C†R

Here is an interesting exchange that I did not include in my book. From the Viking Scroll (BYU Idaho's student newspaper), 16 May 1963, p. 2.

_______________________


A Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor:

Your issue that came out the week before Easter shocked us. We want to know what right you had to put the symbol of the cross in the masthead of our newspaper. Don’t you know that we don’t worship the cross? Do you think we are Catholics? Why didn’t you use an Easter lily or even Easter rabbits? A group of about 25 of us have discussed this and we are really put out by it.

Signed,
Incensed Students

________


Editor’s Note: Since Dr. Jacob, our adviser, was the one who chose the symbol for the masthead, we turned this letter over to him for his answer.)
Dear Incensed:

Thank you for your letter. You are right; we do not worship the cross, but we do not worship the Easter lily or the Easter bunny either. And just because we used the symbol of the cross and the scriptures in the masthead does not mean that we worship them.

Also, just because the Catholics use the cross for a symbol and probably overdo it, this does not mean that we, who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ, cannot use on occasion that symbol that has had so much significance for Christians throughout the ages. Do you know that a good number of years before there was ever a Roman Catholic church, the cross had meaning for the early Christians? Even the custom of crossing our fingers may date back to the time when members of the Early-day Church made the sign of the cross behind their backs when they were facing death before the Romans.

Speaking of the Lord Jesus, Paul said this: “For it pleased the Father that in him should all fullness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be the things in earth, or things in heaven.” (Col. 1:19, 20.) To the Corinthians he wrote, “For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but to us which are saved it is the power of God.” (I Cor. 1:18). In his epistle to the Philippians he warned of this kind of people: “For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ: Whose end is destruction....”

So, Incensed, let us not be enemies of the cross, when the very “God of Israel and the God of the whole earth” was “slain for the sins of the world.” This is why we chose to use the symbol of the cross and the scriptures in the masthead of your paper. I hope this explanation will help your incense to burn itself out with a deeper realization of what Easter really means.

Sincerely,
C.H. Jacob
Adviser, Viking Scroll

_______________

Logo above comes from the "Mormons Who Glory in the Cross of Christ" facebook community.

Ezra Taft Benson, Anti-Catholicism, and Church/State Separation

Having recently given an example of how Ezra Taft Benson's politics influenced his church service, perhaps it would be fitting for me to now give an example of how the LDS Church influenced his political service. Benson served both church and state government simultaneously, as LDS Apostle and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.

The following entry is found in the David O. McKay Diaries, 1 October 1957:

"Note:
Telephone conversation with Ezra Taft Benson from Washington, D.C. regarding world tour to include Hawaii, Japan, the Far East, and Near East, and finally Rome, Italy where about November 11 to 15, he will be the representative of the government of the United States at an international meeting. He will be one of the scheduled speakers.

The American Ambassador has suggested to him that a meeting with the Pope be arranged.

Later, the Presidency decided that if he could avoid such a meeting without embarrassment, 'we would prefer that he do so.'

(see telephone conversation with Bro. Benson following)


Wednesday, October 2, 1957

Last evening, October, 1957, Elder Ezra Taft Benson called me by telephone at my home and asked whether or not he should accept a government appointment to go to Rome, Italy. The American Ambassador to Italy there would like to arrange a conference for him with the Pope. I told Brother Benson that I would talk with my counselors this morning and then let him know.

___________________

Telephone conversation with Elder Ezra Taft Benson, Wednesday, October 2, 1957.

(Brother Benson was contacted in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.)

President McKay: Can you hear me, Brother Benson?

Brother Benson: Yes. I am in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

President McKay: Regarding the matter we were discussing yesterday, we are all united in the feeling that if you can in honor, and without embarrassment, avoid that conference it would be well for you to do it.

Brother Benson: All right. I think I can.

President McKay: Was it the Ambassador?

Brother Benson: The American Ambassador to Italy.

President McKay: Yes. I see.

Brother Benson: He is the one who has proposed it. But I think I can avoid it, President McKay, because I am going to be in Rome for a very short time. I have to make an important address for a World Agricultural Congress, and I think the shortness of my stay can probably be used as a reason for not doing so.

President McKay: We have in mind particularly the effect upon our own people.

Brother Benson: Yes. That is the thing that concerned me too.

President McKay: And the dignity that you would have to give to such a conference.

Brother Benson: Yes, that is right.

President McKay: And really they have everything to gain and nothing to lose, and we have everything to lose and nothing to gain.

Brother Benson: I am in full harmony with that feeling.

President McKay: Well that is good. We are glad of that. We all feel that it would be pretty embarrassing to you, and we are helping you out of what might prove to be a conference that will reflect upon our Church.

Brother Benson: Well, I think it could be embarrassing both to me and to the Church.

President McKay: All right.

Brother Benson: I shall do my best, and I think I can work it out.

President McKay: The brethren all send their love to you.

Brother Benson: Thank you and my love to them, and thank you for calling.

President McKay: Thank you, and good-bye."

Brigham Young's Masonic Cipher

The following[1] entry is given in Brigham Young's diary, dated January 6th, 1842:

The characters Brigham Young used in his encrypted text are similar to this[2] Royal Arch cipher recorded in Oliver Huntington’s journal two years later, January 21, 1844:

Ciphers like this were published and circulated widely in anti-Masonic exposes in Joseph Smith and Brigham Young’s day. The possible relationship between Brigham Young’s cipher and Royal Arch freemasonry is of particular interest, as it provides additional evidence to confirm that the Saints indeed had access to secrets of Royal Arch freemasonry before Joseph Smith was formally initiated (on March 15, 1842), and before the Nauvoo endowment was introduced shortly thereafter (May 4, 1842).[3]

I mentioned Brigham Young’s encrypted journal entry online recently, identifying the cipher with Royal Arch freemasonry. But to my surprise, one LDS apologist (writing under an anonymous pseudonym and claiming to be Mason) denied that the cipher Young employed was even a Royal Arch cipher at all:

Folks, this is NOT the Royal Arch cipher--no matter who says it is. There are no closed triangles in the Royal Arch cipher used all over America and most of England (only one Chapter in England of which I am aware ever used closed triangles, and that was Friendship Chapter, R.A.M., in 1769, but even these differed from what is in the above scan of the journal), nor are there intersected characters such as like a ┴ symbol therein in the Royal Arch cipher. It may be based upon a Royal Arch cipher but it is more likely based upon a similar form of cipher upon which Royal Arch cipher is derived, having a common but divergent source. Even the Royal Arch cipher is said to be based upon a previously existing cipher scheme. [4]

I asked the apologist to substantiate his claim that the cipher was “more likely based upon a similar form of cipher upon which Royal Arch cipher is derived, having a common but divergent source.” He then quoted historian Arturo de Hoyos:

The Royal Arch cipher used in the United States is actually a variation of a Hebrew Qabalistic cipher known as aiq beker or "the Qabalah of Nine Chambers." {24}

*****

{fn. 24} Compare Francis Barrett, The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer (London: Lackington, Allen and Co., 1801), 2:65 (illus. fac. p. 66); E.A.W. Budge, Amulets and Superstitions (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp. 402-405; S.L. MacGregor Mathers, The Kabbalah Unvailed (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1926), p. 10. As an amusing side-note, I add that while writing the first version of this paper (1992) my then nine-year-old son presented me a message in the R.A. cipher which he hoped would confound me. When I asked him for the source he retrieved A Big Color Activity Book: Nintendo Super Mario Bros. (Racine, Wisconsin: Western Publishing Co., 1989), p. 42. So much for Masonic secrecy! [5]

As will later be seen, the apologist’s use of Arturo de Hoyos as an authority on the matter ended up biting him in the end.

He additionally posted an image of a source that Arturo de Hoyos had cited—a page found in Francis Barrett’s The Magus (1801):

He neglected to explain, however, exactly how Arturo de Hoyos’s commentary (which said nothing about Brigham Young, or his journal entry) confirmed that the cipher Young employed was “more likely based upon a similar form of cipher upon which Royal Arch cipher is derived, having a common but divergent source.” He remained convinced that the ┴ illustrated on Barrett’s page was beyond coincidence (although triangles were entirely missing in the illustration). “The ┴ character most certainly came from the Qabalistic cipher,” insisted the apologist.

Being intreagued by this apologetic, I decided to further research Brigham Young’s cipher. As luck would have it, Arturo de Hoyos was the first scholar to have translated Young’s journal entry. De Hoyos decoded the entry as follows:

I WAS TAKEN INTO THE LODGE

J SMITH W[eded]A[nd]S[ealed] AGNESS[6]

I spent about an hour, toying around with the entry and translation. My hypotheses being: 1) the inverted "T" figures were just that—inverted T's; 2) the triangles were actually the V-shaped characters (having the third line drawn to make them complete triangles). I then drew the template for the Royal Arch cipher key, and compared Arturo de Hoyos' translation to the characters in Brigham Young's journal entry, to see where they fell (plugging in my results, later filling in missing letters not found in the journal entry). My hoped for result: that the letters would appear on the grid in an alphabetical order, and therefore show (at least) a dependence on the Royal Arch cipher.

The results[7] of my experiment:

As one can see, the cipher characters for letters A-R are identical to the Royal Arch cipher transcribed by Oliver Huntington two years later

The S-Z portion of the key:

1) letter "T" was removed from the sequence and simply inverted
2) the V-shaped characters are completed as triangles
3) the triangles were reversed (pointing in opposite directions)

It is also notable that Brigham Young made a few careless errors while encrypting his journal entry: He correctly encrypted the "H" when writing "SMITH", but messed up when writing "THE". He correctly encrypted the "S" when writing "SMITH", "WAS", and "WAS" (a second time as an acronym for "WEDDED AND SEALED"), but then messed up when writing "AGNESS". He messed up both of the times that he encrypted "O"; when writing "INTO" and "LODGE".

The journal entry had five errors out of thirty-six characters—92.8% correct. This percentage is comparable to an encrypted text found on this[8] Royal Arch medal:

Five errors out of forty-one characters—only 91.8% correct. Adding or omitting dots in the characters, or reversing the their orientation, were very common errors to make. Brigham Young was of no exception.

One can see that this Royal Arch cipher key above is slightly different than the one Oliver Huntington recorded in his diary. As it turns out, several (if not countless) versions of the Royal Arch cipher exist—a fact that severely undermines the apologist’s argument, which assumed that Brigham Young’s cipher wasn’t a “Royal Arch” cipher at all, simply because it was different from the one he (the apologist) was most familiar with.

Although other forms of the Royal Arch cipher can be listed here, I will instead share an email[9] that I received from Arturo de Hoyos, the historian that the apologist relied upon to challenge my initial claim (posted with permission):

Mike,

Yes, I am the person who first decoded Brigham Young's January 6, 1842 journal entry. It was indeed written in a form of the Royal Arch cipher. However, there are many permutations of this substitution cipher. The letters may be placed in almost order in order to make it more secure. I believe that Brigham rearranged the letters for this very reason.

The Masonic exposures of the Morgan episode merely revealed the *simplest* and *most common* forms. You note that you have been unable to find a form with all the symbols used. Subsequent to decoding the diary entry I have seen manuscripts which employ all the symbols Brigham used. It is, in essence, quite unsophisticated.

I'm happy that you've enjoyed "Committed to the Flames." It was a fun project.

Regards,

Arturo de Hoyos, 33°, Grand Cross, KYCH
Grand Archivist and Grand Historian
Supreme Council, 33°, Southern Jurisdiction, U.S.A.

Oddly enough... even after I presented this information, the apologist continues to insist that he is right. Go figure.

___________________

[1] Image from http://www.masonicmoroni.com/Images3.htm

[2] Ibid.

[3] Royal Arch freemasonry contains important masonic parallels to the LDS temple endowment, and therefore appears to be a probable source from which Joseph Smith and Brigham Young (who, with the help of Wilford Woodruff and others, revised the endowment after Smith’s death) drew their inspiration.

[4] http://www.mormonapologetics.org/topic/45897-mormons-masons-temple/page__view__findpost__p__1208742878

[5] Arturo de Hoyos, "The Mistery of the Royal Arch Word," Heredom vol. 2 (1993), 11 and fn 24.

[6] Arturo De Hoyos decoded this entry on May 21, 1991; as cited in Tim Rathbone's article, Brigham Young's Masonic Connection and Nauvoo Plural Marriages, fn 32.

[7] Three images created by author.

[8] Everett R. Turnbull and Ray V. Denslow, A History of Royal Arch Masonry (1956) vol. 3, p. 1366-67.

[9] Arturo de Hoyos, email to author, 30 October 2009.