The #Givethanks Anti-Polygamy Posts

Day 7

⌛️The History of Polygamy is intertwined with Joseph’s appropriation of Masonry, so let’s talk about Freemasonry, for a second. ⏳

💥TW: Sarcasm, uncomfortable history, LDS Temple talk

🌅In the early parts of Joseph’s life, his father and brother Hyrum were both inducted as freemasons, but the temperature of the country overall towards freemasonry was negative. The social interest in freemasonry heated up with Andrew Jackson’s presidency, in particular, and inspired a lot of suspicion and fear towards masonry and other secret societies. It was seen as elitist, dangerous, and corrupt. Additionally, a famous mason named William Morgan was murdered at this time, presumably for publishing the masonic signs and tokens in a book called, “Illustrations of Masonry.”

(William Morgan’s wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morgan_(anti-Mason)  )

✍️Thus, as Joseph was writing the Books of 3rd, 4th Nephi, Ether, Mormon and Moroni, he seems to have been channelling much of that zeitgeist in his descriptions of bands of robbers and secret societies that had infiltrated the government.

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🤓Extra Credit history: the widow of William Morgan was Lucinda Morgan. She remarried George Harris. (Sound familiar?) They both became Mormons and moved to Missouri where they hosted Joseph and pregnant Emma while Joseph was fleeing the law in Kirtland for fraud in his “anti-banking society.” Lucinda became a “mistress” (her words) to Joseph some time in this period and it seems probable that her previous involvement with masonry through William Morgan may have piqued Joseph’s interest towards creating a theological secret society as part of the church because the first draft of a violent secret society shows up in the form of the Dante’s at the end of the Missouri period. Several other male Church leaders were also masons, already , though, so Joseph may have been gleaning interest from many sources. 🤓

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🏘By the time the Saints were in Nauvoo (1840-on), the social attitude towards Masonry had relaxed a lot. New lodges were popping up all over, including in downtown Nauvoo. The effort to jumpstart masonry in Nauvoo was significantly influenced by John C. Bennett who had come to town and ingratiated himself so completely to Joseph that he became Nauvoo’s Mayor, General of the Nauvoo Legion, Chancellor of the Nauvoo University, AND a “Counselor in the First “Assistant to the President.” Does that need translating? It means he was civically and theocratically Joseph’s right-hand man.

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🤓Extra Credit History: By the time John C. Bennett arrived in Nauvoo in September 1840, he was already known to have a dubious medical degrees and to have abandoned a wife and three children. Medicine was not a super reliable degrees in the 19th century, but Bennett took things to the next level. He created the first medical diploma mill. According to LDS historian Susan Easton Black, “By the 1830s, he held a professorship in midwifery, diseases of women and children and medical jurisprudence at Willoughby University in Ohio. At the time, he was accused or selling medical degrees, peddling diplomas, “to every ignoramus who could raise ten dollars to buy one.” 

In Nauvoo, Bennett’s skills seem to have been put to use to convince “plural wives” to take abortion treatments.

If you’re interested in learning more about this period of the history, buckle up. It’s wild. Read a lot both from within and outside Nauvoo. 🤓

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Okay, back to Masonry:

🎯A nonmember mason named Abraham Jonas was so taken with Joseph, that he bestowed upon him the rare honor of being made a “Mason on sight” in March 1842. This meant that Joseph immediately became a Master Mason without the typical years of practice and ascendance through the three degrees(<–remember that for later) of Masonry.

💭March, 1842–remember that, too.

Remember that in July, 1842, “the Revelation” was written down.💭

With Joseph the Prophet as a freemason, many of the elders of Nauvoo were suddenly super interested in becoming Freemasons, too, and there quickly emerged a thriving practice of Masonry among the Saints in Nauvoo.

A few months after his meteoric rise in Masonry and while more men were jumping on the bandwagon, Joseph arranged for some ✨select few✨ Elders to be initiated through his latest super-original👀 revelation: the temple endowment! Which happened to look just like masonry, use all of the same signs, tokens, grips, penalties, and format except that instead of learning justice, fortitude, tolerance, and prudence with Hiram Abiff, Joseph’s “TRUE Masonry” taught the initiates to obey God (as dictated through Joseph), Sacrifice their money, their stuff, their skills and their life  to the Church (again, repped by Joseph), and, maybe most importantly to Joseph’s view of eternity.

It taught that women are eternally subordinate to men because they are foolish and gullible and can’t be trusted with important decisions, so they should stick to what they are good at–being sex objects for men and having infinite pregnancies so that they could be forgotten on infinite worlds populated by their infinite babies and so that their husbands could be praised by said children forever.

And ever.

And…ever.

Amen. And a…men.

Hm.

Now, let’s go back to those three degrees.

If you are familiar with LDS temples, you’ll know that the whole format of the temple funnels initiates through three symbolic degrees of glory. These are supposed to represent tiers of LDS heaven, with the highest being represented by the prettiest room in the temple.

The design for temples after 1842 differs markedly from the design of the Kirtland temple. The Kirtland temple was basically a fancy meetinghouse. ⛪️ In modern church parlance, it was a chapel with some pretentious add ons, like chairs for the exclusively-male leaders at the front and curtains to separate them from the view of the peasant-members. The design of the temples after 1842 shifts to reflect the Masonic three degrees of progression, with initiates moving from room to room for each “degree.”

In modern times, the ceremony has been updated and changed a bunch of times in fundamental ways. It’s more  shorter, less bloody, and more socially palatable now, and you can even find some traces of feminism emerging. Temple changes is its own topic, but key for the understanding of D&C 132 and Mormon polygamy is this: the temple ceremonies were the bait Joseph used to lure people in to the practice of polygamy and mechanism by which he secured their silence and cooperation.

Here’s how went down:

🧁Joseph selected a target.

🧁He began grooming the target by paying attention to her in some way.

🧁When the time was right (meaning: while Emma wasn’t looking), he isolated the target by taking them on a walk, to his office, or occasionally, by locking them in a room with the blinds drawn and several other Priesthood leaders present.

🧁Many of his targets were orphans, but when there was a male guardian to deal with, Joseph would employ almost all the same tactics on him (although, to my knowledge, none of the male guardians were ever locked into a room).

🧁Once isolated, Joseph would probe for a declaration that the target  verily believed he was the Prophet and spokesman for God.

🧁Once a declaration was obtained, he would present in (usually) hushed and solemn tones that 👉the target👈had been chosen by God to participate in the latest, freshest, most bestest revelation: plural marriage. Lucky her!!

🧁Then, as the target wrestled her gag reflex, Joseph went on insisting that this was the will of God, the mind of God, the ultimate destiny of mankind, and that if the target complied, they and their whole family would 100% be saved forever in the ultimate-best level of Mormon heaven, even if some of their loved ones fell away.

🗡🧁🗡If the target was still resistant, Joseph would pull his trump card: “An angel with a drawn sword appeared to me three times and said he would slay me, if I refused the Practice!!…you wouldn’t want to be responsible for my being slain, would you??”

🧁Eventually, almost all the targets complied. (Nancy Rigdon, from previous post being one of the exceptions.)

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🤓Extra Credit History: as time went on, Joseph acquired some strategic marriages to older woman as well, like Patty Sessions, a Nauvoo Midwife, or Elizabeth Curare, a talkative and observant neighbor. These older women tend to form the backbone of the LDS apologetic that “Joseph’s polygamy wasn’t alllllll about sex, because he didn’t have with allll of his plural wives!” 

This apologetic ignores that Joseph’s objective wasn’t always sex. Sometimes, it was secrecy. But in he found another use for the women he didn’t want to shack up with too: visiting teaching. (No, not the kind that makes casseroles.) Joseph designated these women “Mothers in Zion” and they were sent to prime the targeted young women for accepting polygamy. They were to reassure the teenage sweethearts that they were joining an elite club of the super-spiritual, super-chosen, super-duper-favorites of God. 

Joseph would compliment them handsomely for their loyalty, like any good MLM boss would. 

But anyway, yuck.🤓

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🧁Once a target had agreed to the terms (i.e. Joseph is always right and God wants you to do what he says), they were allowed to have their Endowment. This ceremony further ensured the target’s absolute loyalty, as they did Cosplay the of naked Adam and Eve and felt their dependence on Elohim (aka God, repped by Joseph) for redemption. Then, Joseph would give them the signs and tokens, commit them to secrecy (under threat of violent death and condemnation by God), and condition their reception of Eternal salvation and connection to their families in the afterlife on their loyalty to the covenants they had made in that ceremony and, thus, their loyalty to Joseph.

🧁🧁🧁Afterwards, the target then got to be “sealed” to Joseph or Brigham or Heber or whoever was their special 25-years-older-than-them polygamist husband.

Happy wedding day.

Oh, and we didn’t even talk about Garments, but here’s a fun piece of trivia: garments were designed exclusively for male bodies until the 1930s. In the intervening century, when women requested a design that better fit them, they were told the design given through Joseph (who ordered Eliza Snow to make it, because he wasn’t a sew-er) was divine and unalterable.

Yup.

Yuuuup.

So, how do we round this out? Let’s bring it back to the modern day.

#givethanks  that my husband did not propose to me by locking me in a dark room and telling me my eternal salvation depended on my acceptance! (Although there were still plenty of stories circulating at BYU during my time of men who “proposed” by telling their girlfriends that they had had revelation that said girlfriend had to marry them.)

#givethanks that I did not have to mime my own death (at least, I didn’t knowingly…) to go through the temple, but I did have to swear allegiance to a Church who completely deceived me about its origins.

#givethanks that I didn’t have to wear a man’s long johns to get married, but I was married in garments and wore them constantly for a decade and I was married under the same kind of suffocating veil that has been used since 1842 to remind women that their ultimate destiny is to be forgotten spawn-machines.

#givethanks that I had no idea that I was participating in the same rituals that were used to silence four whole generations of women (and men) about the traumas of “the Practice”–but wait, is that a good thing?

😐

Alright, as our closing song, let’s sing “I love to see the temple!”

What, too soon?

Yeah, too soon.

😔