Part 1: Endowment Beginnings
Part 2: Endowment Development
Part 3: Expansion & Progression
Part 4: The Building & the Ceremony
Part 5: "Bring the Rooms to the People"
Part 6: Remodels & Revision
Part 7: The Return of Progression
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| Nauvoo Temple Spiral Staircase |
The Mormon Church is known for its uniformity and correlation, even as it has grown into an international Church with thousands of stakes in hundreds of countries. Its buildings largely look the same. Its meetings, no matter the country or the culture, follow the same outline and structure. And so perhaps one of the most surprising facts of the Church is this: the temple endowment is not the same in every temple.
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| (Gilbert Arizona Temple Endowment Room) |
To be clear, the ceremony itself is the same--word for word.* This is essential. However, the setting can be different--very different--and that can make the ceremony a completely different experience. The Mormon Church is not known for its architecture (a misconception this blog seeks to address), and that may be because only one ordinance was highly dependent on its surrounding architecture for its efficacy--the temple endowment.
Why is there such variation among the temples? Was it by accident or design? And what does this look like for future temples that are being built around the world? This series of blog posts seeks to answer these questions by diving into the history of temple architecture, focusing on the changes, adjustments, and re-adjustments that have been made over time.
As a final note to this introduction, while these posts will discuss the architecture of the endowment ceremony, and thus make references to the ceremony itself, it will not discuss the endowment ceremony in detail. Those who are interested in learning more about LDS temple ordinances may want to visit https://ldstempleprep.blogspot.com for more information there.
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The introduction of the endowment ceremony (as Latter-day Saints know it today) took place in Nauvoo in 1842. While revelations up to that point had hinted about the endowment ordinance, and also that its setting should be in the temple, the prophet Joseph Smith began to administer the ordinance in the second story of his red brick store.
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| Reconstructed Red Brick Store in Nauvoo, Illinois |
In preparation for this ordinance, the Prophet apparently arranged plants around the room and had several men paint a mural of a pastoral scene in the northwest corner. Thus, from its inception, the setting of the endowment ceremony was critical--its purpose was to more fully envelope the Saints in the story of the ordinance.** Patrons symbolically became Adam and Eve; the temple became their stage, world, and journey.
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| View of second story room in reconstructed Red Brick Store, looking North. |
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| View looking South |
Brigham Young would later say that after his first ceremony, Joseph Smith took him aside and told him, "Brother Brigham, this is not arranged right but we have done the best we could do under the circumstances in which we are placed." It is unknown how much the setting was developed in the Red Brick Store, but by the time Brigham Young administered the endowments in the Nauvoo Temple, there were definite spaces for different segments of the endowment--a creation area, an area representing the Garden of Eden, an area representing the telestial world in which we now live, an area representing the terrestrial world (in Latter-day Saint liturgy, a world that is higher and holier in sphere than the world we live in now) and an area representing the celestial world (the highest and holiest of spheres, where God the Father and Jesus Christ dwell).
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| Nauvoo Temple Floor Plan (Image Source) |
The Nauvoo Temple did not have specific rooms built for this purpose; it consisted of two assembly halls as its main floors. The attic was used for these ordinances, then--curtains partitioned the main room there into the smaller areas needed for the ceremony. No murals were used, but potted plants and trees were in the garden room, and the Celestial Room was decorated with furniture, paintings, and other items on the walls. In the Garden Room, one plant was draped with raisins and grapevines to represent the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.***
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| Original Nauvoo Temple (Image Source) |
To be sure, the ceremony at this point had some major differences from the ceremony that is practiced today. In general, the ceremony was much more literal, and had much more variation, meaning that its length could vary but generally took much longer. The temple itself also had a variety of uses, including hiding Church authorities from enemies of the Church, or--in at least one case--being used a dance hall, when the furniture in the celestial room was all moved to the sides.****
Just as the ceremony would change over the next few years, the architecture would, as well. But the manner in which Joseph introduced the ordinance cemented the importance of the architecture into the ceremony itself, and therefore every Latter-day Saint temple to be built from that point forward. All that remained was to see what changes would be made.
Incidentally, when the Nauvoo Temple was reconstructed in 2002, the second floor was now used to house the endowment ceremony, rather than the attic. In a tribute to the original temple, all five rooms were built into the temple (creation, garden, world, terrestrial, and celestial). The temple's current celestial room envelopes the temple's original celestial room (as it now takes up the second floor and the attic of the original building), which means that Latter-day Saints who currently attend the Nauvoo Temple stand in nearly the same Celestial Room that Saints stood in during the 1840s, just months before they would flee to the west.
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| Nauvoo Temple (Image Source) |
Next Week: Part 2 - Endowment Development
*That is, nearly so--in the live endowment, the ceremony asks patrons to "kindly give your attention," and adds that patrons will be moving from room to room.
**It is well-known that several aspects of the Endowment ceremony are drawn from the Masonic ceremony. The Masons similarly used the setting to set the stage for the ceremony; in their case, the Masonic Lodge symbolically became Solomon's Temple, and objects representing the temple were present, including pillars through which each initiate had to pass. See "Masonic ritual and symbolism," Wikipedia.
***For more information on the Nauvoo Temple and how it was used for temple work, see Lisle G. Brown, “The Sacred Departments for Temple Work in Nauvoo: The Assembly Room and the Council Chamber,” BYU Studies 19, Issue 3 (Spring 1979): 371–72. Available here: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol19/iss3/7/
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