The Temple and Masonry
Joseph Smith became a Mason weeks before he introduced the endowment, and a few ritual forms look familiar. The resemblance is real — but it is a resemblance of form, not of substance, and the roots run centuries deeper than Masonry itself.
The Question Stated Fairly
The facts are not in dispute. Joseph Smith was initiated as a Freemason in the Nauvoo Lodge in March 1842. Some seven weeks later, in May 1842, he introduced the temple endowment to a small group of followers. Observers then and since have noticed that certain elements — specific signs, tokens, grip-like gestures, and the general form of a ritual drama with covenants — carry a family resemblance to Masonic ceremony. The critic’s charge is blunt: Joseph copied the Masons and dressed it up as revelation.
A fair answer does not deny the resemblance. It explains what the resemblance is — and, just as importantly, what it is not.
Familiar Forms, Restored Meaning
God has always spoken to His children in forms they already understand. He gave Israel a tabernacle patterned on the sacred architecture of the ancient Near East, sacrifices resembling those of surrounding peoples, and a covenant structured like the treaty forms of the day — and filled each borrowed form with revealed meaning that transformed it. Revelation rarely arrives in a vocabulary no one has ever seen; it takes a recognizable vessel and pours new substance into it.
Early Latter-day Saint leaders understood the Masonry connection in exactly this light. They held that Masonry preserved fragments — scattered, corrupted, and stripped of authority — of a far older sacred tradition reaching back to the temple of Solomon and beyond. On that view Joseph did not borrow from Masonry so much as recognize in it the broken remains of something ancient, and then receive by revelation the complete, authoritative form the fragments had descended from. The familiar scaffolding helped the first Latter-day Saints, many of them Masons, step into a restored ordinance without stumbling over an entirely foreign ritual language.
Either way — whether one sees genuine ancient descent or simply a wise use of familiar forms — the presence of recognizable elements is not evidence of fraud. It is how sacred instruction has always been delivered to real people in a real time and place.
The Substance Is Entirely Different
This is the point critics almost always skip. Whatever the two ceremonies share in outward form, they share almost nothing in meaning — and meaning is what an ordinance is.
Freemasonry is a fraternal society. Its ceremonies teach moral lessons through the symbols of stonemasonry, promote brotherhood and charity, and make no claim to priesthood authority, no claim to bind heaven, and no claim to save. It offers no covenants with God, no plan of salvation, no ordinance for the dead, no sealing of families, and no path to exaltation. A man leaves a lodge morally instructed; he does not leave it having entered into covenants that God recognizes.
The endowment is the opposite in every dimension that matters. Its subject is the creation, the Fall, and the plan of redemption. Its content is a series of covenants made with God — obedience, sacrifice, chastity, consecration. Its authority is the priesthood restored under apostolic keys. Its purpose is to clothe the disciple with power, bind families across the veil of death, and prepare the sons and daughters of God to return to Him. Two ceremonies can share a gesture and be worlds apart in what the gesture means. A handshake is not a theology.
The Roots Are Ancient, Not Eighteenth-Century
The deepest problem with the copycat theory is chronology. Organized speculative Freemasonry dates only to 1717, when the first Grand Lodge was formed in London. Yet the ritual elements the endowment shares with it — sacred washing and anointing, special clothing, a new name, ritual gestures, a covenant of secrecy, and passage through a veil into the divine presence — are attested in temple and initiation traditions thousands of years older than any lodge.
Ancient Israel’s priests were washed, anointed, and clothed before entering the sanctuary, which was screened by a veil. Ancient Near Eastern and early Christian sources describe ritual initiation, sacred names, new garments, and guarded ordinances. These parallels are far too old and far too widespread to have come from an eighteenth-century English fraternity. If anything, they suggest that both the temple and the fragments preserved in Masonry are downstream of a single ancient headwater — which is precisely what early Latter-day Saints claimed.
It is worth noting that Masonry itself claims descent from the builders of Solomon’s temple; its central legend is set there. A shared temple ancestry is not an embarrassment to the Latter-day Saint position — it is the Latter-day Saint position, told from the other side.
The New Name — Sacred, Not Secret
One specific element draws its own suspicion: the new name given in the temple, which the recipient covenants not to disclose. Critics treat this as proof of something sinister. Scripture treats it as one of the oldest and holiest patterns God uses with His covenant people.
When God brings a person into a deeper covenant, He gives a new name. Abram became Abraham (Genesis 17:5). Jacob became Israel after wrestling through the night and seeing God face to face (Genesis 32:28). Simon became Cephas, Peter (John 1:42). Isaiah promised that the redeemed would “be called by a new name, which the mouth of the Lord shall name” (Isaiah 62:2).
“To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”
This is the temple pattern stated in the New Testament: a new name, written on a white stone, known only to the one who receives it. The privacy is not the mark of a conspiracy — it is built into the promise itself. The Lord also promised to write upon the faithful His own new name (Revelation 3:12).
Latter-day Saints draw a careful distinction: the temple is not secret, it is sacred. Its purposes are published in scripture and taught openly; what is held back is a small set of sacred tokens and names that are guarded precisely because they are holy. This too is a scriptural principle — “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6). Reverent reticence about holy things is obedience, not concealment.
The Verdict
The Masonry objection notices a true thing — a resemblance in ritual form — and then draws a false conclusion from it. Shared form is not shared substance. God delivers revealed ordinances in familiar vessels; the elements the endowment shares with Masonry are older than Masonry by millennia and trace back to the ancient temple both traditions look to; and the meaning, authority, covenants, and saving purpose of the endowment have no counterpart in a fraternal lodge.
As for the sacred name and the covenant to guard it, that is not the fingerprint of a fraud but the pattern of scripture — the new name promised to Abraham, to Jacob, to Peter, and to everyone who overcomes. The temple did not borrow its soul from a lodge. It restored what the lodge, at its best, only dimly remembered.