Freemasonry and the Temple Endowment

Did Joseph Smith copy the endowment from Masonic ritual seven weeks after his initiation — or did an inspired prophet use a familiar ritual language to deliver something Masonry only remembers in fragments?

The CES Letter Claims

The CES Letter’s Argument

The CES Letter observes that Joseph Smith became a Mason in March 1842 and introduced the temple endowment roughly seven weeks later, in May 1842. It points to the close ritual resemblances between the two ceremonies and treats the tight timing as evidence that the endowment was copied from Freemasonry rather than revealed.

The letter presses three specifics. First, the timeline: initiation on March 15–16, 1842, endowment on May 4, 1842. Second, the ritual parallels — grips, tokens, signs, the blood-oath penalties, and the Five Points of Fellowship — several of which are strikingly close to Masonic forms of the day. Third, that the Church removed those very elements in April 1990, which the letter reads as a quiet admission that they were Masonic borrowings the Church was embarrassed to keep. Heber C. Kimball’s description of the endowment as “true Masonry” is offered as an insider confession, and the letter notes that no historian can trace a functioning line from Solomon’s Temple to the modern lodge.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Confronted with real similarities between the endowment and the Masonic lodge, Jeremy reached one of two forks in the road.

The path he took — proximity proves plagiarism. Because the initiation and the endowment stand seven weeks apart, and because the vehicle (grips, signs, a dramatic staging) resembles Masonry, Joseph must have invented the whole thing by copying the lodge. Shared form is treated as identical origin, and origin of the form is treated as origin of the meaning.

The path he stepped over — a prophet using a known ritual language to deliver restored content. This reading distinguishes two questions the CES Letter fuses into one: Where did the ritual vehicle come from? and Where did the covenant theology come from? The honest answer to the first is that Joseph plainly drew on a ritual idiom his contemporaries already spoke. The answer to the second is that the endowment’s substance holds together as a single covenant theology of exaltation. Its narrative frame — creation, fall, a Redeemer, the plan of salvation — was of course drawn from scripture Joseph knew well; no one claims otherwise. But the distinctively temple features that structure that frame — the ascent through veils by token and name, the investiture of sacred clothing, the prayer circle, an adversary who appears as a false teacher — match ancient ritual traditions Joseph could not have read, and match Masonry only where Masonry itself preserves a broken memory of those same traditions.

The nuanced path is better supported because it accounts for more of the evidence. Jeremy’s reading explains the surface similarities but leaves little room for why the deep structure of the endowment tracks Egyptian, Israelite, and early-Christian temple ritual no frontier Mason knew. And it ignores the decisive question: if Joseph merely copied the lodge, where in Masonry did he find the endowment’s actual content — the Creation, the Garden, the Fall, a Redeemer, the plan of salvation, exaltation? None of it exists in Masonry, whose legend is a builder’s parable about Hiram Abiff. The one theory that fits both the shared vehicle and the utterly unshared substance is the one scripture describes: revelation given “after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding” (D&C 1:24).

The Timeline Is Not Disputed — The Interpretation Is

The proximity of Joseph Smith’s Masonic initiation (March 15–16, 1842) and his introduction of the endowment (May 4, 1842) is documented, and Latter-day Saint scholars do not dispute it. The connection is not a secret the Church has been forced to admit. It has been discussed openly in Church-affiliated scholarship for generations — long before the CES Letter appeared in 2013. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1992), published with Church cooperation, carries a full entry titled “Freemasonry and the Temple” that acknowledges Joseph’s membership and the ritual similarities without embarrassment. This is the record the honest reader must weigh: the facts of the timeline were never hidden. What is contested is what they mean.

The Restoration model holds that God works through existing cultural materials as scaffolding for revelation. The Bible was written in the literary forms of its time; the Doctrine and Covenants speaks in nineteenth-century American idiom. Joseph’s Masonic exposure may have primed him to cast restored temple truths in a ritual form his contemporaries could receive — the ordinary texture of how revelation is delivered, not evidence of fraud.

The Strongest Form of the Objection — Met Head-On

A careful critic will say the “common ancient source” answer is too convenient, and will sharpen the objection: it is not generic temple imagery that the endowment shares with Masonry, but particular nineteenth-century Masonic specifics — the exact grips, the penal signs, the Five Points of Fellowship at the veil. These are not attested in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. They are attested in the lodge Joseph joined weeks earlier. That is the version of the argument worth answering, and we answer it plainly.

Yes: some of the ritual vehicle — particular gestures and the manner of conveying tokens — reflects the Masonic idiom of Joseph’s day. Latter-day Saints need not deny this, and the best of them never have. What matters is the distinction the objection quietly erases. A grip is a delivery mechanism; the covenant it seals is the message. Paul preached the risen Christ in the rhetorical forms of the Greek agora and quoted pagan poets to the Athenians (Acts 17:28) without his gospel becoming Greek philosophy. That God would clothe the covenants of exaltation in a solemn ritual language already familiar to the men receiving them is not a defeat for the Restoration — it is exactly what D&C 1:24 describes. The endowment took a broken, half-remembered ritual grammar and filled it with the very content it was originally meant to carry.

On the specific matter of the penalties and the covenant of fellowship — the elements the CES Letter leans on hardest — it is worth being precise about what they meant. They were solemn symbols of the seriousness of covenant-keeping, never instruments of harm, and they are addressed carefully on companion pages that treat the nature of a sacred oath and the frequent confusion of these symbols with the entirely separate teaching of blood atonement. Reading a symbol of covenant fidelity as a literal threat is precisely the flattening this whole subject invites — and the fork Jeremy chose.

Hugh Nibley: The Ancient Pattern

Hugh Nibley’s Temple and Cosmos (1992) and The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (1975, revised 2005) argue for extensive parallels between the endowment’s structure and ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, and early Christian temple ritual. Not every scholar weighs these parallels the same way, and the individual matches vary in strength; the force of the case is cumulative rather than resting on any one item. These proposed parallels include:

  • The dramatic representation of the creation and fall as a cosmic narrative staged in a sacred space
  • Ascent through a series of veils or gates, each requiring a token or name — attested in Egyptian funerary texts and early Christian liturgical sources
  • The investiture of sacred clothing as a ritual transformation
  • The prayer circle, attested in ancient Egyptian and early Christian practice
  • An adversary who appears as a false teacher offering a counterfeit path — paralleled in Egyptian sources and in texts from Nag Hammadi

These patterns predate Freemasonry by millennia. The scriptural narrative they dramatize — creation, fall, redemption — was of course open on any frontier bookshelf; what Joseph could not have reached were the sources that document the ritual pattern itself, chief among them the Nag Hammadi codices, unearthed only in 1945, and a range of early Christian and Egyptian liturgical texts unpublished in his lifetime. The lodge shares fragments of this pattern because Masonry is a late, weathered branch of an old tradition — not because the old tradition descends from Masonry. The endowment, on Nibley’s account, restores the original of which Masonry retained only echoes. The purpose and pattern of the temple across scripture makes the point independently of any lodge.

Heber C. Kimball: “True Masonry” — Admission or Argument?

The CES Letter cites Heber C. Kimball’s description of the endowment as “true Masonry” as an insider confession that early Saints knew the ceremony was borrowed from the lodge. But Kimball’s own words say the reverse. Writing to Parley P. Pratt in June 1842, Kimball — himself a Mason before he was a Latter-day Saint — reported that Joseph taught “Masonry was taken from the priesthood but has become degenerated.” That is not a man confessing the endowment is a copy of Masonry. It is a man claiming that Masonry is a corrupted remnant of something the priesthood restored in full. “True Masonry,” in his mouth, is a contrast, not a credit.

This is coherent with Masonry’s own self-understanding. Freemasonry frames its ritual around Hiram Abiff and the builders of Solomon’s Temple. Historians rightly note this lineage cannot be documented — but the persistence of that origin story is itself a cultural memory of sacred temple ritual once possessed and since lost. For Kimball, the endowment was that lost thing brought back. The relationship between the two rites is examined more fully in Masonry and the Temple.

The 1990 Changes: Updating Presentation, Not Abandoning Doctrine

In April 1990 the Church adjusted the endowment’s presentation, setting aside the penal signs and the Five Points of Fellowship at the veil. The CES Letter reads this as an admission that these were Masonic borrowings too awkward to keep.

The conclusion does not follow. Latter-day Saint theology affirms that the Church is led by continuing revelation and that presentation — form, emphasis, wording — can be adjusted by living prophetic authority while doctrine stands. The theology of the endowment did not change in 1990: eternal covenants, the pattern of creation and fall, exaltation, and eternal marriage all remained. What was set aside were symbolic ritual forms that had served their purpose in an earlier generation. That is the ordinary exercise of prophetic stewardship over a living rite, not the discarding of a fraud.

Consider the parallel the objection ignores: animal sacrifice was central to divinely commanded Israelite worship for centuries and then ceased. By the CES Letter’s logic, its removal would “prove” it was never of God. Ritual forms are added, emphasized, and retired across the life of a covenant people. Change of form is not evidence against original divine sanction — it is a mark of a living tradition under authority.

No Documented Line to Solomon’s Temple — Which Is the Point

The CES Letter notes that Latter-day Saint apologists themselves grant there is no historical evidence of a continuous functioning line from Solomon’s Temple to the modern lodge. That is accurate; mainstream historians trace Freemasonry to early-modern stonemasons’ guilds, not to ancient Jerusalem.

But notice what that concession establishes. Masonry preserves fragments of ancient ritual symbolism without the original context, authority, or fullness — a broken tradition holding pieces without knowing what they are pieces of. The Latter-day Saint claim was never that Joseph mined the endowment from Masonry, but that both point back to an ancient original: the endowment restored by revelation, the lodge preserving only weathered echoes. A missing Masonic pedigree from Solomon’s Temple does not wound that account; it fits it. The temple tradition had to be lost before a restoration could be necessary.

Further Study

Verdict

What is resolved. The timeline is real and was never concealed — it appears in Church-affiliated scholarship decades before the CES Letter. The endowment plainly borrows some of its ritual vehicle from the Masonic idiom of Joseph’s day, and Latter-day Saints lose nothing by saying so, because that is how revelation is delivered “after the manner of their language” (D&C 1:24). But the CES Letter’s central inference — that shared form proves invented content — collapses under the evidence it never engages: the endowment’s most distinctive ritual features echo ancient temple traditions Joseph had no way to reach (a cumulative case that careful scholars weigh differently, but one the letter never takes up), Kimball’s “true Masonry” argues for restoration rather than borrowing, the 1990 adjustments are ordinary prophetic stewardship over form, and the absence of a Masonic pedigree to Solomon’s Temple fits the restoration account rather than refuting it.

What remains, mildly, open. We cannot draw a precise line showing exactly which ritual elements Joseph adapted from the lodge and which came wholly by revelation; the historical record simply does not let us weigh the two with certainty. That is a question of proportion, not of authenticity — and it leaves the faithful reading fully intact.

Jeremy stood at a fork. One path asked only whether two rites looked alike; the other asked where each rite’s meaning came from and followed the evidence into the ancient world. He took the shorter road and called the coincidence a confession. The longer road — harder, better documented, and truer to how God has always spoken to His children — was open the whole time.