Forsberg, “Divine Rite of Kings: Land, Race, Same Sex, and Empire in Mormonism and the Esoteric Tradition” (reviewed by Julie J. Nichols)

Review
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Title: Divine Rite of Kings: Land, Race, Same Sex, and Empire in Mormonism and the Esoteric Tradition
Author: Clyde Forsberg
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Genre: Historical Interpretation
Year of Publication: 2016
Number of Pages: 284
Binding: hardcover
ISBN13: 978-1443885515
Price: $98.00

Reviewed by Julie J. Nichols for the Association for Mormon Letters

We live in a culture where freedom of speech is valued and protected. Critical thinking is practically a requirement in a democracy. I’ve seen books for sale at Barnes & Noble on how to lie, how to defraud, how to deceive—deadly serious books, with insidious implications. But they weren’t censored. They were right there on the sale table with bodice-rippers and little books of wise sayings, all jumbled together, let the buyer beware. But please, let the buyer *think.*

So this book has a right to exist—it belongs, perhaps, on a table with other books about the history and origins of Mormonism, alternative histories of religion, questionable interpretations of official stories.

My recommendation: if you get this one (and it isn’t cheap), please, beware; and please, please think.

It’s not that *Divine Rite of Kings* is not thoroughly researched (the bibliography is 21 pages long). It’s not even that its driving question is ill-conceived. The question of the origins of Mormon beliefs and practices is legitimate, its relation to Masonry and other esoteric and/or secret systems hard to ignore (in fact, irrefutable). So the question itself is valid.

But research is always a matter of selection and interpretation. Argument always carries with it the issue not only of facts but of attitude: not only “what does the reader need to know if I am to prove my point?” but also “what do I want my reader’s attitude toward my subject to be?”

One of the principal reasons the Republican candidate for the presidency was so hard for so many of us to take was not that he pointed out weaknesses, failures, and hypocrisies in the government of our country. It was (among other things) that he seemed to want us to devalue that government, to be disgusted and repulsed by it, so that its saving strengths and successes were stricken from the record and we were left with nothing but Trump’s scowling face, his insults, his strident and autocratic promises to “drain the swamp” and make everything “great again.”

In a similar way, Clyde Forsberg, in his latest volume, seems to want to carefully and thoroughly discredit everything about the work he feels gave rise to a poisonous religion. Source after source is brought forward to prove that Joseph Smith’s translating and temple efforts were influenced by and imitative of empire-building, racist Masonic or other esoteric literature and practice. According to Forsberg, Smith was fully conscious of and involved in the development and evolution of these texts and practices in early American history—all of them power-oriented, exclusionary, racist, sexist, death-mongering in their rituals, and above all, false. So (according to Forsberg) all that Joseph Smith produced must be rejected for the abhorrent influence it is.

A passage from the Acknowledgments section indicates Forsberg’s stance:

“Finally I want to thank my wife…and our two younger children….They have put up with the soul-destroying effects of living with an academic, wondering aloud on occasion why I put myself through this….I am not the best of fathers because, alas, I am too much the academician, off in my little world…it has been sufficient to watch [my children run and play] for me, taking comfort in the fact that my work and the life decisions it prompted may well have given them what I could never have—a carefree sense of the world and no desire or need to slay dragons, as it were. I cannot explain it to them…for they know nothing of Mormonism and the hold that a conservative religion can have on a person, or the debilitating effects of being raised from birth to think in terms of ‘Us’ and ‘Them,’ rather than what Martin Buber calls ‘I and Thou.’….It is, at bottom, how I live with myself and make whatever peace I can with my Mormon ‘Makers’” (xii).

Forsberg feels profoundly damaged by Mormonism, and therefore profoundly called to expose the dark origins of its “debilitating effects.”

His 51-page foreword is a pre-emptive strike against his critics, asserting that *Divine Rite* is not a work of Mormon history (“God forbid” (xv)) but a kind of anthropological/cultural genealogy. In one five-page paragraph he describes the horrors of his upbringing in Mormonism. He left the church in the 1980s, he tells us, and so writes from a unique insider-outsider point of view. The underpinnings of his overarching argument lie in his conviction that “[the] Mormon prophet can be seen as an oral-aural savant…who dictated the Book of Mormon in the form we have it, from memory, and in something like six weeks, but [as] a secret doctrine, oral tradition, and Masonic midrash. Does this fact alone not qualify rather than disqualify the Book of Mormon as a work of Masonic imagination?” (xliii)

(Of course, it’s not a “fact” he’s putting forward here—it’s a speculation—and it ignores so much about the Book of Mormon it hardly seems that he can be talking about the same volume we’ve been reading in adult Gospel Doctrine classes all year.)

His complex thesis comes a page later:

“In the early 1800s, Mormonism and Masonry were in their infancy, their texts unwritten, their rituals yet [to be] codified, their social, economic, and political platforms under construction….Not only did Masonry influence Mormonism, but, and more importantly, Mormonism blazed a fraternal trail of its own…. I am interested in the relationship between early Mormonism and Masonry in American culture and the ways in which Mormonism might be said to come out of Masonry. But in this work I am primarily interested in understanding how various radical appropriates of Masonry in American society since then, those normally thought to be ‘esoteric’ and part of the ‘occult,’ might also be said to come out of Mormonism, and/or represent a kind of hyphenated Mormonism…
… the darker side of Masonic invention [has given rise to] those groups with similar ‘clandestine’ connections to Freemasonry who do not have quite the same humanitarian and/or social-justice ring to them: the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; the Ordo Templi Orientis (New Templars) of Karl Kellner, Adolf Wilbrant, and the Thule Society, precursors of the Nazis and a possible influence upon the racial outlook of Adolf Hitler; the Moorish Temple of Noble Drew Ali (1886-1929), created by a North Carolinian named B. Timothy Drew with links to Prince Hall Masonry and the ‘Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles of the Mystic Shrine,” but decidedly racist and anti-Semitic; and, finally, Mormonism, its racist doctrines and practices as Masonic in origin and nature (Homer 2014)” (xlvii)…A complete picture, which I am attempting here, suggests that Masonry has played both a very positive and very negative role in American society” (xlviii).

Be prepared, if you buy and read this book, for an emphasis on the “very negative” role of Masonry—and Mormonism—in the development of American culture since the 1830s. Forsberg’s complicated agenda renders every chapter a mélange of juxtapositions, dire assertions, and conclusions which are by turns idiosyncratic, obscure, and troubling.

For example, in the Introduction (for we are still not in the text proper) he calls the Book of Abraham “the textual basis for a new Christian-Masonic religious hybrid and sociopolitical synthesis, another in a series of heaven-sent, Masonic-inspired ‘metanarratives’ after the failure to take Missouri from the ‘Gentiles’….One thing is certain—the Book of Abraham laid the foundation for the temple ritual or Endowment, a Mormon ‘Egyptian Rite’ akin to Egyptian Rite Masonry [which] panders to a virulent racism in which Africans represent an apostate priesthood that goes back to the Pharaohs, whereas Abraham is said to be the titular head of a secret caste of white Egyptians and proto-Christians (11)….In the ritualistic and emblematic sense, the kingdom of God stayed the course—until, that is, the ban against the ordination of African men was lifted in 1978. Sexual purity replaced racial purity as the locus of faith and a ritualized sense of national identity….Importantly, the gay and transgender community have taken the place of people of colour. The demonization of LGBTQ persons as ‘adopted sons oand daughters of Cain and Canaan’ is only the latest metamorphosis of the kingdom of God. The LDS devotion to Anglo-Saxon notions of racial purity and African inferiority has simply been replaced by equally narrow heterosexual notions of sexual superiority (purity) and LGBTQ inferiority (impurity). Whether this bodes well for a faith in search of meaning and legitimacy is difficult to say…” (13)

The first half of this passage uses jargon and invective to insinuate secret intentions regarding bloodlines in the bringing forth of the Book of Abraham; the second half makes connections between a 1978 revelation and a 2015 policy change (baleful, in my opinion) that are troubling at best, shocking at worst. Is my response due to my ignorance, my naivete? Or to my sense that there are whole aspects of this story that Forsberg is willfully separating himself from?

One more example from the Introduction: “The women’s auxiliary or Relief Society, which Joseph and Emma Smith established—although it was intended to silence women who were secretly being inducted into polygamy in growing numbers at the time—offered wives of ‘Master Mormons,’ so to speak, a Lodge they might call their own…” (11, see also 94).

Let me suggest that when the vocabulary of one system (Masonry, seen here as racist and empire-driven) is imposed upon another (a religion claiming to be of Jesus Christ), the meaning and intent of both may become confused. Inaccurately translated. Devastatingly muddled.

Chapter One of *Divine Rite of Kings,* first published as a paper in the *International Journal for the Study of New Religions* in 2011, seeks to describe an “’esoteric approach’ [to Mormonism, because such an approach] …is the basis for a more even methodological playing field and new interpretation of the American religion as equally magical (Masonic) and biblical (Evangelical)” (15). The chapter traces Joseph Smith’s fascination with “the coded word” (words that had to be translated) and segues into discussions of Masonic ritual in which bloodline and worthiness are enacted symbolically by the spilling of bodily fluids. The chapter concludes that “For Smith, the measure of Abraham’s manhood is…a matter of…spilling his royal seed upon the ground…by failing to practice polygamy vis-à-vis the recreation of a royal, priesthood lineage. Given the failure to realise the Book of Mormon’s dream of a promised land of red, white, and black on the edge of the Western Frontier (Jackson County, Missouri), the early Mormon metamorphosis from Templar to Shriner proved an excellent exit strategy and new ritual basis for the religion’s evolving monarchal, colonial, and racial self-understanding” (33).

Chapter Two, first published as an article in the *John Whitmer Historical Association Journal* in 2011, discusses the Masonic features in the Kirtland Temple. It includes multiple photographs showing the similarities between Masonic lodges and the Kirtland and Nauvoo temples. Forsberg says that “the architecture of the Kirtland Temple and its pagan and Masonic iconography, in particular, suggest a Mormon cult of fertility in the making….” (52). He concludes that “The original plan to transform Jackson County into a tricolour kingdom of red, white, and black (along Templar lines) never really got off the ground….Making his escape to Illinois, Smith embarked upon a very different Masonic-Christian path of moral geography and ritual space…an exit strategy in the main, which paled in comparison to a work of carpenter-philosopher-kings and the failed social experiment we call Kirtland” (62).

Cult of fertility? Templar aspirations? Hmmm.

Chapter Three discusses Joseph Smith’s study of Hebrew and his reorganization of Biblical material in the book of Abraham “to link the priesthood to a particular race and divinely-sanctioned genealogy” (69). Because Smith’s experiments couldn’t find a foothold, Forsberg claims, he kept moving into new territory—geographical, textual, and “spiritual”—so that “after the forced exodus to Illinois, the original dream of building the kingdom of God *on earth* and thus *of earth* made way for a new formulation—an invisible and unimpeachable kingdom of priests and priestesses, gods and goddesses, made behind closed doors, in secret ceremonies, and the bedchamber” (80).

And so on. “Mormon racial theorizing”; the development of the endowment as a guarantor of sexual purity; theocracy and Judaeo-Mormon governance aspirations; relationships between the organizations quoted in the Introduction above and including Rosicrucianism and Wicca; and a discussion of twentieth-century practices (“Mormon Utah sterilized the insane and menally challenged until recently” (185))—all are developed in chapters as support for Forsberg’s argument. Though most quotes are attributed, the source material is presented frequently without reference to ethos, to who the authors are or what their agendas were (though sometimes their identity as excommunicants and their denunciatory, disaffected purposes are alluded to).

I’m interested in the relationship between Masonry and Mormon practices. I’m interested in esoteric lore and beliefs, ancient and more recent, Eastern and Western. I have first-hand experience with the intersections of seen and unseen worlds. I know that these seemingly opposing realms actually influence each other for good and beauty as much as for selfishness and power.

However, *Divine Rite of Kings* focuses fiercely on the corruptive potential of secrets, initiation ceremonies, and emphasis on pure bloodlines. I tried to see through Forsberg’s lens, but (as with Trump) that lens felt so ignorant of the blessing part of the issue at hand (temple work, translated scripture), so determined to expose the dark underbelly of everything associated with Smith’s work, that I hardly recognized my temple, my congregation’s service and strivings—in short, my own connections to Spirit. I saw nothing of them in Forsberg’s scathing expose.

I am not the one to refute Forsberg point by scholarly point. Someone surely is. I do know that we are not so naïve as to search for truths about our place in a cosmos that both includes and transcends this world. The search for that relationship/place motivated Joseph Smith, as it motivates most religious (even esoteric) systems, including Masons, Templars, and Jews. Such a search can lead to much that’s good, even great. Forsberg shows only that it leads to obliteration of the Other, perhaps the worst kind of corruption. He may have got (some of) his facts right, but his attitude and agenda are hardly inspiring. John L. Brooke’s *Refiner’s Fire* is much less condemnatory without losing validity or credibility. It’s possible to accept Joseph Smith’s position in his time and milieu—to see his work as a function of developments in religious thought and practice in the young United States of his time—without rejecting its spiritual strength. This may be where Forsberg’s ferocity fails him. If all this is so fraudulent, whence cometh the Spirit? Forsberg seems determined not to know.