Mormonism and Masonry: A New Investigation

Decrypting "Prophet" Joseph Smith’s Occult Racket

Copyright©2025 by Independent History and Research • www.revisionisthistory.org

[Reading time is approximately 50 minutes]

This is the second part of a series, “A New History of Freemasonry and Secret Societies in America.” Part One, “Freemasons in the American Civil War,” was published in December.

INTRODUCTION

“Fanatic, impostor, charlatan he (Joseph Smith) may have been, but these hard names furnish no solution to the problem he presents us with. Fanatics and impostors are living and dying every day, and their memory is buried with them; but the...influence which this founder of religion exerted and still exerts throws him into relief before us, not as a rogue to be incriminated, but a phenomenon to be explained.”

Josiah Quincy

The role of Freemasonry in American history has been minimized by Establishment historians to such an extent as to render it barely noticeable—most often relegated to footnote status. When it is studied at length, Masonry is characterized by various academics as an innocuous do-gooders’ society engaged mainly in charitable work and comic-opera rituals.

This cover story is pathetic. From the 18th century forward Masons established enormous ideological and commercial networks which constituted an empire which spanned America and the globe.

This is not a “paranoid conspiracy theory.” From Britain masonic lodges were planted in Dublin, Ireland and Prague (Bohemia) in 1726, in Madrid, Spain in 1728; in Russia and the Dutch Republic in 1731. (There were 140 masonic organizations in Russia by 1792).

In Boston, Massachusetts “St. John’s Grand Lodge” was founded in 1733. (New York’s “Grand Lodge” was planted in 1737). Lisbon, Portugal witnessed the establishment of Freemasonry in that city in 1735. In Italy by 1735 masonic orders had been created in Florence, Milan, Naples, Verona, Padua and Venice.

In 1738 the Brotherhood gained traction in Malta and Aleppo, Syria. Also in 1738 the youthful king, Frederick the Great of Prussia, became a masonic initiate in a lodge erected within his castle at Rheinsberg.

The Brotherhood was ensconced in a nexus in Vienna, Austria beginning in 1742; in Denmark Freemasons gained a foothold in 1743. By 1745 six masonic lodges had been founded in Switzerland and one in Norway.

Established in India in 1728, by the 1770s the British East India Company hosted masonic chapters across the subcontinent.

Masonic dignitaries landed with the first cargo of English slaves (“convicts”) at Botany Bay, Australia. Their first Australian lodge was created in 1820.

Colonial bureaucrats, merchants, and the sellers of black people flourished in new masonic outposts in the slave-trading havens of the West Indies, where four colonial governors were simultaneously serving as Grand Masters of their respective provincial lodges.

In the 18th century Freemasons were growing strong in Central and South America and comprised the leadership of many of the movements fomenting revolution against Spain.

In Texas in 1836, after the battle of San Jacinto, 32nd degree Freemason Antonio López de Santa Anna, the general who months before had massacred unarmed Alamo defenders, was spared death by fellow Mason Sam Houston. (Santa Anna had been initiated into the Scottish Rite on December 12, 1825. His Scottish Rite “membership patent” is in the collection of the Robert R. Livingston Masonic Library of the Masonic Grand Lodge of New York. Houston had served as the fifth Grand Master of the masonic lodge in Nashville, Tennessee and played a vital role in organizing the Grand Lodge of Texas).

It is worth noting that overseas the pioneers of some of these lodges were occasionally accompanied by clandestine operatives of the British Secret Service; the opportunities for espionage being too numerous to bypass (cf. Hans Schwartz, Freemasonry in the Revolutionary Atlantic World [2022], p. 27).

To gauge the atrophied state of media-approved and professor-generated historical research we should contemplate the datum that these “experts” have been largely blind to the monumental clout and control exercised by the masonic institution since the 18th century.

In a future installment of this series we will study how some of the Brotherhood’s glamor was first diminished when knowledge of the relationship between the Bavarian Illuminati and Freemasonry was revealed by the eminent American geographer, Jedediah Morse (father of the inventor of the telegraph); and Timothy Dwight, President of Yale; as well as Edinburgh University’s John Robison in his book, Proofs of a Conspiracy.

Dwight termed the Illuminati “a higher order of Masons.” One might with justification opine the same about the Mormons.

It is an irony of history that Freemasonry was supposed by certain Catholic critics to have found its ideal home in Protestant America due to the reputed masonic attachment to “religious liberty” and animus toward “priestcraft.”

There is no such attachment, as David C. Miller would attest were he alive today. It was Miller, a Batavia, New York printer who was compiling for publication an exposé by former Freemason William Morgan of the first three degrees of Masonry (Illustrations of Masonry), when his shop was set ablaze by members of the Brotherhood (cf. Thurlow Weed and Harriet A. Weed, Autobiography of Thurlow Weed [Boston, 1884], pp. 218-219).

Nearly two decades later a newspaper in Nauvoo, Illinois was destroyed by Mormon-Masons. There are many instances of the abridgment of free speech and press by the masonic order.

In 1826 the author Morgan was abducted by lodge brothers from a jail in Canandaigua, New York where he had been confined on a trumped-up charge, and never seen again.

As for priestcraft, consider the titles of the degrees conferred in Freemasonry as one ascends the ladder of initiation: Council of Princes of Jerusalem, Knight of the Rose Croix, Prince of Libanus, Master Ad Vitam, Grand Inspector, Master of the Ninth Arch, Sublime Prince of the Royal Secret etc. Each of these degrees is marked by the wearing of florid garments and elaborate insignia indicative of a priesthood.

Freemasonry has seldom sincerely stood for liberty of conscience or freedom of expression for its enemies in matters of religion, statesmanship or politics. To take the word of these practiced occult deceivers on this or any other matter is folly.

Moreover, hundreds of thousands of American Protestants of Puritan heritage, such as Dwight and Morse, harbored an intense distrust for clericalism and were not so obtuse as to perceive it only in the hierarchy of the Church of Rome. The Freemasons, notwithstanding their blather, were a dictatorial counter-church, every bit as authoritarian and priestly as their papal rivals, with the difference being that Rome made no hypocritical claim to being liberal.

While a significant minority of the American people were attracted to the pomp and costumes of the clericalism exhibited by the temple priesthood of Joseph Smith’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which laid claim to the revival of “once-vanished ancient secrets and verities,” in the early Protestant-American republic, the majority favored their forefathers’ plain religion, and were ill-disposed toward aristocracies of command, marked by ostentatious displays of rank.

When the masonic kidnapping and assassination of William Morgan became widely known the tremors from the resulting “earthquake” collapsed masonic centers of power in the Northeast and launched a radical, leveling distrust of secret societies and government itself, with a force beyond Richter scale measurement. The populist anti-masonic movement in early Protestant America has no equal in terms of its ferocity.

The official LDS account of Smith’s masonic bonds claims that they arose in 1842 in Illinois. I know this to be a lie. They began in the 1820s on the 42nd degree of north parallel latitude, in upstate New York, in the epicenter of the Morgan abduction and assassination upheaval. Since this writer is aware of it, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Mormon leadership also knows. They possess most of the archives and with their substantial wealth have in their pay a small army of researchers. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that the LDS Church has chosen to hide a truth which is destabilizing to Mormon myths.

This writer’s approach to obtaining better knowledge of Masonry in history is to study Mormonry in history.

It is by peering through the Mormon keyhole that we espy masonic realities. As noted, Masonry and the Mormons did not first unite in the Midwest in 1842. The truth of their earlier occult confluence in New York vouchsafes aspects of the two brotherhoods heretofore locked away from the “prying eyes of cowans” (non-initiates).

The American people are increasingly disturbed by their growing consciousness of the presence of a “Deep State.” It might behoove us to delve as far as humanly possible into the history of the heart of that subterranean territory, which is the purpose of this study. Let us embark on our voyage of discovery.