hugh nibley

Did the Temple Ordinances Come From The Masons?

Dr. Hugh Nibley lecturingToday a commenter on the site mentioned how I should include more parallels with the practices of the Masons, since that is plainly where the temple ordinances came from. And I would respond, did they? Did they really, so easily, come from the Masons? Can we dismiss Joseph as a prophet, seer, and revelator as simply as that?

I am reminded of a quote by our eloquent Dr. Nibley:

Off-hand, one may say that Joseph Smith could have gotten his ideas from any or many of a great number of sources, ancient and modern. Here is an illustration. On Easter Day in 1954 at about noon, the writer was standing with Brother Virgil Bushman, that doughty missionary to the Hopis, before the house of the celebrated Tewaquetewa in Old Oraibi, when a small delegation of leading men from the village came up and informed us that they had just learned from the local Protestant missionaries how the Mormons got a lot of their stuff. It seems that when the famous chief Tuba became a Mormon, Jacob Hamblin took him to Salt Lake City to marry his wives in the temple there. While the chief was in town, Joseph Smith, none other, got him aside and interrogated him very closely, prying the tribal secrets out of him; from what Chief Tuba told Smith, he proceeded to write the Book of Mormon, establish the temple ordinances, and found the Church. And that, sir, is why the Hopi traditions are so much like the Mormon.

The point is, that would be quite a plausible explanation had the two men been contemporary, or had either ever been in Salt Lake; Joseph Smith just might have gotten his knowledge that way. There are in fact countless tribes, sects, societies, and orders from which he might have picked up this and that, had he known of their existence. The Near East in particular is littered with the archaeological and living survivals of practices and teachings which an observant Mormon may find suggestively familiar. The Druzes would have been a goldmine for Smith. He has actually been charged with plundering some of the baggage brought to the West by certain fraternal orders during the Middle Ages-as if the Prophet must rummage in a magpie’s nest to stock a king’s treasury! There are countless parallels, many of them very instructive, among the customs and religious of mankind, to what the Mormons do. But there is a world of difference between Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews and the book of Isaiah, or between the Infancy Gospels and the real Gospels, no matter how many points of contact one may detect between them. 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. ((The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment, intro))

Instead of making Joseph out as someone he clearly was not (a one-of-a-kind religious scholar of the most keen intellect and a knowledge a good two hundred years ahead of his time), it makes much more sense to me that he was actually a prophet of God who received the ordinances of the temple in the same way the ancients did, by revelation from God.

“You Don’t Speak About the Temple” Says Bushman

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Dr. Richard BushmanI have just recently begun reading Dr. Richard Bushman’s prominent Rough Stone Rolling biography of the prophet Joseph Smith. I have found it very insightful and excellent, and I’m sure I will share things here that relate to the temple as I come upon them in the book.

This morning, I read a Deseret News article this morning which reported on a talk that Dr. Bushman gave at Weber State University on March 5th. One of the main subjects that Bushman spoke about is Mormonism’s acceptance in America, and the troubles which surround that acceptance. One of those troubles stems from the LDS practice of keeping the temple secret. The report states:

“It is true that we are in a sense secret,” Bushman said. “It will be difficult to remove the suspicions when there is a certain fact to it.”

Bushman said he doesn’t like when Mormons say the temple is not secret, that it is sacred.

“It is secret,” he said. But he appreciates how excellent Mormons are at creating sacred spaces.

“Those temple spaces are just different from the rest of the world,” Bushman said after watching people walk silently with arms folded through the Manhattan Temple before it was dedicated. The process to be able to go into a Mormon temple evolves around keeping it sacred and at the same time, secret.

“Important as anything,” Bushman said, “is you don’t speak about the temple, even to those who go to the temple.”

[Read more…]

A Doorkeeper in the House of the Lord

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Stone lions that flank the entrance of the New York Public Library

Stone lions that flank the entrance of the New York Public Library

I attended an endowment session in the Mount Timpanogos temple early this morning. It was a marvelous experience. I loved walking into the temple while it was dark outside, lights illuminating the angel Moroni, and then later walking out in the early light of the morning, a haze blanketing the ground. In fact, I think it was my first visit to the temple in the morning hours. The dawn light that begins to stream through the windows into those hallowed halls from the rising sun, reflecting off mirrors and chandeliers, is inspiring and beautiful.

I love the temple workers, many of whom sit or stand in the hallways or doorways, kindly directing temple patrons in the right direction. It seems like a menial task, one that they attend to for hours at a time, but it is an important one. They help get things done, keep things in order, protect the sanctity of the temple, and allow the temple patrons to enjoy their experience in the temple. They remind me of something Hugh Nibley once said:

I have always been furiously active in the Church, but I have also be a nonconformist and have never held any office of rank in anything. I have undertaken many assignments given me by the leaders, and much of the work has been anonymous: no rank, recognition, no anything. While I have been commended for some things, they were never things which I considered most important. That was entirely a little understanding between me and my Heavenly Father which I have thoroughly enjoyed, though no one else knows anything about it. . . . I would rather be a doorkeeper in the House of the Lord than mingle with the top brass in the tents of the wicked. ((John Welch, A Doorkeeper in the House of the Lord, <http://farms.byu.edu/publications/nibleywelch.php>))

Nibley clearly knew where he held his priorities and focus in life. He didn’t care about the fads, fashions, trends, and popularity of the day. There were greater things to attend to. However small a task may seem of attending to a door or hallway in the temple is, it is a job which has been commissioned by the Lord for service in His holy house. I can’t think of many more worthy ways to spend one’s time than in the Lord’s service.

In another reference to doorkeepers, Nibley once described a figure in an ancient Egyptian papyrus (Herweben) thus:

A lion-headed figure, designated as “Doorkeeper of the House of Truth” (lions still guard the doors of our courthouses), conducts Herweben to a door or screen that is opened. ((Hugh Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, 2005, p. 93))

Indeed, you can still see large stone-sculpted lions, or doorkeepers, in front of many government, financial, or intellectual buildings today, which symbolically guard the entrances from those who are not permitted to enter, and to protect that which is held sacred inside.

What Good are the Scattered Fragments?

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Hugh Nibley

Hugh Nibley

Since the first day I picked up a book by Hugh Nibley I have been fascinated by the parallels which he taught exist between our practices and those of the ancients.  Many critics of the Church claim that Joseph Smith made this all up, that he was a charlatan, a deceiver, and a con-man.  However, making that broad claim that Joseph invented it all from his fantastic mind (for even our critics offer him that), or that he plundered the practices from others, still fails to explain why parts and pieces of the gospel structure are to be found scattered around all the world in almost every time, place, and culture.

But what good does it do us in studying the ancient practices?  Why is it so interesting and pertinent to our modern-day Church?  Why does looking back help us look forward?  Nibley gave a good explanation:

Latter-day Saints believe that their temple ordinances are as old as the human race and represent a primordial revealed religion that has passed through alternate phases of apostasy and restoration which have left the world littered with the scattered fragments of the original structure, some more and some less recognizable, but all badly damaged and out of proper context. . . .

Among the customs and religions of mankind there are countless parallels, many of them very instructive, to what the Mormons do. . . . But what about the Egyptian rites? What are they to us? They are a parody, an imitation, but, as such, not to be despised. For all the great age and consistency of their rites and teachings, which certainly command respect, the Egyptians did not have the real thing, and they knew it. . . . in the words of Abraham, “Pharaoh, being a righteous man,” was ever “seeking earnestly to imitate that order established by the fathers in the first generations, in the days of the first patriarchal reign” (Abraham 1:26), for he “would fain claim [the priesthood]” (Abraham 1:27). If the Egyptian endowment was but an imitation, it was still a good one, and we may be able to learn much from it, just as we may learn much about the early church from the vagaries of the gnostics. But it is not for a moment to be equated with the true and celestial order of things. . . . What these few bits of added information do is to supply a new dimension to . . . [our temple] experience, along with the assurance that a wealth of newly found records confirms the fundamental thesis of its antiquity and genuineness. (Hugh Nibley, The Message of the Joseph Smith Papyri, xxvii-xxix)

Harold Bloom on the Essence of Religion

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Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Today the LDS Newsroom has an article on life and death, following the passing of President Hinckley.  I like the quote that they gave from Harold Bloom:

Regarding the undaunted way in which Latter-day Saints confront death, well-known literary scholar Harold Bloom proclaimed the following: “What is the essence of religion? … Religion rises inevitably from our apprehension of our own death. To give meaning to meaninglessness is the endless quest of all religion. … Of all religions that I know, the one that most vehemently and persuasively defies and denies the reality of death is the original Mormonism of the Prophet, Seer, and Revelator Joseph Smith.”

The entire reason for religion is man’s apprehension of death.  Hugh Nibley was wont to quote a poem by A.E. Housman on this subject of man’s preoccupation with life and death:

. . . men at whiles are sober
And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
Their hands upon their hearts. ((Qtd. in Nibley, “Prophets and Glad Tidings,” The World and the Prophets, 259-67, http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/bookschapter.php?bookid=54&chapid=515))

Man has not been able to get away from death.  Man has thought about it since time began, and it preoccupies his thoughts day in and day out.  It is part of the “terrible questions” as Nibley put it, that man has made since the start.  Where did we come from?  Why are we here?  Where are we going?  What is the purpose of this life?  What will happen to me after I die?  What will I do for eternity?  It is the subject of much art, literature, and religion since the beginning.  If there is one thing that man fears most, it is probably death, and the unknown that accompanies it.

But the Latter-day Saints know differently.  We thank God for a latter-day prophet, Joseph Smith, who restored the truths of the physical and bodily resurrection, of the sealing of eternal families, and the principles of eternal life and exaltation, and what eternity consists of, teachings we learn about and make a promised reality in the temples of the Lord.