Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [14]
As the Mormons wandered the nation in search of a safe home, Smith founded a Freemasonic lodge at his large community at Nauvoo, Illinois. According to his compatriots, Smith believed that the priestly rites of Freemasonry represented a degraded version of the lost rituals of Hebraic priests. Such rites, he reasoned, were a precious thread to the ancient tabernacle. And Smith determined he would take that thread and, weaving it through with divine revelations of his own, restore the ceremonies of the Hebrews.
In the early 1840s, he introduced into Mormonism the symbols of Masonry, such as the rising sun, the beehive, and the square and compass. Using adapted Freemasonic rites—which included ritually bathing neophytes, clothing them in temple garments, and giving them new spiritual names and instruction in secret handgrips and passwords—Smith conducted initiation ceremonies in a makeshift temple over his Nauvoo store. Smith also studied Hebrew and possibly elements of Kabala with a French–Jewish scholar and Mormon convert named Alexander Neibaur. It was a period of tremendous innovation within the nascent movement. But it reached a sudden end.
In 1844, Smith turned himself over to authorities at Carthage, Illinois, where he sat in a jail cell to await trial on charges arising from the destruction of an opposition newspaper at Nauvoo. Smith had directly sanctioned the burning and sacking of a critical news sheet. Though his act was indefensible, it served merely as an excuse for the state government to finally get its hands on the religious leader. Illinois’s frontier towns were increasingly fearful and suspicious of the Mormon newcomers, who maintained their own militia and formed a political power bloc in the state. While the prophet and his closest colleagues waited in the second floor of the two-story jailhouse in Carthage, they found themselves without the protection that the state’s governor had promised. The days turned tense as armed bands circled the area. During the early evening of June 27, a mob—including state militiamen with soot-disguised faces, who were supposed to be protecting Smith—stormed the jail.
Before diving from a window in a vain attempt at escape, Smith was reported by witnesses to issue the Masonic distress signal, lifting his arms in the symbol of the square and beginning to shout out, “Oh, Lord my God, is there no help for the widow’s son!” Musket balls tore through his falling body. On his corpse, descendants claimed, appeared his old protective amulet marked with the astrological symbol of Jupiter, now just a cold piece of silver. At thirty-eight, the most famous son of the Burned-Over District was dead—a man driven by the strange alliances and esoteric philosophies that seemed to grow from the very soil of his upstate New York home.
Paradise Found
The people of the Burned-Over District believed in the redemptive power of ideas—whether political or spiritual. Rare was the person with a foothold in a mystical sect who didn’t also have one in a social sect, and vice versa. For many, the two worlds naturally blended.
The area hosted some of the New World’s earliest utopian religious communities, including the nation’s most long-lived and economically successful commune at Oneida. From about 1848 to 1880, under the leadership of John Humphrey Noyes, the Oneidans thrived in the manufacture of animal traps, cutlery, and other high-quality goods, while experimenting with sexual liberation, biblical communism, and attempts at human “perfectionism.” By the mid-nineteenth century, the Burned-Over District housed about twenty villages or active societies based on agrarian socialist ideas. Most were short-lived.
A dizzying range of reformist, civic, and spiritual movements shared members and melted