder Paul that Acts 23:12-14 describes. The oath-bound nature of that conspiracy — the Greek word itself has for its roots syn (“together with”) and omnumi (“to swear”) — is perfectly appropriate for “combinations” in the Gadianton manner, as is its desire to murder a prophet and apostle of God.
81. Times and Seasons 5:757.
84. See Truman G. Madsen, Defender of the Faith: The B. H. Roberts Story (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1980), 145. This is the same kind of “secret combination,” I think, as that considered in the case of Lyon v. Pollock, alluded to above. In view of their location, period, and apparent intent, the so-called “Knights of the Golden Circle” were most likely a Klan-related group. Although I have as yet located nothing specifically on them, Klan offshoots with names like Knights of the Air, Knights of the Flaming Sword, Knights of the White Camelia, Knights of the Great Forest, Knights of the Black Cross, Knights of the Flaming Circle, and Knights of the Golden Dawn, are well-documented.
85. See “Newel Knight’s Journal,” in “Scraps of Biography,” as reprinted in the anonymously edited Classic Experiences and Adventures (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1969), 79.
86. See also Messenger and Advocate 2 (March 1836): 278.
87. B. H. Roberts, ed., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1978), 5:310­11. The text of the proclamation is also in Joseph Fielding Smith, ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1938), 285. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Kent P. Jackson for bringing it to my attention.
89. E. W. Lane’s Arabic-English Lexicon, 2 vols. (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 1984), s.v. masad; see also J. G. Hava, Al­Fara’id Arabic-English Dictionary, 5th ed. (Beirut: Dar al-Mashriq, 1982), and John Penrice, A Dictionary and Glossary of the Kor-an (London: Curzon Press, 1971). Reinhardt Dozy makes it “sparte,” a kind of grass (Dozy’s Supplément aux Dictionnaires Arabes, 2 vols. [Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1968]). Compare that with this rendering of the verse: “On her neck a rope of bast” (H. A. R. Gibb and J. H. Kramers, eds., Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam [Leiden: Brill, 1974], s.v. Abu Lahab). The habl under consideration here is, reports Lane, “a plaited rope, firmly twisted” (see Hava, Al-Fara’id; and Penrice, Dictionary and Glossary). Hava is aware of an Arabic verb masada/yamsudu — obviously cognate with the noun masad — meaning “to plait a rope.”) This is a parallel from the early seventh century A.D. and thus far later than the period the Book of Mormon claims for itself. But the Qur’an often mirrors ancient Near Eastern motifs, and it seems to me that this one is worthy at least of mention (see also M. M. Bravmann, The Spiritual Background of Early Islam [Leiden: Brill, 1972], 315-34, for potentially relevant materials from ancient Arabia).
90. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 64-65.
91. Grant Underwood, “The Earliest Reference Guides to the Book of Mormon: Windows into the Past,” Journal of Mormon History 12 (1985): 82; see also Parkin, “Mormon Political Involvement,” 484­501; Milton V. Backman, Jr., The Heavens Resound: A History of the Latter-day Saints in Ohio, 1830-1838 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1983), 24, 335. An as-yet-unpublished book-length study by Professor Backman on the Mormons in Ohio will include computerized statistical data on early Mormon Jacksonianism.
93. Dom A. Cody, “Hebrews,” in Reginald C. Fuller, Leonard Johnston, and Conleth Kearns, eds., A New Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (Nashville: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1975), 1235 (942a).
96. Could there be a real referent for the warning against “false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (see Matthew 7:151 = 3Nephi 14:151)? Although by far most references to sheep or lambs in the Book of Mormon are metaphorical, as are most quotations from Old World writings, its peoples did raise sheep (see Ether 9:18; Alma 5:59; 25:12). That the Gadianton movement was characterized by a heretical religiosity (from the standpoint of the Book of Mormon writers) is one of the propositions I intend to advance in yet another paper on this topic, currently in progress.
97. Bushman, Joseph Sntith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 232, n. 46, cites one piece of evidence that might tend to confirm Hullinger’s claim—but in such a way as to lessen one’s confidence in it.
100. Richard L. Bushman, “The Book of Mormon in Early Mormon History,” in Davis Bitton and Maureen U. Beecher, eds., New Views of Mormon History: Essays in Honor of Leonard J. Arrington (Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1987), 4.
101. Underwood, “Earliest Reference Guides to the Book of Mormon,” 82.
102. See Parkin, “Mormon Political Involvement,” 494-95; Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 232 n. 46. E. D. Howe, incidentally, would immortalize himself in subsequent Latter-day Saint history with his 1834 publication of the first anti-Mormon book, Mormonistn Unvailed.
104. Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 65.
105. Ibid., 63. I thank John W. Welch for suggesting this line of thought to me.
107. See the relevant discussion in her “Supplement” to the second edition of her biography, in Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 413-16.
108. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism, 104-5; 116, n. 46.
109. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 54-56.
110. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism, 112-13.
111. Bushman, “The Book of Mormon in Early Mormon History,” 5.
112. Quinn, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View, 161.
113. The Strand Magazine originally published the story between July 1891 and June 1892 in the series The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.
114. Rushworth M. Kidder, The Christian Science Monitor, 13 May 1986, 18. Margaret Drabble’ s obscure allusion to “the esoteric masonic paradise of Oxford” also illustrates continuing metaphorical use of Freemasonry (see her novel, A Summer Bird Cage [New York: New American Library, Plume Books, 1985], 11).
115. A future article will examine that relevance in some detail.
116. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte der Assassinen (Stuttgart, 1818), was still used as an authority as late as the 1930s. Fortunately, it has been replaced in recent years by far more reliable and less tendentious accounts, notable among which are Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Order of Assassins: The Struggle of the Early Nizari Ismacilis against the Islamic World (‘s-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1955); and Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (New York: Basic Books, 1968). Enno Franzius, History of the Order of Assassins (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), is somewhat less reliable.
117. Hodgson, The Order of Assassins, 27.
118. De Lacy O’Leary, A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923), 17, 21.
120. Duncan B. MacDonald, Development of Muslim Theology, Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory (Lahore: Premier Book House, n.d.), 41.
121. I. K. Poonawala, Biobibliography of Ismacili Literature (Malibu: Undena, 1977), 6. Professor Poonawala, my teacher in graduate school, has no rival in his knowledge of the vast and arcane field of Ismacili literature, and I certainly do not dispute his mastery. That even he would use the Masonic metaphor shows how pervasive it has become, despite its inapplicability.
122. W. Ivanow, “Ismaciliya,” in the Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, 181.
123. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mortnonistn, 130­31. (I have corrected an obvious printing error.) See Bushman’s discussion of the anti-Masonic campaign on p. 129; cf. Hullinger, Mormon Answer to Skepticism, 101. Hullinger, ibid., 115, n. 32, looks away from the Book of Mormon to the Pearl of Great Price and sees the “Irad” of Moses 5:49-5p as the Morgan figure.
124. This, I think, is something of the approach taken by John W. Welch, “Theft and Robbery in the Book of Mormon and Ancient Near Eastern Law,” F.A.R.M.S. Working Paper, 1985, and is reflected as well in Terrence L. Szink, “A Just and True Record (3 Nephi 1-5),” in Kent P. Jackson, ed., Studies in Scripture: Volume Eight, Alma 30 to Moroni (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1988), 128- 34.
125. Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion,” 74. For the nineteenth-century claim that Masonry was a counterfeit religion, Ostler cites the Proceedings of the Anti-Masonic Convention, 11 Sept. 1830 (Philadelphia: I. P. Trimble, 1830), 43-45, 79-83, 102­7. For the ancient Near Eastern parallels, he relies mostly upon Welch, “Theft and Robbery,” which I shall discuss in a future article.
126. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 131.
127. Ibid., 131. It seems that the incompatibility of the Spalding theory with purported traces of the Morgan-Masonry excitement (which commenced in late 1826) in the Book of Mormon was at least a minor factor in Fawn Brodie’s rejection of the theory (see Brodie, No Man Knows My History, 454).
128. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, 131; see Underwood, “Earliest Reference Guides to the Book of Mormon,” 81.

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