Video of the Scale Model of the Salt Lake Temple. (Press play to view)

Today, the Church unveiled an 88-inch scale model of the Salt Lake Temple in the South Visitors’ Center on Temple Square in Salt Lake.  You can see an introduction of the model in the video clip above.  It is a 1:32 scale replica of the temple, with the walls cut away so visitors can see the rooms inside.  Sixteen model makers constructed the model over five months, and went to great lengths to construct the model, using thousands of photographs to make sure every intricate detail was accurate, from the murals, to the wall paintings, chairs, lighting fixtures, etc.  You can look into nearly every room.

The community regularly gets to tour new temples in a public open house before they are dedicated, but since it’s been so long since the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple, they hope this model will allow visitors to get the same experience of this temple:

"This replica will show the millions of visitors who come to Temple Square the beauty and majesty of this sacred and historic building," said Elder Richard G. Hinckley, executive director of the Missionary Department. "Like all temples, once the building is dedicated it is used for sacred Church purposes and not open to the general public, but this exhibit will provide the public with a glimpse of the interior and a feeling of the Spirit that is present there."

You can read more details, and see a few photos, about the model in the Church’s news release.  They also have more details about the project, photos, audio clips, and a fact sheet at this link about the creation process.

I’m going to have to go up to Temple Square to see this fantastic new model.

Scale Model Exhibit of the Salt Lake Temple Opened on Temple Square

360° panoramas of Temple Square let you look around as if you were there.

Dr. William Hamblin has put together some very cool high resolution 360° panoramas of different locations on Temple Square in Salt Lake City.  And they really are 360°.  You can look in all different directions, including up and down.  It gives the impression of standing on the spot.  Well done!

The locations he has included are:

• West of the Salt Lake Temple (next to Tabernacle)
• In between Assembly Hall and Tabernacle
• East of the Salt Lake Temple
• South of the Salt Lake Temple
• Near the South Visitor’s Center
• Christus statue in the North Visitor’s Center
• Conference Center auditorium
• Tabernacle interior

You get the best effect if you zoom in just a little.  You can zoom in and out by using the shift and Ctrl keys on your keyboard.  You can move around by clicking and dragging with your mouse.

I’ve always been impressed by how new technologies can take us places for fun or practical purposes.  I’ve written about visiting Utah temples with Google Street View, modeling temples in 3D with Google’s Sketchup, using Microsoft’s Photosynth technology to virtually zoom around Temple Square, or how the Church uses computer rendering to envision future temples.  Dr. Hamblin’s panoramas are a welcome addition!

See the 360° Panoramas of Temple Square

360° Panoramas of Temple Square

A retired farmer spent 30 years building this massive model of Herod's Temple. Picture: Geoff Robinson Photography

The Telegraph reported today about a man from Norfolk, England, who has spent the last 30 years building an awesome, gigantic and highly detailed scale model of Herod’s Temple.  Here are some interesting facts about it:

• Estimated 33,000 hours to construct
• Measures 20ft by 12ft
• Includes 4,000 tiny human figures, with authentic time-period dress
• 1:100 scale
• Everything is hand-made down to every clay brick and tile
• Took 3 years of research
• Still not finished
• Not for sale
• Resides in a building in the creator’s back garden
• The creator, Alec Garrard, is now 78 years old, and he started it when he was in his 40′s
• Some historians believe it to be the best representation of the temple in the world

Now that is pretty creative!  You can see many more great photographs of the model at the Telegraph’s picture gallery.

Man Builds Massive Model of Herod’s Temple

Microsoft has built some free software called Photosynth with which you can take many photographs of an object or place, and the software will automatically overlay them together seamlessly and construct a 3D model from their similarities.  You can then fly around the object or place in real-time and zoom in to see details in the photographs.  It’s fascinating technology.  See a fuller definition here.  It’s been in beta for a while now, but has just been released for anyone to make their own “synths.”  A designer from the Church has picked up on it. 

Aaron Barker, one of the Church’s designers, has created a “photosynth” of the Salt Lake Temple, as reported on NorthTemple.com yesterday.  It is only 58% “synthy,” which means that you cannot go all the way around the temple in 360°, which can make it difficult to navigate, but it does have about a 200° viewable space of the Salt Lake Temple (the east, north, and west sides).  It was built using 117 photos of the temple, and there are many detailed ones too that you can zoom in on and see close-up.

Because Photosynth is so graphics intensive it does require a browser plugin and an application installed on your computer in order to see a synth.  But I guarantee it is worth it.  They are free.  To install it go here.

I have embedded the synth of the Salt Lake Temple below.  Or you can see it here on Photosynth’s website.

I echo Aaron’s excitement about the possibilities of this technology.  Think if you could see a synth of any temple in the world, fly around it, and see the details, all while online.  Think of the Church historical sites you could virtually visit like Carthage jail, the Sacred Grove, Nauvoo, and Palmyra.  It’s going to be interesting to see where this technology goes, particularly if and when they build a social community around it and allow any person to add photos to synths.

Salt Lake Temple in 3D with Microsoft Photosynth

The two symbols used for the commonly translated “time” and “eternity” are neheh (nhh) and djet (dt), respectively, and looked something like this:

Jan Assmann described the difficulty of pinning down an understanding of these hieroglyphics: 

The meaning of this disjunctive concept of time and its two components cannot be translated by any pair of words in Western languages. The Egyptian terms in no way correspond to our “time” and “eternity”; this distinction deried from Greek ontology (eternity as the punctually concentrated presence of being, which unfolds in time as the process of becoming) was not only foreign to Egyptian thought, but even contrary to it. Neheh and djet both have properties of our “time,” as well as of our “eternity,” and as a practical matter, either can sometimes be translated as “time” and sometimes as “eternity.”  The terms refer to the totality (as such, sacred and in a sense transcendent and thus “eternal”) of cosmic time.  To clarify this concept of time and its religious implications or semantic range, we must heed an important distinction.  We are so accustomed to the notion of infinity that we think of “totality” as finite and bounded. The Egyptians, however, viewed “totality” as the opposite of finite and bounded. To them, the boundaries of totality were not contrasted with the unbounded, but with the “whole,” with “plenitude.”

As foreign as these concepts seem to Western and modern thought, Assmann proposes further understanding, going back to the Book of the Dead:

In chapter 17 of the Book of the Dead, a compendium of Egyptian mortuary beliefs in the form of a series of questions and answers (an initiate’s examination?), the expression “all being” is explained as “neheh and djet.”  What this means is that neheh and djet designate the comprehensive and absolute horizon of totality.  They refer to the temporal totality of the cosmos, but it was in this way that the concept of “cosmos” or “being,” that is, of reality, was comprehensible to Egyptian thought and capable of articulation.  This totalization of being on the temporal level is so foreign to us that some scholars have proposed that djet and neheh mean “space” and “time.”  This is not correct, however; both are unequivocally temporal concepts, and in Egyptian thought, they represented the whole of reality.

So how are we to understand neheh and djet?

The closest we can come is a pair of concepts such as “change” and “completion/perfection” . . .

We can also illustrate the Egyptian disjunction of time with the help of the concepts “come” and “remain.” It is often said of neheh-time that it “comes”: it is time as an incessantly pulsating stream of days, months, seasons, and years. Djet-time, however, “remains,” “lasts,” and “endures.” It is the time in which we distinguish the completed, that which has been effected in the stream of neheh-time, which has matured into completion and has changed into a different form of time that will undergo no further change or motion.

The concept neheh can still best be connected with our everyday notion of time. For us, time is less something that comes than something that goes by, but in any case in motion. . . . djet signifies . . . the enduring continuation of that which, acting and changing, has been completed in time.

Modern Kemeticism offers more explanation:

The term neheh refers to the cyclical nature of time as expressed in the passage of seasons and celestial events, the time that is not linear, but goes in a spiral with the repetition of certain events: day and night, seasons, holidays, and the natural cycles of life. Neheh’s cyclical nature can be observed in the hieroglyphs that make up its symbol, all of which are characterized by curves or non-linear surfaces: the top wavy line standing for water, the two hieroglyphs at each side that are the wick of oil lamps that burn in the night, and the circle with a point in the middle, universal symbol of Ra, the sun itself. . . .

This term, djet, specifically refers to the concept of linear, or nonrepetitive time, and this can be seen symbolically in its hieroglyphs: the long, linear snake of the dj sound, the flat loaf of bread which supplies the feminine t ending, and the long island symbol being the determinative for “land.” Thus, djet is earthly time, the time of the land.

The sum of the two was always used to finish the ritual:

Djet and neheh are symmetrical concepts and are almost always used together, “eternity and everlastingness” in English, or perhaps the same as our idiomatic “forever and ever.” In ancient times, the act of ritual purification was shown with the gods pouring water jars containing the symbol ankh, or life, over the person being purified. A person was then said to be pure forever (djet) and ever (neheh), or in both manners of counting of time, both in years and in memory.((ibid.  See the second part post on the ankh for a representation of this.))

So we begin to get this conceptualization of a time which belongs to this earth, and a time that belongs to the cosmos, or celestial events, equinoxes, the movement of the sun and stars, etc.  Neheh is generational time and repeats, whereas djet is permanent and unchanging in eternity.  The model of “one eternal round” illuminates both views, eternal repetition and permanence (cf. 1 Ne. 10:19, notice also the dual usage of “times of old” and “times to come”; Mosiah 3:5; Alma 7:20; Alma 37:12; D&C 3:2; D&C 35:1; D&C 39:22; D&C 72:3; D&C 132:7, 18-19).  This also conveys the thought that the gods were capable of eternal change while still being unchanging, since both symbols were bestowed by them upon the kings and queens, the repitition of an enduring process ad infinitum.  This perception of time does not have a place in Western thinking, but hearkens back to the ancients.  Such an explanation of time seems perfectly in keeping with Abraham’s discourse on the multiplicity of time measurements in Abraham 3.  More home runs for Joseph Smith.

Of course, Hugh Nibley also adds his thought-provoking voice to the conversation:

Otto avers that, while nhh conveys the idea of “unending recurrence of the same, the concept of becoming, something like our ‘development,’” dt denotes “ineradicable endurance,” a state of being established to last forever. Thomas Allen’s translation of the Book of the Dead supports this, rendering nhh as “endless occurrence” or “endless recurrence” and dt as “changelessness.” … while A. Bakir has the idea that “… nhh connotes the concept of infinity associated with time before the world … came into being,” while “dt refers to the other infinity … the time when the temporal world comes to an end” … Gardiner has much the same idea, i.e., that dt is “eternity in the past” and nhh “eternity in the future” [see 1 Nephi 10:19] . . .  A clear distinction is made in Book of the Dead chapter 17: “Others . . . say that the things which have been made are Eternity (nhh), and the things which shall be made are Everlastingness (dt).” . . .

“The nhh-eternity thus designates the unceasing recurrence of the same, the endlessness of time.” He agrees with Thausing that nhh is divisible into years, while dt cannot be so divided. . . .

There is a general agreement that time as nhh has an end, being bound to the conditions and cycles of this world, whereas eternity as dt is something solid and final, written with the earth symbol, which denotes the ultimate in unshakable solidity.  But everyone seems to feel the rightness of both making a distinction and of closely associating the two ideas to make sure that the ordinances shall be effective both “in time,” by whichever means we choose to measure it, and “thoughout all eternity,” which is not to be measured at all.  This is the expression that closes all major ordinances . . .

Time and Eternity: An Egyptian Dualism

Several scholars, both LDS and members of other faiths, have noted that the temple is a model of the universe:

• The temple is a scale model of the universe…
• …the temple represents the principle of ordering the universe.
• [The temple is] for the purpose of taking our bearings on the universe…
• …the temple reflects things as they exist in heaven-things as they really are.
• The temple embodies “the structure of the universe, so that ascent through the heavenly levels [is] also a journey ‘inward’ through the temple’s concentric areas of increasing holiness to the Holy of Holies at the center.”
• …the temple (whether earthly or heavenly) is a miniature imitation of the structure of the universe.

God’s perception of time and space are incomprehensible to our mortal and finite minds (Isa. 55:8-9).  However, if the temple is an accurate model of the universe, then it should be possible to reproduce an approximate visual representation of the universe from what we learn from the temple, which is what I’ve attempted above.

The concentric circles represent the various degrees of glory. The red arrows indicate the path that the earth has taken from its terrestrial creation, its fall to a telestial state (our current state), its renewal to a paradisaical terrestrial glory during the millennium, and then its final purification when it is made a celestial sphere, and, according to Elder McConkie, “no one can live on it who does not conform to a celestial law. Hence, in that day it will be reserved for those who are saved and exalted” .  The other planets shown represent the other innumerable worlds that now stand at some point in their progression from creation to celestialization (Moses 1:35).

Note that this is an attempt at an actual representation of the universe, so the earth would actually physically travel the path away from and back to the presence of God, passing through the different stages and levels.  Indeed, the end of times sign of the “stars falling from heaven” has been described as the earth moving through space rather than the stars moving (Rev. 6:12-13; D&C 29:14; D&C 88:87; D&C 133:49).  The pre-mortal world starts at the center of the celestial circle (in the presence of God).  The spirit world is in the same location as the earth is, albeit in the different dimension.  Our celestial kingdom will be upon this earth back in the center of the celestial circle and in the presence of God.

How accurate do you think this representation is? How could it be improved?  What are your thoughts on the relationship between this model and the current scientific model of the universe we know today?  Where do you think those who inherit the terrestrial and telestial kingdoms will reside in the universe?  What have other prophets and apostles said about the structure of the universe that might help improve the representation?  Where does our solar system, galaxy, and visible universe fit into this representation?

If we get convincing comments I will update this graphic to reflect the newfound insights.

Temple as a Scale-Model of the Universe

A group of researchers has just begun a two-week excavation at the well-known Stonehenge site in England in an attempt to discover, once and for all, the meaning behind the mysterious ruins. According to current scientific dating, Stonehenge dates back to about 3000 B.C., but it has perplexed archaeologists for years as to the purpose of its creation. Who created it and why? Why was the structure a venerated destination for thousands of years, being built, taken down, rebuilt and expanded a number of times.

What was Stonehenge?

There are, of course, many theories that have circulated since studies began hundreds of years ago. According to the BBC, the most popular hypotheses have regarded Stonehenge as a:

1. Gigantic calendar – The arrangement of the stones is such to allow for astronomical observations, including the summer and winter solstices.
2. Religious worship site – Some have said that the heavenward pointing stones connected man with the spiritual, as well as their circular placement. It created a type of shrine or sanctuary.
3. Monument for the dead – This theory states that the stones represented a permanence of ancestry that could be memorialized.
4. Extraterrestrial landing site – Some in the 1970s believed that beings from other worlds would come to this site.
5. Healing center – The latest theory, and the one supported by the latest researchers that are currently excavating at the site, is that Stonehenge served as a healing center for the sick and otherwise afflicted who would travel for miles around to be supernaturally cured from their ills. It was a kind of “prehistoric Lourdes.”

Scientists studying the ruins seem to argue for one or the other theories, and reject the others. I confess I’m not an archaeologist in the least kind, but I believe that Stonehenge could have served all of the above purposes that different researchers have concluded that the site was built for.

Nibley Spoke of Stonehenge

Hugh Nibley associated Stonehenge, as well as the rest of the megalithic stone circles found in many parts of Europe and other parts of the world, to the temple. In one of his latest analyzes Nibley spoke of the ruins in Avebury, another henge which is much larger and older than Stonehenge and just 20 miles to the north of the more famous site:

Since death cannot be denied, what hope is there for the hereafter? The Egyptian answer, as everybody recognizes today, was to start all over again and have a new life. That meant a new creation. How was that to be effected? There is one glowing example which no one can overlook--the sun. And the Egyptians, like other ancient people, made the most of it. Stick close to the sun was the idea, and do what he does. Get yourself a place in his boat, as a crewmember, attendant (shms-Re), or member of the family. To prolong your own life, you must get in on the action--you must be present at the only time and place that the sun, completing one cycle and reaching its lowest point at the solstice, without a split-second hesitation, reverses its direction and begins its upward climb [solstices].

This means that everybody in the world had to come together at a special place--the exact center of the cosmos, since it was the point of convergence for the pilgrims’ roads from every point on the horizon. And for the beginning of a new life cycle, you must start with the creation all over again. The creation drama is a standard feature of temple worship. Everywhere, as far as we can trace the records and the ruins, there have been great gatherings of the race--the panegyris, or “everybody in a circle,” in every part of the world. Many have recognized the phenomenon, but no one can explain when or how it began. Eduard Meyer thinks it started with animals in their periodic meetings to disport and reproduce. Megalithic circles marking the great ceremonial assemblages are found by the thousands and go back to the Stone Age.
I had the good fortune to be stationed near Avebury in Hertfordshire at the end of World War II and had ample time to examine the vast establishment. That was before it was discovered by the tourists. The stone circle, [was] 1400 feet in diameter… From the air (I had to pass over it slowly in regular and frequent glider flights) one could behold traces of prehistoric roads, marked by standing stones, leading from all directions. That is the general layout of countless megalithic ceremonial centers, over ten thousand of which are known…

On another occasion, Nibley said:

The temple is the great teaching institution of the human race; universities are much older than we might ever expect. A university began as a Greek Mouseion, a temple of the Muses, who represented all departments of knowledge… The Egyptians called it the “House of Life.” It was an observatory, a great megalithic complex of standing stones (later columns and pylons), with amazingly sophisticated devices for observing and recording the motions of the heavens. A study of Stonehenge shows that it was a computer of great accuracy, a university set in the midst of sacred groves -- botanical and geological gardens and groves; it was a “paradise,” a Garden of Eden, where all life is sacrosanct.

And again:

To get the general picture we have to see this institution which is so very important. We’ll call it the panegyris here. Pan means “everybody,” and gyris means “a gyroscope,” around in a circle. This is when everybody meets in the big circle, the cosmic circle. “In ancient times at holy shrines, each believed to mark the exact center of the universe… represented as the point at which the four quarters of the earth converge… one might have seen assembled at the new year… the moment of creation, the beginning and ending of time, vast concourses of people would come together.” That’s what you have at Stonehenge and Avebury and well over a thousand ancient megalithic centers scattered all over Europe. They are also in Asia. There are lots of them in Palestine. “Vast concourses of people, each thought to represent the entire human race in the presence of all its ancestors and gods….”

Nibley continually repeated these same things:

I spent eight months in 1943 and 1944 preparing for the invasion of Europe, at Grenham Lodge, not far from Avebury, near Marlborough, on the plains of England. This is one of the oldest (2600 B.C.) and largest monuments of Europe, 500 years older than Stonehenge. It’s enormous. Much excavating has been done there. On days off, I had a chance to inspect it, and I was electrified by it…

At this same time “in other parts of the British Isles people were already putting up great stone circles for ceremonies. At Stennes in the Orkneys [in Scotland halfway to the North Pole] twelve steepling columns stood in a ring” -- as Jacob did in Israel, whenever he made a covenant (Genesis 31:45-46).

Twelve steepling columns stood in a ring. . . . In Ireland the chambered round cairn of New Grange with its quartz walls with a passage aligned towards the mid-winter sunrise was placed inside a circle of over thirty massive blocks of stone. In the Lake District, source of many stone axes, people were going to splendid stone circles with names that peal like a prehistoric role of honour: Long Meg and Her Daughters, the Carles at Castlerigg, Sunken Kirk, the Grey Horses. Rites inside these sacred rings differed but in every region where there was a fair-sized population circular enclosures were the foci [notice the focus, the center points] of ceremonies, megalithic rings in the north and west, henges of earth or chalk in the stoneless areas of lowland Britain.

That is how they differed in form, but they always have the ring, and they always do the same thing when they come together. It is vastly older than the pyramids, is beautifully done, and contains magnificent things…

The point is that our ancestors were doing all this far back in time… In the earliest times, everybody seemed to be doing the same sort of thing, building the same kinds of structures….

“Avebury became almost a metropolitan centre to which people came from miles around to trade and to settle disputes, to worship in the marvelous stone rings that expressed the barbaric pride of the natives.” And the remains are not a few. There are piles of stuff to show what was going on at these places. They were all doing the same sort of thing.

Death and regeneration are the themes of Avebury. The presence of human bones, the pieces of stone, the red ochre, the pockets of fertile earth, the antlers, the shapes of the sarsens, the architecture of the avenues and circles, all are consistent with the belief that Avebury was intended as a temple in which, at various times of the year, the large population could gather to watch and take part in ceremonies of magic and evocation that would safeguard their lives…

Gordon Childe [the great Scottish prehistorian] thought of Avebury as a cathedral, Stuart Piggot as an open sanctuary associated with a sky-god… Jacquetta Hawkes wrote of fertility rites involving the earth and the sun although “what those mysteries were we shall never know.” However generalised these observations there is agreement about a religious centre… linked with the earth, the sun [the heavenly bodies in their motions], ritual objects and dead bones [i.e., with the ancestors, and scholars all agree on that]. Not many years ago Patrick Crampton went further, suggesting that Avebury was not only a temple of the powerful Earth Goddess but also a “city,” the first “capital -- religious, cultural, commercial -- of most of southern Britain.”

So these concepts are very old. I myself was enormously impressed by the size of the stones, weighing sixty tons, set in a great circle 350 yards across. It was an amazing accomplishment that they dragged them to the site. It required great work, concentration, and leadership…

The enormous ditch around the stones is thirty feet deep, dug out by use of only deer horns. For ritual reasons, they could not use anything else.

I used to fly over the area frequently. You could see radiating from the site great table stones, and the great prehistoric roads that led to the site, from hundreds of miles to the north. From everywhere, people came to Avebury, nearly five thousand years ago, to celebrate the very thing we do in our temples today -- the continuity of life.

And again:

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was the habit of English country gentlemen, fired with the scientific interests of the former century and the romantic sensibilities of the latter, to survey, sketch, describe, and speculate about the many and mysterious prehistoric stone circles, avenues, passage-graves, and mounds on their estates and elsewhere. In their papers read before local learned societies and in their letters to antiquarian journals, they debated endlessly without reaching any consensus of agreement as to whether those often imposing monuments were the work of some mysterious unknown race or that of the ancient Britons, Druids, Romans, Saxons, or Danes. But on one thing there was almost unanimous agreement, namely, that the most impressive of the structures were temples. In the light of local folktales and legends, immemorial rustic seasonal festivities, and other quaint customs and observances, supported by occasional illuminating passages from classical and medieval writers as well as the Bible, they could imagine vast concourses of people gathering at these great ceremonial centers at times set by sun, moon, stars, and the growing and harvesting seasons, to celebrate a new lease on life for the individual and the society…

[An article from July 1980 Scientific American] finds “a succession of what we can only call cathedral architects” at work in the third and fourth millenniums B.C. “Most emphatically,” he writes, these “megalithic rings in general [were] sacred and secular meeting places,” and he sees” an impelling faith” behind the immense effort and skill that produced them--”some powerful religious belief including belief in an afterlife.” He notes that though the building activity stopped by 1000 B.C., “the general population” retained folk-memories of what went on, and he finds it “more than possible that the Druidic priesthood . . . used them as temples.” Finally he notes that even Christian churches in some places did not disdain to build upon their ruins.

So what were these people doing? They were building temples, sacred places where they could go to commune with diety and perform their sacred ceremonies, rites, and ordinances.

Latter-day Parallels

If you’ve made it this far in the post, congratulations. Probably 95% will have dropped off by now. Who cares about that old wreck Stonehenge, right? It has nothing to do with me. Well, it has much more to do with us than we might casually admit or recognize. Nibley saw it, he recognized it, and largely thanks to him our knowledge of the temple is placed squarely in the milieu of religious worship since the beginning of time.

The similarities between the restored ordinances of the LDS temple and the various theories that exist about Stonehenge go much deeper than first appearances:

1. Gigantic calendar – The temple has always been a place where, as Nibley said, “one gets one’s bearings on the universe”. The temple is a model of the universe. Even the newest member of the Church recognizes the vast number of cosmological symbols which adorn our temples, on the outside and within. The temple connects us with the heavens, the planets, the stars, the orbits, the motions, the dwelling place of God. The temple is the gate of heaven (Gen. 28:17). It connects us back to God.
2. Religious worship site – As Nibley extensively noted, Stonehenge was a religious site, as were all the other stone circle creations of man in ancient times. They were places where man got in touch with the Gods. God spoke to man there, and man to God. It represented the center of the cosmos, where God dwells. It was where people traveled far or near to worship deity. This is precisely the same of our modern-day temples.
3. Monument for the dead – I don’t think there is a greater monument or establishment to the dead in all the world than the Latter-day Saint temples which dot the earth today. 99.9% of the work that we do there is for the salvation and redemption of the dead, so that they might receive the ordinances of the gospel of Jesus Christ that they had no opportunity to in mortality. The gates of hell have not prevailed. They have been thrown open wide by Jesus Christ, and many thousands upon thousands are being redeemed every day in holy temples scattered across the world, dedicated to the work of the Lord. Billions of names have been gathered in preparation for the work. Around the year 350 A.D. Cyril of Jerusalem gave the following as part of the instruction in the early Christian prayer circle practice, hinting at a kind of vicarious offering of the atonement for the dead:
   

   After that we remember the dead--patriarchs, prophets, apostles, martyrs--that God might grant our petition through the joining of our prayers with theirs. Then we pray for … all of our own people who have fallen asleep, believing that the greatest possible benefit can come to the spirits on whose behalf (hyper hon) the petition is made.

   I have often heard people ask: What good does it do the departed spirit, whether the person was good or bad in life, to be remembered in the prayer? … Ans. By doing for them and for ourselves what a loving God requires (exileoumenoi), we make available (prospheromen) the atoning sacrifice which Christ made for our sins.

4. Extraterrestrial landing site – This might seem out of the realm of relationship with the temple, but it is not. Extraterrestrials are none other than beings or personages from another place. We do not believe in the aliens of popular folklore, the little green men with oversized heads and eyeballs. Modern revelation to prophets and apostles has revealed that there is other life in the universe besides us, and it is the very same life as we are – people. God’s creations are as innumerable as the sands of the sea, and each of them have human beings living on them, sons and daughters of God, just like us (Moses 1:35). Latter-day Saints believe that God and angels have visited the earth anew since the beginning of the restoration (JS-H 1). Indeed, from the very beginning of time, this earth was populated from people from another place (i.e. heaven). We believe that the temple is a place where God and his angels can come to this earth and commune with the saints. They walk the halls. They witness the ordinances. They interact with the patrons. They facilitate the work, both inside and outside the temple. They have been seen countless times in temples since Kirtland. God and his angels are not absent from the his work on the earth.
5. Healing center – The latest theories, especially those of the current excavators, surrounding Stonehenge are that it was a place of healing, where people could gather who had ailments, and the sanctity and supernatural powers of the spot would help cure them. LDS temples today have prayer rolls in the temples whereupon the names of people who are sick and afflicted (either physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually) may be written, and for whom prayers are then offered up in the temple. We believe the words of James who said, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16). As part of the same instruction from Cyril in the fourth century on the early Christian prayer circle we read:
   

   We pray for the common peace of the church and the well-being of the world (kosmos), for kings, commanders, and allies, for the sick and afflicted, and in short for all who need help.

Stonehenge is not something that is so unrelated to our present situation that we cannot understand it. It has served the same purpose that many sacred spaces have since the beginning, and which has been restored in its true and correct form today in the Latter-day Saint temples, the house of the Lord.

Stonehenge: An Ancient Temple

Salt Lake Temple model

One of my hobbies is 3D modeling with computers. A couple years ago, when Google acquired Keyhole and the Google Earth and Sketchup software, I chose to build the Salt Lake Temple in 3D for it, as a tribute to my love of temples and so all the world can see this unique temple’s architecture and majesty in Google Earth.

It took me a few days, and many hours of Photoshoping photographs of the Salt Lake Temple to get the textures just right and the structure built to scale. But I think it was a worthwhile experience and will give many people the opportunity to “virtually” visit the Salt Lake Temple on Temple Square.

When I was done I submitted my model to Google’s 3D Warehouse so that anyone in the world could download and see the temple in Google Earth. Just recently I noticed that my model has been given Google’s distinction of being one of the “Best in 3D Warehouse” and will show up in that layer of Google Earth if you have it.

You can view the model, download it into Google Earth, see rankings/reviews, descriptions, location, and other details at this link.

I guess you could say that I am continuing the tradition of my predecessors in a small way, since one of my ancestors was William Warner Player, the chief stone mason on the original Nauvoo Temple. I have built other temples in 3D also, which I will share on another day.

3D Salt Lake Temple in Google Earth

But I also thought a comment from Anita made an interesting point about how the temple can be a model for raising and teaching our children:

…in their initial years they are given a name and learn about the importance of bodies, body parts, about clothing and modesty, the nature of this world, creation, and opposites. As they are baptized and accountable, they learn to recognize Satan and his half-truths, and as they become teenagers, we focus on morality and chastity, and preparation for marriage. The temple can be a map through mortality and guide us in raising our children if we look at it that way.

On a related note, in some cultures the initiation of adolescents into adulthood only takes place by the sacred rites and ceremonies (i.e. the Hopi).

Temple a Model for Raising Children