Open Veils · Answer
What are the roots of the LDS church?
The LDS Church's roots run far deeper than its 1830 founding date suggests. Researchers in esoteric history trace Joseph Smith's theological framework directly to Freemasonry, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, and the treasure-digging folk magic culture of early 19th-century New England. The Nauvoo Temple rituals, introduced in 1842 just weeks after Smith received his third-degree Masonic initiation, mirror lodge ceremony so precisely that even orthodox LDS historians cannot fully deny the connection. The deeper question is whether Smith was a genuine visionary channeling an ancient mystery tradition — or an initiate deliberately encoding one into an institutional religion.
Evidence
- Manly P. Hall documented extensively that the ritual architecture of the Nauvoo endowment ceremony — including the five points of fellowship, the veil ceremony, and the oath of vengeance — was transplanted almost verbatim from Craft Freemasonry.
- Researcher D. Michael Quinn, in his landmark work on early Mormon folk magic, documented that Smith's family practiced ritual magic using seer stones, divining rods, and ceremonial parchments drawn from the grimoire tradition — specifically Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and the Key of Solomon.
- Gregg Braden and Rudolf Steiner's interpreters have separately pointed to the Book of Mormon's cosmological framework — with its Adamic language, pre-mortal councils, and hierarchical heavens — as echoing Gnostic and Neoplatonic emanation theology filtered through the American frontier.
- Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled briefly acknowledges Smith as one of several 19th-century figures who independently accessed what she called the Ageless Wisdom — imperfectly, she argued, but genuinely.
- Smith was raised to Master Mason in Nauvoo Lodge on March 15–16, 1842; the endowment ceremony was unveiled to a select inner circle within weeks.