Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [13]
In another apparent echo of the Rosicrucian texts, Freemasonry drew upon arcane imagery as codes for personal and ethical development. As members rose through the fraternity’s ranks, their achievements were marked on ceremonial badges and aprons by rising suns, luminous eyeballs, pentagrams, and pyramids. This practice informed one of the greatest symbols of Masonry, or at least those influenced by it: the all-seeing eye and incomplete pyramid of the Great Seal of the United States, familiar today from the back of the dollar bill. The Great Seal’s initial design began, appropriately enough, on July 4, 1776, on an order from the Continental Congress and under the direction of Benjamin Franklin (himself a Mason), Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.* The Latin maxim that surrounds the unfinished pyramid—Annuit Coeptis Novus Ordo Seclorum—can be roughly, if poetically, translated as: “God Smiles on Our New Order of the Ages.” It is Masonic philosophy to the core: The pyramid, or worldly achievement, is incomplete without the blessing of Providence. In its symbols and ideas, Masonry saw this polity of man and God as a break with the sectarianism of the Old World and a renewed search for universal truth as it existed in all the great civilizations. Renaissance occultists had viewed ancient Egypt as the source of a primal, ageless wisdom transcending nation or dogma. The eye and pyramid of the Great Seal expressed a tantalizingly similar ideal.
In the laboratory of religious experimentation that was the Burned-Over District, Freemasonry—this cryptic religious order with liberal values—should have enjoyed a long and fruitful influence. But there the secretive brotherhood ran into a scandal that nearly threatened its existence in America. It began in the mid-1820s, sparked by a violent episode that played out not far from Joseph Smith’s home and would leave its mark on Smith’s life—and death.
The Widow’s Son
In 1826, a disgruntled Mason living in Batavia, New York, William Morgan, threatened to expose Masonry’s secret rites in a manuscript he was readying for publication. Morgan soon suffered a variety of persecutions, ranging from his arrest on specious charges to an attempted arson at the print shop that held his manuscript. He was eventually kidnapped and never seen again—possibly murdered at the hands of Masonic zealots. Residents of the Burned-Over District certainly believed as much.
The presumed homicide and the dead-end legal investigation that followed raised suspicions about Masonry’s influence on law enforcement and the courts. The episode let loose a torrent of anti-Masonic feeling, first in the Burned-Over District and soon throughout America, stoked by a general mood of discontent over corruption in high places. In time, fifty-two anti-Masonic newspapers sprang up in the nation, and dozens of anti-Masonic representatives were sent to state legislatures. While the waters soon calmed, Freemasonry would never again command the same level of prestige in American life. But the brotherhood’s influence spread in unexpected ways.
The victim William Morgan left behind an attractive widow, Lucinda. She eventually met a new husband, George Harris, with whom she traveled west as part of a dawning religious order: Mormonism. But Lucinda was fated to be more than an ordinary convert. Around 1836, the blond, blue-eyed ex–New Yorker, though since remarried, became one of many “spiritual wives” of the prophet himself, Joseph Smith. Smith had lived about fifty miles east