THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TEMPLE* * * * * * * *
A
temple, good or bad, is a scale-model of the universe. [I believe] the first
mention of the word templum is by Varro, for whom it designates a
building specially designed for interpreting signs in the heavens—a sort
of observatory where one gets one's bearings on the universe.
"What Is a Temple?" CWHN 4:357-58* * * * * * * *
The contemplation of the unbroken continuity of life "from
eternity to eternity" is the very purpose and function of the temple.
Message of Joseph Smith Papyri, 7* * * * * * * *
Ancient writers assure us repeatedly that the temple is the
earthly type of Zion, a holy place removed from contact with the outer world,
set apart for ordinances from which the world is excluded. While it is in the
world, the temple presents a forbidding front of high gates, formidable walls,
narrow doors, and frowning battlements, dramatizing the total withdrawal of
Zion from the world and its defensive position over against it. Zion itself, of
course, is absolutely impregnable and unassailable since the world has no
access to it. Should the world get too close, Zion withdraws.
"What Is Zion?" CWHN 9:27-28* * * * * * * *
We know now that there are three worlds: the telestial, in
which we live; the celestial, to which we aspire; and in between them another
world, called the terrestrial. It is of neither the celestial nor the
telestial. According to the
ancients, this world is represented by the temple, the in-between world where
the rites of passage take place.
"The Meaning of the Temple," CWHN
12:27-28* * * * * * * *
If the temple represents the principle of order in chaos, it
also represents the foothold, you might say, of righteousness in a wicked
world. Someone once asked me concerning the Egyptian ordinances contained in
the Joseph Smith manuscript, "Is this stuff relevant to the modern world?"
My answer was, "No. It is relevant to the eternities." The modern
world is as unstable as a changing isotope, but the temple has always been the
same. The ordinances are those taught by an angel to Adam.
"The Meaning of the Temple," CWHN
12:34* * * * * * * *
Whether in Kirtland, Far West, Nauvoo, or the valleys of the
West, the [Saints'] hearts have been set on activities and observances that, in
terms of modern-day progress and success, make no sense at all. The whole
temple economy is grotesquely out of place in the present world; there is
nothing the least bit practical about it. It is a school to wean us away from
the things of the world.
Abraham in Egypt, 250* * * * * * * *
It is the actual work done within the temple that most perfectly
exemplifies the temple idea. For here, all time and space come together; the
barriers vanish between this world and the next; between past, present, and
future. What is bound here is bound beyond, and only here can the gates be
opened to release the dead who are awaiting the saving ordinances. . . . Here
the records of the race are assembled as far back in time as they go for a work
performed by the present generation to assure that they and their kindred dead
shall spend the eternities together in the future. All time becomes one and the
worlds join hands in this work of love, which is no mere mechanical
bookkeeping.
"What Is a Temple?" CWHN 4:368
TEMPLE ORDINANCES* * * * * * * *
The
LDS endowment was not built up of elements brought together by chance, custom,
or long research. It is a single, perfectly consistent organic whole, conveying
its message without the aid of rationalizing, spiritualizing, allegorizing, or
moralizing interpretations.
Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, xii* * * * * * * *
The Mormon endowment, like the Egyptian, is frankly a model,
a presentation in figurative terms. As such it is flexible and adjustable; for
example, it may be presented in more languages than one and in more than one
medium of communication. But since it does not attempt to be a picture of
reality, but only a model or analog to show how things work, setting forth the
pattern of man's life on earth with its fundamental whys and wherefores, it
does not need to be changed or adapted greatly through the years; it is a
remarkably stable model, which makes its comparison with other forms and
traditions, including the more ancient ones, quite valid and instructive.
Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, xiii* * * * * * * *
The ordinances are mere forms. They do not exalt us; they
merely prepare us to be ready in case we ever become eligible.
"The Meaning of the Temple," CWHN
12:26* * * * * * * *
Ordinances are more than just symbols—they go beyond
that. They can be as simple as a drawing of something that actually is. They
always have a double nature: they are or mean something that is real.
You
see that as soon as you try, in music and art, to give religious experience a
third dimension. The gospel actually has that third dimension, of course. But the
whole purpose of music and art, and literature too, is to produce the
illusion of a third dimension, to produce the illusion that there
is depth in the picture. That's what art does. [When ancient painters
discovered perspective, people were scandalized—it was a form of
deception.] On a two-dimensional canvas you can produce a third dimension. It's
like looking up into the heights of St. Peter's: you can see the angels
floating on the clouds, and you get the illusion of ascending up to heaven.
But
that's the point: it's all an illusion, a trick of art, you see; and it will
always backfire if you try to do that with the gospel, which is the real thing.
That's why I think we're wasting our time, mostly, to try heightening religious
experience by using such devices in the Church. Once you know the real thing,
everything else is an anticlimax. The ward choir can never achieve the same
effects as a choir of angels, and yet these things go together.
I
was truly amazed when I went to the Kirtland Temple. Look at the work that went
into it! It looks like nothing much on the outside but not so on the inside:
the workmanship, the design, the way the whole thing is conceived, the scope of
it all, the size, the proportions—simply astounding! There is something
legitimate there. I can see that the Lord, and not just an angel, has deigned
to appear there, knowing how the poor people have worked their heads off for
these very same things. And it is really so. They are actually working in a
third dimension there. It's more than just dream and illusion. It's totally
unlike these ugly gothic, neogothic churches all over the place, these massive
pretentious buildings. But of course, they are not genuine. They are imitation
gothic. They try to take you back to the Age of Faith, to the Middle Ages.
"Conversation with Hugh Nibley," 22* * * * * * * *
Temple ordinances . . . put you into an eternal . . . order
of things, which the world will not understand. And if you try to make them
vulgarized down here and treat them as if they belong to this
universe of discourse, then you spoil them.
"The Faith of an Observer," 27* * * * * * * *
So universally is religious ritual today burdened with the
defects of oddness, incongruity, quaintness, . . . mere traditionalism, obvious
faking and filling in, contrived and artificial explanations including myths
and allegories, frankly sensual appeal, and general haziness and confusion,
that those regrettable traits have come to be regarded as the very essence of
ritual itself.
In
contrast we find the Latter-day Saint rites, though full, elaborate, and
detailed, to be always perfectly lucid and meaningful, forming an organic whole
that contains nothing incongruous, redundant, or mystifying, nothing purely
ornamental, arbitrary, abstruse, or merely picturesque.
"What Is a Temple?" CWHN 4:369* * * * * * * *
No rites offer a richer variety of profound associations
than those dealing with water. For water is not only a symbol of cleansing, cooling, refreshing, and
reviving: it actually does all those things, at one and the same
time, along with which it is par excellence the medium of passage. Halfway
between solid matter and tenuous spirit, it enables bodies to move from one
place to another in a state of effortless motion and silent suspension, visibly
hovering between the solid earth below and the empty sky above.
Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 94* * * * * * * *
Sleep, like water, is one of those things in which reality
and symbol meet and fuse. It is both the rest of the body and the freeing of
the spirit.
Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 147* * * * * * * *
The garment represents the preexistent glory of the
candidate. When he leaves on his earthly mission, it is laid up for him in
heaven to await his return. It thus serves as security and lends urgency and
weight to the need for following righteous ways on earth. For if one fails
here, one loses not only one's glorious future in the eternities to come, but
also the whole accumulation of past deeds and accomplishments in the long ages
of preexistence.
Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 268* * * * * * * *
One of the most puzzling episodes in the Bible has always
been the story of Jacob's wrestling with the Lord. When one considers that the
word conventionally translated by "wrestled" (yeaveq) can just as well mean "embrace,"
and that it was in this ritual embrace that Jacob received a new name and the
bestowal of priestly and kingly power at sunrise, the parallel to the Egyptian
coronation embrace becomes at once apparent.
Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 243* * * * * * * *
All the arts and sciences began at the temple. Dance, music,
architecture, sculpture, drama, and so forth—they all go back to the
temple. One thing that has impressed me is that the early Christian art and
early Jewish art is almost uniformly bad; it's terrible. It's so bad in a world
of great artistic heritage that it must have been deliberate. They knew that
all one could hope for was to indicate the indescribable in symbolic ways. Don't
try to give us heaven by secular means. That's what they tried to do in the
Baroque. They poured it on, and no matter how magnificent it was, it always
fell flat.
Letters to Smoother, etc., 104* * * * * * * *
In Wulf Barsch's paintings there is a sense of deep concern,
an ominous and brooding feeling of admonition and warning. This I find
disquieting until I remember that that is exactly the effect the reading of the
scriptures has on me. The pictures do not tell a story—there is nothing
trivial, contrived, clever, or cute about them; they seem more like a solemn
summing-up, with something of both suspense and finality about them. For Plato
true art must have spoudaiotes, usually
rendered "high seriousness." Its opposite is blasphemy; which does
not mean thundering denunciation, solemn deprecation, or consuming wrath, but
the very opposite—it means not taking holy things seriously, being too
stupid or insensitive (blax means both) to value anything beyond
the business of business.
Was
there ever an artist less inclined to show off than Wulf Barsch? He does not
hesitate to try again and again to get through to us, not seeking novelty, but
fighting for expression and perfectly willing to stay with a problem. It is
that, I suppose, that gives his work the sense of deep sincerity that demands
to be taken seriously. Strangely enough, with all his moving solemnity, I find
some of his things intensely romantic. The constant dialogue of the poplar and
the palm is right out of the most ancient traditions of romantic poetry,
whether Barsch is aware of it or not, with echoes from the Patriarchal romances
of Genesis. The poplar is the tree of the pioneers, marking their farms on all
the benches and valleys from the red sands of Moencopi to the plains of
Alberta. It is becoming rare as business supplants the noble windbreaks with
billboards. And the palm evokes the wandering tribes of Israel (the palms of
California are never convincing), for it is their hope and succor in the
desert.
"From the Earth Upon Which Thou Standest," CWHN 12:552-54
THE TEMPLE IN ANTIQUITY* * * * * * * *
Ancient
civilization was "hierocentric"—centered around the temple. The
everyday activities of farming, trade, and war were all ritually bound to the
cycle of the year and the cosmos. The great periodic rites were of a dramatic
nature, but they were nonetheless real. A coronation is the purest ceremony;
yet for all that, it is still real recorded history. A war or migration, though
only too real to its victims, would be carried out with strict ritual
propriety, according to the religious rules of the game. It is hard for us to
understand this ritualizing of history, but once it was a very real thing, and
one can still find it miraculously surviving among the Hopi.
So
when the ancient myths from all over the world show us the same situations and
the same adventures and monsters recurring again and again, we may look upon
this endless repetition not as discrediting the historicity of those events and
situations but as confirming it. These myths tell about such things happening
because that was the type of thing that did happen, and the ritual nature of
the event guaranteed that it should happen not once but over and over again.
"Myths and the Scriptures," CWHN 1:43-44* * * * * * * *
The hierocentric concept that all good things have been
conveyed to mankind from above through the divinely appointed operations of
holy shrines and persons is immensely appealing even in the abstract. But
transcending all theory is the fact, obvious enough to the ancients if not to
us, that all the basic institutions of civilization—political, economic,
artistic, literary, . . . and scientific—did take their rise at the temple.
"Sophic and Mantic," CWHN 10:319-20* * * * * * * *
Men seem unable to leave the dream of a hierocentric state
alone. . . . We cannot blame people if they yearn for (1) the grandeur, color,
and unity of the great assembly, (2) the lofty and uncompromising certainty of
universal kingship, (3) the sense of refuge and well-being in the holy shrine,
(4) the high and independent life of a chivalrous aristocracy, (5) the sheer
authority of the institutions established and maintained by force. These are
the strengths of the hierocentric state. Its weakness is that it doesn't exist.
"Hierocentric State," CWHN 10:133-34* * * * * * * *
The archives were known in Egypt as the House of Life,
housing the writings upon which the life of all things ultimately depended. It
was a powerhouse humming with vital electricity, transmitting cosmic forces
from heaven to earth, a place of deadly peril to any mortal not holding the
necessary priestly credentials.
"Genesis of the Written Word," CWHN
12:469* * * * * * * *
The House of Life where the books were copied and studied
had from the earliest times the aspect of a university, a super graduate
school. There it was that all questions relating to learned matters were
settled. The place was always part of the temple, and the books contain the
earliest poetry, for poiema means "creation"
and the business of the Muses at the temple was to sing the creation song with
morning stars.
Naturally
the hymn was sung to music, and some scholars would derive the
first writing from musical notation. It was performed in a sacred circle or
chorus, so that poetry, music, and the dance go out
to the world from the temple, called by the Greeks the Museon, or shrine of the
Muses.
The
creation hymn was part of the great dramatic presentation that took place
yearly at the temple, dealing with the fall and redemption of man, represented
by various forms of combat, making the place the scene of the ritual
athletic contests sanctified throughout the world. The victor in
the contest was the father of the race, the priest-king himself, whose
triumphant procession, coronation, and marriage took place on the occasion,
making this the seat and source of government (the king was always
crowned in the temple rather than the palace).
Since
the entire race was expected to be present for the event, a busy exchange of
goods from various distant regions took place, the booths of pilgrims serving
as the market booths for great fairs, while the necessity of converting various
and bizarre forms of wealth into acceptable offerings for the temple led to an
active banking and exchange in the temple courts; the earliest "money"
from the shrine of Juno Moneta at Rome is temple money. Since the place began
as an observatory and all things were tied to the calendar and the stars,
mathematics flourished and astronomy was a Muse.
History
was another Muse, for the rites were meant for the dead as well as the living,
and memorials to former great ones (believed to be in attendance) encouraged
the production of a marvelous art of portraiture, of sculpture and
painting, which would have flourished anyway as architectural
adornments, since the design and measurements (the middot) of the
temple structure itself as a sort of scale model of the universe and cosmic
computer were all-important; the architecture of the hierocentric
structure was of primary concern.
And
since from that central point all the earth was measured and all the lands
distributed, geometry was essential: "In the Beginning the
One God promised Horus that he should inherit the land of Egypt, which was
written in the Books by order of the Lord of All. . . . At the Division of the
Lands it was decreed in writing."
The
writings produced and copied in the House of Life were also discussed there,
giving rise to philosophy but concerned largely with cosmology and
natural science. In short, there is no aspect of our civilization that does not
have its rise in the temple, thanks to the power of the written word. In the
all-embracing relationships of the Divine Book everything is relevant. Nothing
is really dead or forgotten; every detail belongs in the picture, which would
be incomplete without it. Lacking such a synthesizing principle, our
present-day knowledge becomes ever more fragmented, and our universities and
libraries crumble and disintegrate as they expand. Where the temple that gave
it birth is missing, civilization itself becomes a hollow shell.
"Genesis of the Written Word," CWHN 12:472-73* * * * * * * *
In Egyptian rites everything is in motion; they respect the
Heisenberg principle, for they never try to make any two temples, tombs, texts,
vignettes, or reliefs exactly alike. It is the modern world that mass-produces
on fixed and static patterns.
Every
system, no matter how dynamic, must have certain unchanging constants to give
it structure: with Einstein, it was the speed of light; with the Egyptians, it
was the unchanging identity of the individual. Life was an endless series of
exciting episodes through which the individual passes, undergoing many changes
to match every changing environment, but he never loses his identity. It is our
modern dynamic faith that binds the individual to a single stereotype and gives
him only one life, chopped off at both ends as neatly as a piece of dough in an
ITT bakery.
In
the more exalted realms of higher thought, however, modern thinking moves
steadily closer to the Egyptians. For just as it is not possible for us to
visualize the incredible forces and particles of a universe describable only in
terms of mathematics, so the Egyptians wisely did not attempt to visualize the
ultimate, but stuck to models to explain themselves. The whole Egyptian ritual
cycle is figurative: "Behold, all things have their likeness," was
their motto, ". . . both things which are temporal, and things which are
spiritual; things which are in the heavens above, and things which are on the
earth, and things which are in the earth, and things which are under the earth,
both above and beneath: all things bear record of me" (Moses 6:63).
Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, xiii* * * * * * * *
Egyptian love of life . . . runs through everything, along
with a lively recognition of the individual as the representative and vessel of
that life. A constant concern of the Egyptian is that his own personal name be
recorded, remembered, and repeated on earth and in the beyond. This is no
mystic absorption into the blessed nothingness which men farther East and
centuries later disciplined themselves to accept. Emptiness and negation held
no charm for the Egyptian. This desire for individual eternal life finds
expression in three constantly recurring motifs, rarely missing from any
significant monument: (1) the family . . . , (2) eternity . . . [and] (3)
cosmology. . . . Need we point out that the principal teachings of the Mormon
Temple are also concerned with family, eternity, and cosmology?
"There Is Always Egypt," 12* * * * * * * *
The three motifs that confront us wherever we turn in temple
and tomb are eternity, family, and cosmos. As to family, the gods themselves do
not appear in solitary splendor in the great temples, but always have the rest
of the family along, as the individual in his tomb wants to be seen in the
intimate and loving company of his wife and children; whether gods, kings, or
commoners, they hold hands and embrace in an easy and affectionate manner.
"The Greatness of Egypt," 14* * * * * * * *
An important feature of Egyptian architecture of temple,
tomb, and even palace is a door, sometimes shown as a curtain or lattice,
through which a spirit can pass, a means of communication between two worlds;
and the literature is full of ceremonial and mythical doors and gates and
instructions on how to pass them.
"The Greatness of Egypt," 18* * * * * * * *
If we attempt to untangle the probably historical from the
fanciful, we soon discover the common ground on which they meet and fuse: it is
ritual. Myths arise as attempts to explain
ritual doings, whose meaning has been forgotten—"What mean these
stones?" After much discussion back and forth, the consensus now emerges
that it is the rites and ordinances that come first. This should have been
clear from the outset, since myths and legends are innumerable while the rites
and ordinances found throughout the world are surprisingly few and uniform. . .
.
Such
indeed has always been the Latter-day Saint position. Adam first performed an
ordinance and when asked to give an explanation of it replied that he knew of
none "save that the Lord hath commanded me." Then it was that the
true explanation came forth from the mouth of a heavenly instructor.
"Myths and the Scriptures," CWHN 1:42
THE BLESSING OF THE TEMPLE* * * * * * * *
The
Christian world has been perennially haunted by the ghost of the temple—a
ghost in which it does not believe. If the least be said for it, the temple has
never lost its power to stir men's imaginations and excite their emotions, and
the emotion which it has most often inspired in Christian breasts has certainly
been that of envy, a passion the more dangerous for being suppressed. The
temple has cast a shadow over the claims and the confidence of the Christian
church from early times, a shadow which is by no means diminishing in our own
day. If we seem to have labored the obvious in pointing this out, it is only
because the obvious has been so long and so resolutely denied or ignored in
high places.
"Christian Envy of the Temple," 414* * * * * * * *
Five days a week between three and four o'clock in the
morning, hundreds of elderly people along the Wasatch Front bestir themselves
to go up and begin their long hours of work in the temple, where they are ready
to greet the first comers at 5:30 a.m. (At that time, long before daylight, the
place is packed, you can't get in, so I virtuously wait until later, much
later, in the day.) Whatever
they may be up to, here is a band of mortals who are actually engaged in doing
something which has not their own comfort, convenience, or profit as its
object. Here at last is a phenomenon that commands respect in our day and could
safely be put forth among the few valid arguments we have to induce the Deity
to spare the human race: thousands of men and women putting themselves out for
no ulterior motive. There is a touch of true nobility here.
What
draws them to the temple? There is no music, pageantry, or socializing to beguile
the time; none of us begins to grasp the full significance of what is going on,
yet nobody seems bored. Why is that?
I
can only speak for myself, harking back to the subject of hints, those
countless impulses with which our perceptors are being bombarded by day and
night. For thousands of years the stars have gone on sending us their hints,
broadcasting unlimited information if we only knew it; now at last we are
reacting to a narrow band on the informational spectrum, putting clues together
in a way the ancients never did. But also we are beginning to suspect that
there were times when the ancients reacted to another band of the spectrum
which is completely lost on us. The temple, as the very name proclaims, is a
place where one takes one's bearings on the universe. What goes on there is
confidential and must remain so until both the Mormons and the outside world
are in a better position to understand it.
Meanwhile,
I write this almost fifty years to the day since the bewildering experience of
my own endowment; I have just returned from the temple again where this day I
made a most surprising and gratifying discovery. If I went to the temple five
times and nothing happened, I would stop going. But I've gone hundreds of
times, and the high hopes of new knowledge with which I go up the hill every
week are never disappointed.
"An Intellectual Autobiography," xxvii-xxviii* * * * * * * *
We live in Vanity Fair today, and the temple represents the
one sober spot in the world. . . . It is my testimony that the gospel has been
restored, and the Lord intends to fulfill his purposes in these days. And
whatever we ask him for, he will give us. This I tell my family without any
reservation whatever. I have never asked the Lord for anything that he didn't
give to me. Well, you say, in that case, you surely didn't ask for much. No, I
didn't; I was very careful not to ask for much. We don't want to be spoiled
brats, do we? We ask for what we need, for what we can't get ourselves, and the
Lord will give it to us]. Don't worry. But he also wants us to get in and dig
for the rest.
So
I pray and hope that the Lord may inspire and help us all to become more
engaged—more involved—in the work of these latter-days and visit
the temple often and become wiser all the time, because he intends to give us
more revelations through that instrumentality.
"The Meaning of the Temple," CWHN 12:38 
