Nauvoo, St George, and the Freemasonry Question

The endowment has a documented history and the church has published a good deal of it. Joseph Smith first administered it on 4 May 1842 in the upper room of his red brick store at Nauvoo, to a group of nine men, before any temple existed. Women began to receive it in 1843. It was administered on a large scale in the Nauvoo Temple through the winter of 1845 to 1846, while the city was being abandoned, in what amounted to a race against the eviction of the whole community. In Utah it was performed first in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City and then in temples as they were completed. Brigham Young directed that the ceremony be committed to writing, and the text was set in order at St George in 1877.

It has been revised since, and the revisions have been reported publicly at the time: notably in 1990, in 2005, and in 2019, the last of these altering wording relating to women. That an ordinance held sacred is also revisable is a direct consequence of the doctrine of continuing revelation, and Latter-day Saints generally describe the changes in those terms.

The hardest historical question is Freemasonry. Joseph Smith was initiated into a Masonic lodge at Nauvoo in March 1842, seven weeks before he first administered the endowment, and the two share vocabulary, structure and a number of specific elements. The church acknowledges the similarity and holds that the content is restored rather than borrowed, with Masonry preserving a corrupted remnant of something older. Most historians outside the movement read the relationship as a much more direct one. Both readings are held seriously and the atlas records the disagreement rather than resolving it.