The Inca Priest on the Mormon Stage
A Native American melodrama and a new American religion
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV
III.
One point, however, remains mysterious. BrighamYoung—a dominating figure and the main promoter of the 1844 performance—did not play either the tragic Rolla or the victorious Alonzo. He played the Inca high priest. This character had few lines and no role in the plot, yet was considered one of the most important in the play. The leader of a theatrical troupe typically cast himself either as Rolla or as the high priest. What was it about this incidental character that attracted Brigham Young and his contemporaries?
Fig. 3. Certificate of Membership, Improved Order of Red Men. Ehrgott & Krebs, lith. (Cincinnati, 1873). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
One possible clue, unlikely as it seems: in 1842, two years before Pizarro reached Nauvoo, the leaders of the Mormon church became Masons. The ritual world of secret fraternal clubs may have had more to do with Pizarro’s success—and Brigham Young’s performance—than meets the eye.
Reading Pizarro’s stiff and bombastic lines today, I had some trouble understanding its popularity, and some contemporaries had the same reaction. Even the editor of one 1846 edition suggested that the play’s appeal lay less in its writing than in its "scenery, music, and processions." This aspect of pure, exotic spectacle was centered in the high priest’s procession, which formed an interlude in the play. It also connected the play to Masonic performance.
Men’s fraternal clubs, such as the Masons, Odd Fellows, and Knights of Pythias, were theaters of ritual, allegorical performance, as formal and complex as anything on the public stage. But the mode of performance was distinct from stage acting: it was slow, solemn, and gestural, much like the high priest’s interlude in Pizarro. Furthermore, fraternal rituals had a religiosity resembling that of the Incas in Pizarro. More deist than Christian, they often involved pagan and exotic figures. The prayer in Pizarro to the "pow’r Supreme" could have come from a Masonic initiation. Even the title "high priest" was Masonic.
There were even clubs that specialized in "Indian" performances. Their imagined Indians were much like the characters in Masonic dramas: ancient, departed, and deist. (Some groups sought more authenticity: Lewis Henry Morgan, the father of American anthropology, actually began studying Iroquois ethnography as material for his own club’s rituals.) One group, the Improved Order of Red Men, adopted a ritual that was strikingly similar to the high priest’s in Pizarro: during a new member’s initiation, a "prophet" stands before an extinguished council fire and calls, "Oh let thy sacred fire descend," and the fire is mystically lit from above. The Red Men, in fact, may have borrowed their ritual from the often-staged Pizarro.
Fig. 4. Frontispiece from Joachim Heinrich Campe, Pizarro; or, The Conquest of Peru, (New York, c. 1826-40). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Joseph Smith’s adoption of Masonry was no mere whim. He immersed himself in the study of Masonic ritual in order to reform what he considered a sacred but corrupted tradition. The new body of ritual he created for the Mormons included initiation rites for a new priesthood with mysterious signs and secret, allegorical dramas—the latter with roles such as Adam and Eve, Solomon, and Satan. Brigham Young was an important participant in this process of innovation. Elements of ritual theater, indeed, pervaded Mormon religion. As the Inca high priest in Pizarro, Young gave a ritual performance neither more nor less exotic and theatrical than in his day job as a Mormon high priest.
