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(and partial copycat) of Agrippa. Smith’s occult interests closely reflected those that traveled through Central New York. Later in life, his theology suggested the existence of a male–female God, an idea found in Hermetic and Gnostic traditions, though one that Smith may have imbibed locally through the teachings of Mother Ann Lee or Jemima Wilkinson. He also grew fascinated with the temple rites and symbols of Freemasonry, a movement of tremendous influence and controversy in the Burned-Over District, as will soon be seen.

The rebellious, spiritually adventuresome Smith began reporting divine visitations in the 1820s, which culminated in the angel called Moroni directing him to golden plates buried in the Hill Cumorah, near his home. It was the same place where local legend held that a lost tribe of Israel had made its last stand, a pillar of Smith’s later theology. Like Smith, many early-nineteenth-century observers took seriously the existence of a highly developed, pre-Indian civilization in the area. In 1811, New York’s Governor DeWitt Clinton told the New York Historical Society:

There is every reason to believe that, previous to the occupancy of this country by the progenitors of the present nations of Indians, it was inhabited by a race of men, much more populous, and much further advanced in civilization. The numerous remains of ancient fortifications, which are found in this country … demonstrate a population far exceeding that of the Indians when this country was first settled.

Clinton and others reported discovering esoteric fraternities among the nineteenth-century Iroquois, which some considered a form of “ancient Freemasonry.” These speculations were heightened when the Seneca leader Red Jacket and other New York–area Indians were seen wearing Freemasonic-style medals in the shape of the square and compass, a fact well documented in a 1903 New York State Museum monograph, Metallic Ornaments of the New York Indians by archaeologist William M. Beauchamp.

All of the area myths—the remnants of a lost civilization, the uses of peep stones, ancient buried treasure—formed tantalizing threads in Joseph Smith’s expanding worldview. They wound together in the narrative of the golden plates Smith discovered at Cumorah—written in “reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics” and translated by the young seeker through a pair of ancient seer stones. In 1830, he revealed the testimony as the Book of Mormon. Smith’s record traced a vast alternate history, involving a tribe of Israel fleeing the Holy Land for the American continent, experiencing the gospel directly from Christ, and later suffering fracture and vanquish in a “great and tremendous battle at Cumorah … until they were all destroyed” (Mormon 8:2). The scale and scope of the Book of Mormon were extraordinary—seen by followers as buttressing the lore of Smith’s home district rather than built upon it.

Yet Smith’s theology found little influence within the Burned-Over District, where he was often seen as a former “peep-stoner” peddling himself as a prophet. Like Israel’s lost tribe, Smith and his followers would have to journey west to live out their destiny. But the ideas and loyalties that the prophet developed in Central New York converged with profound consequences over the lives of Smith and the small band that followed him down the Psychic Highway.

“Our New Order of the Ages”

Smith was fascinated with Freemasonry, and for a time the religious–civic brotherhood was widely popular in the Burned-Over District and many parts of America. Early American Freemasons held a sense of breaking with an Old World past in which one overarching authority regulated the exchange of religious ideas and sought to position itself as an intermediary between the individual and the spiritual search. Both American and European Freemasons professed ecumenism and religious toleration. In so doing, they may have taken a cue from the so-called Rosicrucian manuscripts that had aroused the imagination of radical Protestant reformers. Beginning in 1614, Europe had marveled over cryptic manuscripts