Masonry and the Mormon Temple Endowment Ceremony (excerpt)

By Sharon Lindbloom
18 February 2019 / http://www.mrm.org

Earlier this month The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints posted a new essay to the Church History Topics section of its website. In the church’s continuing effort to be more “transparent” about its past, the new essay, titled “Masonry,”¹ examines the relationship between the LDS temple endowment ceremony and Masonic ritual. . . .

The essay gives very little detail regarding the “similarities” between the LDS endowment ceremony and Masonic ritual, providing but one sentence in the introduction: “. . . Masons advance by degrees, using handgrips, key words, and special clothing,” and another near the conclusion: “Masonic rituals deliver stage-by-stage instruction using dramatization and symbolic gestures and clothing . . .” Endowed Latter-day Saints recognize that similar elements are included in their temple endowment ceremony, but they have no way of knowing how closely the original ceremony imitated (and continues to imitate) the Masonic ritual. For example, it’s not just that Masons use handgrips in their ritual; they appear to use virtually the same handgrips that Mormons are taught in the temple. BYU professor Charles Harrell notes,

Though different in certain respects, many similarities can be seen between this new temple endowment and Freemasonry. For example, the endowment incorporated the same five points of fellowship (since 1990 it has no longer been used in the Mormon endowment), the same kinds of gruesome penalties (also discontinued in 1990), and the same compass and square symbols. The Masonic ritual included a rehearsal of the “periods of creation” as initiates representing Adam progressed through stages according to their “sincere desire to make advances in knowledge and virtue.” Initiates for Freemasonry also wore ceremonial regalia (aprons, robes, etc.) with instructions that they were “never to be forgotten or laid aside.” BYU humanities professor George S. Tate notes that prayer circles were also conducted by “Freemasons of the period [who] arranged themselves in circular formation around an altar, repeating in unison the received Masonic signs.”²

Regarding Masonry, the church essay claims “stark differences in . . . content and intent,” yet the LDS temple endowment ceremony has much more in common with Masonic rituals – rituals that, according to the LDS church’s essay, “originated in early modern Europe” – than it does with anything that God ever prescribed for His biblical temple. There are such fundamental differences between the biblical temple and LDS temples that, whether conceding the endowment ceremony’s origination in Freemasonry or not, Mormon temples and the ceremonies performed therein are, in fact, unbiblical.

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