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ocular-intercourse · 4 years ago

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okay @mangosandchili 14 OC questions instead of 16 cause ned picked the other two 🙏

actually.. let me split this character-wise so I won’t take 100 years

finn gets first draw always

🌲 What is the kindest thing your OC has ever done for someone? What is the kindest thing someone has ever done for them? On the flip side, what is the worst thing your OC has done to another person?

Hmm hm kindness seems like a weird concept to think about for Finn. Cause yeah, he is excessively, self-sacrificingly kind, but he can also turn that off pretty easily when the other end does not deserve it in his eyes. The kindest thing he has ever done, continues to do sometimes, absolutely misplaced, is caring for his father, not giving up on him. Back when they were still living together, when his dad was too drunk to function, he’d clean him up, clean up around him, sober him up, even after the beatings started, forgiving him over and over. The kindest thing someone did to him was probably his mom getting him out of that situation.

The worst thing he has done to somebody else.. what an absolute nightmare question for Finn hasdghj. Take your pick between not magically being able to keep Kitty alive, continuously cheating on Emily like the single greatest asshole in the world or leaving Shawn straight after he tried to kill himself… he’d probably be able to come up with some other things that seem to be true in his eyes but might not be quite as bad as he sees them.

🌳 What does your OC do when they see others upset or in pain? An upset friend? A stranger?

He helps. Stops what he is doing and runs to help the more he loves the person. He could be standing on the court of some major tournament and drop the bat to go and help one of his loved ones, you can call him in the middle of the night and be sure to count on his help. Nothing in his own personal life can be more important than helping a friend in distress, so he’ll almost always put himself second. And if he does not, for whatever reason, no matter how justified, he’ll feel guilty about it. The same goes for strangers, in a way, of course not quite as extreme. But if he’d see someone in need of help, he won’t walk past it. He’s the type of person, when you’re in public and something happens that makes everyone uncomfortable, makes them pointedly stare someplace else or walk off hurriedly, he’d be the one to step in with no regard to his personal safety. He’d be the guy trying to safe someone from getting hit with a car, or step in between fights, argue with the police, make sure a person gets home safe.. But he also thinks ahead about what he could do for people. I made a post a while back about him being the kind of person to bring homeless people warm drinks and shoes in winter. I’m not quite sure what drives him, I think it’s one part his personal experience, knowing how it feels when nobody helps, but also him feeling guilty, feeling like he is a burden and a bad person and he needs to counterweight somehow.

🌿 What is something true about your OC that they refuse to admit about themselves? Is there any reason to this besides embarrassment?

He will NOT. EVER. let people tell him he is/would be a good father. He is though, he’s been practically raising his little half-brother since he was three (he’s seven now) since his mother is.. uh.. not exactly full-time mom material. And the kid is so good, he’s great actually, smart as hell, already running circles around him, skipped some classes (actually I’m thinking about it more and more but what used to be a he when i came up with him might actually be a trans girl but we’ll see so I’m sticking with describing Bryant as him atm, that’d be something that develops in the story in the future). But if somebody tells him what a good job he did/does with Bryant Finn would shut that down immediately. And then go and cry about it. He gets really panicky about the thought of being a father, since fathers in his family have traditionally not been especially great at it. There are arguments between him and Shawn, who says that Finn worrying so much about being a good father would already make him a hell of a better father than he ever had.

🍃 Describe a regular day for your OC. What is their schedule (if they have one).

He’s developed a pretty good routine since he went pro, which helps a lot with his moods and all. He will get up early, 7-ish, go for a run, come home, make breakfast, a lot, cause he has to eat constantly to keep mass. Then it’s time for some “paperwork”, organizing stuff, calls with sponsors and partners and whoever wants something of him, photoshoots, interviews, collabs. Cooking, eating. Meeting with his trainer, training or training solo. Depending on the day picking up Bryant from school and hanging out with him/meeting his sister/mother/other friends. Cooking, eating. On every other day streaming, mostly some games, sometimes cooking, sometimes just hanging out with fans. Mania/depression will of course throw some wrenches in there but he’s been pretty good at keeping things together lately. If he’d be back with Shawn he’d also trim all the job stuff down a bunch, a lot of his excessive training atm is very much just to keep himself occupied.

🍁 What is your OC’s most traumatic experience? (If they don’t have just one traumatic experience either pick one or describe them all!)

Ha, laughing at the describe them all.. let’s not. The biggest is definitely losing Kitty. It has completely, both positively and negatively, marked his life. It made him develop his strict anti-drug stance and the focus on sticking things through to avoid hurting his family. Sometimes he thinks back to it, if Kitty would not have died, who he would have become. He’s mostly sure he’d be the one who had killed himself instead, without the trauma of losing her he would not have thought about what that would do to others as much. He’d most definitely be an addict in one way or another. He would not like himself very much. He also ABSOLUTELY hates that thought cause he can’t bare seeing anything positive in her death, he refuses to think about it that way. He’d bring her back in a heartbeat, regardless of what that would do to him. So instead he is much more focused on the fear of losing his loved ones, of somehow being responsible for it either directly or indirectly by not seeing it and not helping.

🍄 How would your OC react to the death of a friend/family member/loved one? Is there anyone they can confide in?

Oh boy how fitting. It was already the absolute worst thing to happen to him, knocked him out for quite a while, people had to babysit him constantly, he dropped out of school, it took him a lot of time and energy to resemble a human being again. If it would happen again I think he would just stop functioning. He wants to follow but promised himself not to, so he can’t, but that does not make him feel better. I think he would have to be hospitalized in some way or another, stay in a clinic for a while. Other than that Shawn and Raphael would be the ones he would confide in the most. His sister too, in a way, but with her he would be much more worried about putting all this negative shit on her.

🌾 What would your OC be like if they were evil. Or if they’re already evil what would they be like as the good guy?

Oh I’m excited about this question for some of the others lol. It’s really hard to picture Finn as an evil person. He sure likes to believe he’s an unlovable asshole but he’s really not, that’s at the core of his character. Evil Finn would have married Emily and been an asshole about it, cheating and not being safe about it. He’d be a drug dealer probably, that’s the worst thing regular Finn could imagine himself to be. He’d just be bitter and aggressive and living it out, enjoying dragging others into the muck with him.

💐 How would your OC react to somebody telling them that they love them? (+ bonus give another characters/OC name!)

Definitely depends on whether the intention is platonic or romantic. Emily and Raphael showing romantic interest would just make him sad? Melancholic? Guilty. Cause he wants to make them happy, but he can’t give them what they want, even if he loves them, he does not love them that way. Shawn telling him he loves him would just.. break a dam, he’d definitely cry and be absolutely overwhelmed and relieved. Also a little scared. Anybody else saying it would just prompt him to, uh, probably stop seeing them. Flight instinct. He is so not over what happened between him and Shawn he will run for the hills at any sign of a potential relationship.

🌷 What does your OC hate about themself? What lies about themself do they believe? On the flip side, What does your OC love about themself?

I love these questions, they were very much made for the way I write characters lol. Especially Finn, cause a lot of him is just being tortured by his brain and him knowing that, but still believing in it. He focuses on the bad things he has done, and there’s been a bunch, a lot of it definitely fueled by being bipolar, but he can’t accept that as a reason, he does not want to make excuses for his actions. So he just sees how he has hurt people in the past and deduces that he has to be an asshole. It is really hard to convince him otherwise. Even if he logically can understand that it is unlikely that people think this way about him, it’s still an underlying fear beneath everything and always some part of his motivation. So he’s weak, and a coward and selfish and a burden, unlovable. He definitely hates being impulsive and aggressive sometimes, there’s been a hundred times when he was in a fight, an unnecessary fight he couldn’t keep himself from starting, and saying things/doing things he did not mean to. He hates this fact, that he can lose control like that, it scares him.

On the flipside, he is somewhat narcissistic. If he does not hate himself for a second he considers himself to be pretty damn great. He prides himself on the way he takes care of other people. On how far he’s come, both mentally and professionally. He knows he’s a good musician, a good cook. He’s the kind of person that would refuse to work with others in a group project cause he knows he’s insufferable and would not be happy with other people’s work affecting his evaluation. He can’t watch other people do things he would do a different way without wanting to step in and correct them. But all of that ego is just a balloon that pops pretty quickly and he’s back to believing he’s the worst at everything.

🥀 What is something your OC blames themselves for and is it really their fault? Does it keep them up at night and is there any lingering trauma?

I like how these questions are all just building up on one another. He blames himself for not seeing how miserable Kitty had been, for having her persuade him to travel without her when he kinda knew he should probably worry about her, for not somehow having been able to, I don’t know, just know what was going to happen and act differently, or just generally for not being enough of a good force in her life for her to cling on to. That’s all just doubling down when Shawn tries to kill himself and he once again feels like it was his personal failure. Not being good enough or attentive enough, probably even being part of the reason why. There’s a whole lot of trauma there. Of course none of it is true. Kitty knew exactly how attentive Finn had been to her, it’s the reason she made sure he was away when she went through with it. The same goes for Shawn, where the reason was exactly the opposite of killing themselves because Finn was not enough, but rather because Finn was too much, too good, and they would just be bad for him if they would stay alive. Finn can’t see that angle, at all, if he did he would not accept it. It keeps him up in his worst nights. If/when he gets back together with Shawn it would be a major fear for him, Shawn having a relapse, Shawn dying of an overdose, intentional or not, Shawn getting to such a low point again without him realizing or being able to do anything about it. I imagine he would sometimes get a bit hysteric about stuff, if he does not know what Shawn is currently doing or something seems off, he is really good at working himself up into a frenzy about small stuff that feeds into his worst fears.

🌺 In what situation would your OC be pushed to commit an act of violence? Would they go as far to kill someone if they had to? How would this affect them and their relationships with others?

Well he’s certainly been in a bunch of fights, cause he’s provocative, he’s great at making people lose it, sometimes intentional sometimes not. He’s also not good at not reacting to provocation himself. Racism certainly feeds into that a lot. He’s had some manic phases where he was very much looking for fights. I think he would be able to kill someone, but only in the moment and only if it’s to protect himself or somebody else. He would not deal with it all too well, it would haunt him. He would think about that person having a life, a family, loved ones of their own. He would think about putting an end to somebody’s consciousness, that last fading moment, it’s all over, because of him, and he can’t take that back. I feel like the people around him would never be able to punish him for it as much as he would do himself. If he would have killed for Shawn’s sake, he, Shawn, would probably struggle a bit with accepting what has happened, because of him, what Finn had to do, because of him. He would be angry for a while, directed at Finn and himself. Finn would not be able to handle that very well, he can’t bare the thought of being hated be Shawn, he is so scared of being seen as bad, even though part of him has himself convinced that people see him this way anyways. He’s just scared of confirming what he already suspects.

🌸 What would your OC do if they were given god-like powers or the ability to change anything about the world for a whole day?

I think Finn would have a lot of problems with that timeframe. Cause there is not a lot of things god-like powers are worth of that would make sense for such a short amount of time. He would think about ending hunger and homelessness, discrimination, racism, the entire system, he would bring Kitty back, he would want to make everything okay.. but only for a day?? And then go back to square one? We would rather not change anything than have something great for a second only for it to be taken away again. So it would all be about creating a nice experience with the people he loves, allowing them all to do something they have wanted to do their whole lives.

🌼 Describe one of your OC’s worst nightmares.

Oh I think I mentioned them all already. Family members and close friends dying, or other terrible things happening to them. Alternatively finding out that everybody hates him and he’s hurt all the people he loves without realizing it, that they all think he and his moods are a burden and they’d all be happier without him.

🌻 What advice would your OC give to their younger self? What advice does your OC need now?

Don’t try to stick to how you think things are supposed to be as much versus doing what you actually want to do. Don’t bend and break yourself to fit some sort of premade mold that society created for you. He has done a lot of hurtful things to himself and others only cause he tried to play by the rules. He dated Emily for much longer, trying to present himself as straight, than he should have, experimenting on the side and hurting her that way. He excused his father’s behavior way too much, being the filial son he’s supposed to be, cause it’s family and family sticks together and forgives. He’s hated himself so much for his illness, trying to force it away instead of accepting that it’s there and acting accordingly to get a better grip on it. He still hasn’t outed himself to his father or the world, since he became somewhat famous, because he’s really insecure about it changing the way people will look at him. That’s probably what he could use good advice on these days. He knows, somewhere, that he should out himself, that it is a fantastic thing to do, in his position, to work towards change. He’s just not quite ready to pay the price and he feels awfully guilty about it. Someone should tell him about all the people he could be representing, but also about how much living his life without hiding anything will free him.

#mangosandchili #ocs #finn #he sounds way more unhappy than he actually is these days!!!#tho it's always kinda one harsh blow away from falling apart sooo #long post

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turtlestanfirst · 6 years ago

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To apologize for doing nothing productive on this blog over the past few days i offer design ideas for the Rising Heroes AU babies???

Tora:

Age: 17

Gender: female

Sexuality: lesbian af

Parents: Raph and Atari

Personality: firey and hot-headed, but she's certainly inherited both her parents' soft hearted ways. She comes off as intimidating, but deep down she's actually goofy and fun-loving, even sentimental at times. Above all else, though, she has Raph's protective spirit and takes her position as eldest sister and eldest cousin very seriously. She's sort of the lieutenant of the team; not quite the leader, but she's always ready to take charge and help the team to victory.

Appearance: tall and stocky, wild brown curls, brown eyes, bright green skin (tougher like a turtle's skin), a flatter, softer shell on her back

Fun facts: she loves hip hop and hamburgers more than legally allowed, and hates every single horror movie ever. She'd much rather watch something funny or romantic

Aries:

Age: 16

Gender: trans guy

Sexuality: bi af

Parents: Donnie and Talise

Personality: He's about as chill as they come. It takes a lot to get him to panic, but once he reaches that point he's absolutely hysterical. He can act cocky and sarcastic like both his parents, but is just as empathetic and sensitive to emotion as Talise, and as such is the best listener in the group. While he loves a good fight, he puts his best talents to work as the team's researcher- the spy if you will. He can learn anything about anyone and is slowly developing his own mental manipulation abilities to really up his spying game. He's clever and smart, taking after both parents in Donnie's love of science and Talise's fascination with the supernatural.

Appearance: dark blonde hair, heterochromatic eyes (the left one is grey and the right one looks almost violet), pale green skin with some darker jade green splotches on his face, arms, and torso, slightly taller than Tora, lanky form, sharp canine teeth (inherited from Donnie bc in this AU the purple boi has those softshell fangs), freckles on his cheeks

Fun facts: when they found out they were having a baby, Donnie and Talise had one major problem; he wanted a scientific name while they wanted a more magical name. They argued right up until Talise have birth, and after seeing them suffer like that (their labor was not an easy one), Donnie decided that they deserved to pick the name for their son after all that work. Moved by his decision, Talise picked a name that fitted both their tastes; a constellation and a zodiac sign. Aries is a talented drummer and loves old rock (as do hos cousins Enzo and Ezzie, who are good guitarists and singers. They have a lil rock trio and it's pure and good)

Lorenzo:

Age: 15 (the older twin by 2 hours)

Gender: demiboy

Sexuality: pan af!

Parents: Leo and Vinny

Personality: He might be just a tiny bit reckless, but he makes up for his impulsive nature with an unyielding bravery. He's every bit as adventurous as his mother, and as charming as his dad. He feels like he needs to live up to their legacies as a Battle Nexus champion and the leader of a team of ninjas. Unlike Leo, however, his son starts out as the leader, with Tora there to balance him out and support him along the way. He can act with a lot of confidence even if he doesn't feel so sure of himself. Surprisingly, he has a quiet side as well, and can be very gentle and understanding from time to time.

Appearance: short, dark brown hair, lots of tiny light blue freckles, several bright red markings on his face, three bright red markings on each of his arms and thighs, two large, bright red splotches on his lower back, yellow markings on his tail, lime green skin, a flatter shell on his back, about the same height as Tora, lean frame, long limbs that give him a sort of gangly look, brown eyes.

Fun facts: Enzo is a sucker for comics, and loves to draw his own (only Ezzie has ever seen them and she's been sworn to secrecy about them). Not only is he good at writing comics, he's a talented songwriter as well! He writes rap rhymes, poems and ballads and they're absolutely stunning.

Esmeralda:

Age: 15 (the younger twin by 2 hours)

Gender: female

Sexuality: bi af

Parents: Leo and Vinny

Personality: The mellow twin and the strategist of the team, she's a logical thinker with a knack for getting out of a tough situation with brilliant plans. She's snarky and cocky most of the time, but she's got her soft spots and they show themselves every now and again. She's an innovative thinker and shows an incentive spirit her uncle Donnie hopes to help nurture. She's not likely to start a fight, but she sure as hell can finish one.

Appearance: Shoulder length brown hair, brown eyes, three light blue spots on both her cheeks, bright red markings over her eyes like her father's, three yellow markings on both her arms and thighs, bright red markings on her tail, slightly darker shade of green than her twin, flatter shell on her back, second-shortest person on the team (and highly bitter about it).

Fun facts: Ezzie has a photogenic memory, she can remember a surprising amount of information just by reading and looking something over for a few minutes. This has definitely helped her learn more languages than anyone else in the family; she's fluent in English, Spanish, Japanese, and French.

Risa:

Age: 14

Gender: nonbinary

Sexuality: pan af

Parents: Mikey and Rhys

Personality: Tough little cookie right here. The official muscle of the team, they're surprisingly aggressive when in battle. Out of it, they've still got an aggressive streak, but it's overshadowed by their friendly energetic nature. They're very confident and is a jack of all trades, showing talent in all sorts of fields.

Appearance: Mink yokai; brown fur all over her body, grown longer on her head to resemble hair, amber eyes, shortest member of the team, stocky build, fairly muscular

Fun facts: They aren't pyrokinetic like their father, but they do use his kusari-fundo as their primary weapon, and under Talise's guidance has become surprisingly familiar with handling the fire demon. They've taken a real interest in the supernatural, and wants to learn about all the mythical beings on Earth.

Taigen:

Age: 14

Gender: male

Sexuality: gay af

Parents: Raph and Atari

Personality: The real heart of the team, he's the one who looks for peaceful solutions to conflicts. He's thoughtful and intuitive, very in touch with emotions. He always has a calm disposition, and is a bit of a pacifist. He doesn't like fighting, and is always confident there's another way to solve a problem.

Appearance: the only human in the group; pale skin, brown eyes that turn violet when he's tapping into his powers, shoulder length black hair shaved on the left side, light dusting of freckles on his cheeks, shoulders, and arms, shorter than Tora and Enzo but taller than Ezzie, lean, slim form

Fun facts: He was born with psychic abilities, and Talise is training him in the art of controlling those abilities. When he's not training, he likes to garden! He loves growing edible things, much to the joy of the family cooks Mikey and Enzo.

#rising heroes au #i'm slowly working on maybe drawing them so we'll see how that goes

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nox-lee · 7 years ago

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My Beloved is Mine and I am His: 13x02 and Song of Solomon

One of the first things I wrote when I was brand new to the fandom was a short fic with Castiel reading and re-enacting sections from the Song of Songs to Dean. At the time, I thought it was too cheesy and trite to fit within the realm of Supernatural, and I deleted it in a bout of frustration. I am regretting that today like you wouldn’t believe.

I’m a bit of a bible nerd. I took a lot of theology and religion classes in my undergrad. That was nearly a decade ago though, so my current knowledge is a bit shaky. Here’s what I can recall about Song of Solomon that may or may not inform your reading of 13x02 and SPN in general.

A disclaimer: I am sick and drug addled, so please forgive any incoherent rambling. There is a lot of irrelevant gibberish, so I’ve tried to highlight the bits relevant to SPN.

To begin!

Solomon is the heir of King David (whom you may recall had a passionate same-sex relationship with Jonathan.) Solomon’s reign is idealized, much like David’s was, and it was under Solomon that the First Temple was built. Solomon is famous for his wisdom and his large concubine of women. Notably, he settled a dispute between two women who were fighting over a child. He offered to cut it in half, revealing the true mother who could not bring herself to see the child hurt. This bears resemblance to Jack’s situation right now, torn between two fathers.

Song of Solomon (also known as Song of Songs, or the Canticles) is often attributed to Solomon because he is mentioned. However, the text is dated much later, and certain Persian words and influences in the text suggest a post-exilic era as the earliest possible date. Some scholars date it even later.

Song of Solomon is part of the collection in the Hebrew Bible known as The Writings (or the Kethuvim). It’s the third major division in the Hebrew Bible, and one of the last to be adopted into canon. It’s a bit of a catch all category that contains vastly diverse content including poetic works (Psalms, Song of Songs), and wisdom literature (Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes), to name a few.

Most of these writings (including Song of Songs) date to the post-exilic era. That is, after the Babylonian conquest, and during Persian rule. The nation of Judah perished in the fires that were set to Solomon’s temple. Post-exile, Judea was experiencing a theological crisis in the face of the apparent absence of Yahweh, or God. David’s dynasty has collapsed, and we see theological despair reflected in writings like Job and Ecclesiastes that ponder the problem of evil, the absence of God, and undeserved suffering. Song of Solomon, and other writings like it, were written at a time when things felt hopeless and there were fears that God has abandoned his people. It is oddly fitting then, that Jack should open to this particular part of the bible.

The Kethuvim mark a shift in religious thought. Previous writings centred on an independent kingdom involved in international politics. After the fall of the temple, we see an exiled, diasporic religion now led by priests instead of divinely appointed kings. Religious leaders and writers had to adjust and re-envision their scriptural teachings. Gone was the simplistic thesis that equated prosperity with religious obedience and misery with sin. The authors of the books known as The Writings were questioning conventional scripture of the time and creatively refocusing their theology.

Persian rule also introduced new religious ideas, namely Zoroastrianism, which came to influence later Judeo-Christian ideas. Zoroastrianism viewed the world as dualistic, ruled by two opposing powers of good (light) and evil (dark) and had hierarchies of angels and demons. Until this time, most biblical literature did not give name or ranks to angels, nor did they depict satan as an actual autonomous figure. We have Zoroastrianism to thank for that, and its influence on biblical writings can start to be felt around the post-exile period (i.e. the time during which Song of Solomon was written). The book of Daniel, for example, names the angel Gabriel, and the Book of Tobit names the demon Asmodeus. (In Tobit, Asmodeus is a jealous demon who kills each successive husband of Sarah on her wedding night and is later exorcised. He is someone who keeps lovers apart and keeps them from consummating their love.)

Songs of Songs is essentially a collection of erotic love poems. The book defies any easy interpretation or classification, and it stands out in stark contrast to the rest of biblical canon. It’s a completely unabashed, uninhibited celebration of sex, with little evidence to suggest that the lovers are married. They do not live together, and yearn intensely for one another when apart. It’s the subject of numerous feminist readings, as it’s one of few books of the bible to give a voice to women’s thoughts and feelings. Here, those are romantic and erotic feelings.

Don’t believe me? Read this:

My beloved thrust his hand into the opening, and my inmost being yearned for him. I arose to open to my beloved, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with liquid myrrh, upon the handles of the bolt. (Song of Solomon 5: 4-5)

This is some raunchy stuff for the bible! And all of this is sharply contrasted with the sexual ethos elsewhere in the bible which imposes harsh penalties for sexual misconduct, and places great emphasis on the institution of marriage. Deuteronomy (a book of the bible about sexual and social control) calls for the death penalty in many cases

There was understandably some debate as to whether this particular bit of writing warranted inclusion in the biblical canon of scripture. Rabbi Akiba was a key figure in the development of the Hebrew canon. While he argued strongly against the inclusion of certain books of the Apocrypha, he advocated for the Song of Songs, calling it the Holy of Holies. Its sanctity was preserved by interpreting it as an allegory for the love between Yahweh and Israel, and later by Christians as the love between Christ and the Church. Interestingly, God is not mentioned once in the entire book. (The only other book of the Bible where God is not mentioned even once is Esther.)

And yet, this book was called the Holiest of Holies. Love is championed here above all else.

I really don’t think we’ve seen the last of Chuck. Someone (I’m sorry, I can’t remember who!) pointed out the rainbow glare that happened in 13x01 when Dean was praying as a sign of God’s promise. (Edit: I’m an idiot. I reblogged the damn thing and it was just a couple posts down. It was @gneisscastiel who made the beautiful post about lens flares and pointed out the rainbow as God’s promise.) The inclusion of Song of Solomon in 13x02, besides being a blatant callout to Dean and Cas, suggests this is also about God and his people. I’d also like to suggest that Song of Solomon is a book that asks us to think broadly about canon. What constitutes canon? How is it formed? And I do mean canon here in the sense not just of biblical canon, but of fandom canon. Who decides what canon is? Is there room in canon for outliers like the Song of Solomon? The answer, as the show has just demonstrated, should be a resounding yes.

Onto the destiel side of things, which I’m sure has been discussed already. Song of Solomon contains some of the most beautiful poetry in the Bible. It is full of similes and references to nature (and arguably Eden/Paradise). It is deeply rural and pastoral, with an appreciation of agriculture, nature, and animal life. The multiple reference to sheep in 13x02 were no coincidence, I’m sure. Castiel has long been associated with natural, rural things: flowers, bees, goats, fish, etc. (If the Void is depicted as a garden and Cas has been spending his time under apple trees, I’m going to lose my freaking mind.) Is he being associated with sheep now? As someone who has been led by God, other angels, duty, Dean, Jack… perhaps this is time for Cas to choose a direction for himself. Sheep and lambs in the bible are also frequently marked for sacrifice. They represent symbolic innocence, and in the New Testament, Christ is called the “Lamb of God.” I definitely think Cas is being set up as a Christ-like figure with his death and anticipated resurrection. If 13x02 made anything clear, it’s that Cas is the answer the whatever problem faces Dean, Sam, and Jack alike.

Lamentations might have been a more appropriate choice for the episode. It’s also a book of poetry, but one that evokes pain and loss. But they chose instead to give us the book that celebrates love and hope amidst despair. That’s a choice that feel very deliberate, and makes me cautiously optimistic for Dean and Cas.

In closing, here are some passages from Song of Solomon, and the ones I feel are most closely tied to a destiel narrative.

“You have ravished my heart with a glance of your eyes.” (Song of Solomon 4:9)

“Set me a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm…” (Song of Solomon 8:6)

“… For love is strong as death, passion fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.” (Song of Solomon 8:6)

“I will seek him whom my soul loves. I sought him, but found him not.” (Song of Solomon 3:2)

“My beloved is mine and I am his.” (Song of Solomon 2:16)

#spn season 13 #spn 13x02 #song of songs #song of solomon #destiel #bible #spn meta #?

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sleepyfan-blog · 7 years ago

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Two-part Drabble Game: 10 - After a near-death experience & 16 - “There’s nothing to be scared of, okay? I’m right here.” for Connor/ConHayth uwu

@balsaminaceae

Fandom: Assassin’s Creed

Characters: Connor and Haytham Kenway

warnings: incest tw, modern au, stabbing tw

pairing: ConHayth

word count:1,930

summary: A normal work day for Connor ends terribly.

Connor was in the break room, eating lunch with his fellow coworkers and watching the tv. His father was at a press conference and they’d decided to tune in to see what he was talking about. Most of his coworkers seemed to be only half listening, but Connor, as ever, was completely focused on Haytham… Although the young man could readily admit that he was enjoying listening to the sound of his father’s voice, though the fact that Abstergo was expanding their veterinary clinic program from the initial three clinics that they’d opened last year to another eight - three outside of the US, in other countries that Abstergo had offices and other work buildings in - was rather exciting.

The young man had been tempted to apply for one of the veterinarian positions at the first three clinics… But they were a bit far from where he and his father lived - and with a closer Abstergo Employee housing… It was possible that he might have been tempted to move… At least while his father was jet-setting around the world for work purposes, although it would be very strange to be living in two apartments, and not something that Connor was very interested in… Besides while Connor had loved working as a vet in the small village that he had settled into while he had been there…

The setting of being back in a veterinary clinic might remind him of the small village, and while he knew that the anarchists were working against his father and would very clearly do anything in order to achieve their goals… Including and especially if they had the chance to kill his father, the young man still occasionally felt guilty for just up and leaving them as he had done … In order to protect himself from kidnapping… But still. Occasionally the feelings of guilt would remain, despite the fact that Connor was very much aware that he had left in order to protect himself… The young vet worried that he might feel guilty working in such a place - or it would remind him of where he’d worked previously…

Besides, he really enjoyed working in the research department with the raptors. Connor made sure to focus more on Haytham again as the other continued to talk, doing his best to not get distracted by the small smile on his father’s face - or the way the other’s tie brought out the blue in his father’s eyes. Haytham concluded the speech and was met with dozens of questions - each of which his father expertly answered. Once the press release was over, Corbin - one of his coworkers - switched the channel to a music channel while everyone finished the last of their lunches.

The young man was headed home from work - it was about a mile walk, but Connor enjoyed it, and it allowed him to exercise his legs a little before and after work every day. He stopped for a moment, frowning a little as he thought the saw someone familiar, sitting at a nearby café table. Was… Was that Myriam? He blinked in surprised and frowned a little, glad that he was on the other side of the street - even if she wasn’t Myriam, the resemblance was uncanny - and given the fact that she’d been directly involved in stealing the… Piece of Eden? That’s what the bitter old man who’d tried to take it from him had called it. Not that Connor had let him do such a thing.

He cautiously made his way down the sidewalk, hoping that if Myriam was, for some reason, at that café, that she wouldn’t notice him among the dozens and dozens of people walking on both sides of the streets - or through the cars that honked and slowly rumbled their way down the road. Not that he glanced at her more than one or two more times, as he didn’t want her to potentially see him looking at her, having recognized her if the person he was trying to get past really was Myriam.

A lightly accented voice sounded in his ears, right behind him, causing the young man to startle and try to get out of the way, but for several moments, whoever it was managed to hold him completely still which was a rather terrifying feat in and of itself “It’s a pity that he’s got you so deeply under the spell of the Piece of Eden. Hopefully this will wake you from it and you will realize the truth.”

“Let me g-mmph!” Connor tried to yell as loud as he could, but the person muffled him with one of their hands, as he felt something cold and sharp stab into his back. There was a cloth in the other’s hands and he tried not to inhale, but as he struggled, he found that he desperately needed to breathe and something that was quite possibly chloroform caused a deep darkness to overtake him. He heard shouting and felt the person let him go - and the sound of running as he passed out.

Connor woke up with a pounding headache, in a room with too much white and too much light. He covered his face with one of his hands as he groaned and tried to sit up, hissing in pain as his lower back ached. Memories of what had happened last filled him and the young man sat bolt up right, eyes switching to his second sight, despite the pain and the dizziness that was coursing through his body. He didn’t see anyone who was an enemy nearby… But he also didn’t see anyone who was a definite friend, either, which made the young vet rather nervous.

He switched his sight back to normal, and it was clear that he was in a hospital of some kind. There was a saline drip attached to his arm, but it had a rolling base to it, which was why Connor started to get out of bed. Someone had taken his clothes and everything else that he had on him and placed it in an open-faced cubby on the far side of the room, and he was going to get to it. He didn’t know if his father had been contacted - if the hospital he’d been taken to even knew that was necessary or not..

Had he been stabbed and kidnapped by the anarchists, so that he wouldn’t be able to escape as he had the last time they’d tried kidnapping him? If so -why was he in a hospital? Unless he was in an Assassin-controlled hospital? Connor had no idea how long he’d been out for, which was why he was very carefully swinging his legs over one side of the hospital bed and very carefully shifting so that bit by bit, he was starting to put his weight on his feet, one hand on the metal post that his IV bag was attached to, the other hand firmly gripping onto the hospital bed.

Haytham burst into the room, arguing quietly with someone in scrubs - either a doctor or a nurse, Connor couldn’t entirely tell “- and I’m telling you, I am very certain that my son is in this room and I will be seeing… Connor get back into bed. Now. You were just stabbed in one of your kidneys.”

“I… Rake:ni! I… I wasn’t sure if I’d gotten kidnapped again and was hoping to get to my phone to call you.” Connor murmured gratefully, leaning back against the bed, pulling his feet up carefully.

Haytham moved further into the room, and the young man gratefully held tightly to his father’s hands when his beloved drew closer to be touched. He hadn’t realized that he’d been trembling until his father murmured gently “There’s nothing to be scared of, okay? I’m right here. I won’t let anyone try to cause you any harm.”

The younger man nodded a little, feeling himself relax a little, as he tugged the blankets up higher. He felt really cold. He blinked a little, feeling tired. “Okay. I’m glad that you’re here.” He wasn’t sure how long it would take for him to heal, but the young man was well aware that he healed a lot faster than most people. He wondered if they were in a normal hospital, or in the place where his father had been taken to, when the other had been dying. “Where are we? I mean… I know that we’re in a hospital but… Which one?”

“Meridian Park Hospital. A dozen people witnessed you suddenly collapse and start bleeding out - one of them thought to call for help - but not before someone stole your wallet - which is why no one here knew who you were, as none of them thought to go through your phone. I tracked your location through the phone and came as soon as I could. I knew that something was wrong when you weren’thome and was an hour and a half later than when I usually get home, and you hadn’t texted me about working late, orstaying out with coworkers or friends. So I’ve already dealt with the potential identity theft issues on the drive over here, so you need not worry about that… And I informed your place of work that your work-badge had been stolen when you were injured, so you need not worry about that either.” Haytham explained, and the medical staff member frowned a little at that, although Connor couldn’t imagine why - perhaps that someone would steal his wallet and ID badge, but not his (very expensive) phone?

He nodded, still feeling dizzy. “Okay… Thank… Thank you for taking care of everything and coming to find me. I… I’m tired…” Connor yawned softly, though he hid it as best as he could, not wanting to be rude.

“Then rest. I will be here when you wake, I promise.” His father murmured, voice warm and gentle as the other lightly brushed a stray lock of hair that had come undone from his braid, tucking it behind one of his ears.

Connor nodded sleepily, sending the other a small smile as he settled into bed, grumbling a little “Wish I could sleep on my stomach… Stupid cord won’t let me.” His father chuckled softly at that, a wonderful sound that helped the young man fall asleep within moments.

#stabbing tw #kidnapping mention #hospital tw #father/son incest #conhayth #conhayth ficlet #my writing #it's not as dark as the tags imply I promise

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dansphlevels · 7 years ago

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Fic Masterpost

All of the links to my fics!

^^^Will be added to with each new fic^^^

(The starred* fics are my personal favorites!)

Chaptered Fics

*But Love Is Overrated Anyways- Masterlist, Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5, Ch 6, Ch 7, Ch 8, Ch 9, Ch 10, Ch 11, Ch 12, Ch 13, Ch 14, Ch 15, Ch 16, Ch 17, Ch 18, Ch 19, Ch 20, Ch 21, Ch 22, Ch 23, Ch 24, Ch 25, ao3, wattpad, Sequel (on ao3)

Dan is an angry mutant with ability to control the cold. He shares a tent with a man Phil, who has powers over fire, but refuses to use it for evil. Dan has no such moral qualms.

Themes: superpowers, mutants, dystopian

Yellow Roses- Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4, Pt 5, Pt 6, ao3 (completed)

Dan has a wife who just loves the bouquets of flowers he keeps getting for her. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know about the attractive florist who sends hidden messages with each bouquet that her husband might just be falling for.

Themes: language of flowers, forbidden love, historial, angst and fluff and something that almost resembles smut

Smelling of Smoke (and Hearing Voices Not There)- Pt 1, Pt 2, Pt 3, Pt 4, Pt 5, Pt 6, Epilogue, ao3 (completed)

Phil was a quiet type of crazy. Dan’s eyes were so loud that they made everyone take a step back from his madness- everyone but Phil, who instead, stepped forwards.

TW: mental asylum, mentions of suicide attempts, mental illness, abuse

Themes: mental asylum, trigger warning, schitzophrenia, pyromania, insanity, dark

Wires- Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5, Ao3 (completed)

Arranged marriage AU where you are paired with a partner based on a test, and commitment is more vital in the relationship than love is. The story of Dan’s arranged marriage to Phil Lester, a man seven years his superior who postponed taking the test to work in the military.

Ebony is 17 years old and terrified to take the test and be arranged with someone. So it’s her father Dan’s duty to tell her the story of his marriage, from the initial fear and hatred that came with his obedience, to the feelings that followed .Inspired and named after the song ‘Wires’ by The Neighborhood.

TW: the very mildest mention of dubious consent, age gap (both 18+)

Themes: Arranged marriage, au, strangers to lovers, angst, fluff, romance, Phil being a sneaky snek and seducing Dan

Tomato Blush- Ch 1 (uncomplete)

Summary: HS!Au in which Dan has a rather unfortunate crush on someone who is probably way out of his league: Phil Lester. And, while Dan really doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s willing to try to figure it out along the way, which would work out great, if Dan wasn’t the most awkward person to ever exist.

A humorous story with at also deals with some of the hard truths of longing, accepting yourself, and putting yourself out there for the first time.

Short Oneshots (1-3k words)

(Oldest to Newest)

Despite the Curse 1k

Dan and Phil had been given a curse that would ultimately kill them. They have to find a way to live despite it.

Themes: curses, magic, secrets, established relationship, angst, suspense

*What the Audience Can’t See 1k

Phil is a circus performer on the joint aerial hoop and he is hopelessly in love with his partner.

TW: Mentions of vomiting

Themes: pining, circus, acrobatics, strength, unrequited love

Señor, Not Señorita 2k

Despite the flowy skirts and high heels, Dan Howell was definitely a man. Unfortunately, the waiters at the resort in Mexico they were staying at didn't always get that, leading to endless teasing from Phil, his fiancé.

Or, the one where Dan wears skirts and Phil wears a shirt covered in birds, and they decide to take an unexpected dip in the pool.

Themes: established relationship, engaged!Phan, fem!Dan, rule breaking, fluff

Backseat Bad Behavior 1k

It’s Anthony’s driving test, and he was stuck with his friends being sat in the backseat, which he’d thought would have been nice- except they weren’t as interested in the actual driving as they were with each other.

Themes: fluff, driving test, friends with benefits, fondling, fluff with like a teeny bit of something that almost resembles smut, high school au

I Won’t Help You Unless You Stop 1k

TW: mentions of self harm, relapses, scars

It wasn’t the first time Dan came into his shop, and it wouldn’t be the last. But this time, it was different. Because this time, the scars were fresh.

Themes: self harm, recovery, tattoo artist!Phil, scar coverup

*Satisfied <1k

“Ever since acting school, Dan had mastered the ability of giving people what they wanted, but never leaving them satisfied.”

Themes: Fluff, domestic, established!relationship, lil angst

*Baby 1k

TW: mentions of blood, death, violence

“You’re soft too,” Dan announced, almost too quietly to hear. “You just pretend like you’re not. But I know the truth.”

Phil snorted. “You know all my secrets, Baby.”

Dan laughed aloud. “Please. You’re in a fucking gang, I don’t think I want to know all your secrets. I don’t have that kind of time.”

Themes: gangleader!Phil, pastel!Dan, pastel but still really badass!Dan

What We Do For The Ones We Love 1k

TW: mentions of sickness, sexual immorality

Dan and Phil live in a dystopian world, with few survivors and fewer resources. When Phil needs life-saving medicine, Dan has to find a way to get it.

Bliss <1k

Day 1 of 12 Days Of Prompts (2017)

Fluffy!Phan cuddling in bed with absolutely no desire to get up.

Beautiful Browns 1.2k

Day 2 of 12 Days Of Prompts (2017)

Themes: fluff, artist!pastel!dan, artist!caring!Phil, crappy high school dating dynamics

Words Aren’t Always Needed 2.5k

Day 6 of 12 Days Of Prompts (2017)

TW: For light (but semi-frequent) cussing

Summary: After a bad reaction to painkillers administered by his dentist, Dan loses the ability to speak for a few days. Which wouldn’t be that big of a deal if they didn’t have plans, including an important business meeting and going to the Star Wars premiere.

Or, the one where Dan loses his voice and Phil has to interpret for him like an extended, inappropriately timed game of charades.

*Turquoise Stains <1k

Day 7 of 12 Days Of Prompts (2017)

Prompt: color schemes

Themes: Fluff, colors, a lil bit of fantasy

Red Nails And Chapped Lips 1.8k

Day 8 of 12 Days Of Prompts

Summary: After Dan goes and gets his nails painted at a professional salon, he and Phil embark on a quest to Target for last minute Christmas shopping, and together they must decide whether having painted nails is gay or just hipster. Includes Dan and Phil style bantering, questioning of gender stereotypes, chapped lips, and a clerk at Target who horribly misunderstands what Dan needs vaseline for.

Themes: nail painting, Christmas shopping, domestic!Phan, humor, innuendoes.

Six Months And Ten Seconds 1k

Summary: The story of how long it took for two boys to fall.

Themes: falling in lust/love, drug usage (marijuana), dropout

Aced It 2.5k

Day 10 of 12 Days Of Prompts

Summary: Dan and Phil are in the process of pursuing a relationship. There’s only one issue: Dan’s asexual and doesn’t want to get physical with Phil but has no idea how to tell him.

Christmas With Colin (And The Rest Of Dan’s Family) 1k

Day 12 of 12 Days Of Prompts

Summary: Dan and Phil go to meet Dan’s family for the first time, and things go better than accepted, especially considering that Dan’s parents hadn’t always been accepting of his sexuality. They’re more interested in questioning him on other things- like, for example, when Dan’s planning on giving them some grandchildren.

Themes: fluff, meeting the family, Colin the Good Boy (Dan’s family dog)

The Rulers Of All That Is Cold™ 1.2k

Summary: Based on this art post by @alinaazac, a short oneshot of Dan and Phil as co-Kings of all that is cold, bantering, arguing with each other, and correcting the peasants who come to seek their help because it’s ‘my kings’ or ‘your highnesses’, not ‘my lieges’.

Themes: kings/royalty!Phan, ice kings, humor

Two Bros Sittin’ In A Bathtub... 1.6k

Summary: Dan and Phil getting ready for 2018 in the only way that makes sense: with a joint bubble bath, bad vine references, face masks, banter, and completely unnecessary amounts of fondness.

Themes: Fluff, humor

Tanqueray 2k

Summary: Au based on “Fools” by Troye Sivan, with my own special twist on it. Dan and Phil live in the middle of nowhere, and all they’ve ever known is the wheat fields and pastures, water towers and barns, and the strangers that are basically family and family that are practically strangers.

TW: Abuse

White Moon, Blue Alarm Clock 2k

Summary: Dan can’t agree to let his boyfriend move in because then he’d find out just how sick Dan really is. Loosely based on “Blue Moon” by Troye Sivan.

TW: insomnia, mental illness

Redemption 1.6k

Summary: Dan came out of the war with a broken mentality, the guilt of an assassin, and one less arm, but he never lost his fight. Heavily inspired by Marvel’s Winter Soldier, but completely independent of it.

Medium Oneshots (3-10k words)

(Oldest to Newest)

Paper Cranes 3.2k

Summary: Dan and Phil, who have been dating and completely open about their relationship for two years now, find themselves in a strict week-long church camp where they might need to keep their relationship a secret.

TW: Low-key religion and potential homophobia

Themes: fluff, religion (Christianity), potential homophobia, closeted relationship, au, camp, established relationship

*Hungry 4.5k

Summary: You can still suffer from eating disorders even if you’re a boy, even if you’re an adult, even if you’re married and in love and even if you have a daughter. TW: eating disorder, body image issues Themes: fluff, light angst, parent!phan, established relationship, eating disorders

*Torture 3.7k

Summary: Phil’s skin is impenetrable, and Dan wants to be the one to make him bleed.

Themes: TW, torture, stockholm syndrome, no gore, knives, mental illness, mentions of suicide/suicide attempts, dark

Caudal 8k

Ao3

Day 3 of 12 Days Of Prompts (2017)

Summary: The cave has two exits. One, a hole in the ceiling, wide enough that Phil could see the stars glitter at night. The other exit was through the pool in the middle of the cave, where they’d come from. The siren leaned against the cave wall a few meters away, tending to his wound. It wasn’t bleeding anymore, but the damage was done. Sharks circled in the pool, desperate for a taste of the merman. The hole in the ceiling was too high up, the walls too steep to climb. The sharks circled in the pool of water, ready to eat whatever comes their way. No way out. Phil was stuck, with no food, no fresh water, no hope to escape, and a siren who had tried to drown him not hours before.

Themes: merman/mermaid/siren!au, sharks, survival, enemies to ?

Nothing And Everything 3.5k

Prompt: Dan realized he has feelings for Phil during the making of tatinof so he just straight out asks Phil on a date and they share a milkshake with 2 straws

Themes: tatinof, friends to lovers, ‘friendly kissing’, cereal stealing, milkshakes with two straws

*6:30 Special 8.6k

Epilogue, Bonus Scene

Summary: In a world where you and your soulmate both have constellations of dark blue freckles that glow when you’re together, Dan has been waiting for his whole life for it to finally glow. And when it does, he is stood face to face with a man Phil, who looks back in confusion, his own constellation unlit.

Includes: Dan, the workaholic who accidentally ended up managing a small convenience store and spends most of his life there; Phil, the nocturnal painter who believes that art can only properly be made at night and buys a coffee every morning at 6:30 on the dot; and the story of a man who falls hard for someone who could surely never return his feelings.

Themes: unrequited love, soulmates, au, strangers to friends to ?

Shakespeare And Coffee 5k

Summary: Teacher!Phan au where Dan Howell is the new Language and Composition teacher at the high school where Phil Lester teaches English to a bunch of public schooled kids who want nothing to do with it. Includes lots of very un-subtle flirting, a minor caffeine addiction, and a shared love for Shakespeare.

Themes: fluff, teacher!phan, au, slow burn

The Subject Series 8k

Summary: Tensions have been rising in Phil’s hometown at the rise in gun violence and string of robberies. However, Phil has bigger things to worry about me, like his newest art assignment to paint a series of portraits showing the true character of a person you know. Phil has his subject, the only problem is, he doesn’t actually know Dan, though he’s more than willing to rememdy that.

Highschool!phan au with artist!Phil and newkid!Dan, including the growth of a friendship, Phil being a little stalker-y, and Dan not understanding the concept of stranger danger. Was heavily inspired by my Drabble series ‘Artists’ and recent events involving gun violence.

Long Oneshots (10k+)

(Oldest to Newest)

*Jackets 10k

read on ao3

Summary: Phil Lester, bad boy who wears the same leather jacket to school every day and makes a hobby out of scaring people. Dan Howell, future valedictorian who prefers a varsity jacket, and refuses to be shaken by anyone, bad boy or otherwise. And how they come together through a high school track, an English class, and a failing videography program.

TW: language, use of homophobic slurs Themes: highschool!phan, badboy!Phil, valedictorian!Dan, enemies to friends to lovers

A Sword, A Little Bit Of Magic, And A Whole Lot Of Pizza 15k

read on ao3

Part of the Phandom Reverse Bang 2017, inspired by this art

Summary: When Dan and Phil are following strange dark creatures that appeared out of nowhere in London, things go wrong and they end up being sucked into an alternate dimension, where magic exists and they must find a way to use it in order to contain the creatures before they completely overrun this new world. Warning: contains the use of ‘spork’ as an insult, the destruction of a perfectly good library book, and questionable pizza physics.

Themes: alternate universe (literally), magic, alternate dimension, prophecy, two dorks trying to survive in an alternate dimension, fluff, light pining

*Libertadores (Liberators) 20k

read on ao3

Part of the Phandom Reverse Bang 2017, inspired by this art

Summary: The current conflict in Venezuela told through the eyes of two boys who are not supposed to be in love, not supposed to protest, and not supposed to fight. But they do anyways.

TW: weight loss, cannon real life violence, non-graphic descriptions of injuries, light homophobic language

Themes: The Venezuela crisis, au where Dan and Phil were born in Venezuela, real life canon violence, protesting, closeted relationship, angst with fluff

The Odyssey 12k

Day 11 of 12 Days of Prompts

TW: bullying, homophobic slurs, language, drinking

Summary: High school au where Phil is bullied for being gay and Dan thinks he should have just stayed in the closet. But it just so happens Phil has a big family and can’t get any studying done, and Dan’s house is the perfect place to study.

Themes: highschool au, enemies to friends to lovers, bullying, boxer!dan, studious!phan, Homophobia, family/sibling drama

Drabbles/Drabble Series’

*Artists Drabble Series-

The Writer, The Painter, The Poet, The Performer

Inspired by this post

Please Don’t Let Me Drown

A short drabble on Dan’s Depression from first person pov.

Masterlists / Mini Masterlists

‘But Love Is Overrated Anyways’ Masterlist

Chaptered Fic with fire!Phil and ice!Dan, mutants au

12 Days Of Prompts (2017) Masterlist

12 days of prompts/oneshots leading up to Christmas 2017

My Ao3 and Tumblr ask

*Starred fics are my favorite ones

#masterpost #masterlist #master #post #main post #all my fics #dansPHlevels #fanfic #fanfiction #phanfic #phanfiction #phan

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free-mormons-blog · 8 years ago

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What Is a Temple? -- Mormonism and Early Christianity -- HUGH NIBLEY 1987

What Is a Temple?

Those church fathers, especially of the fourth century, who proclaim the victory of Christianity over its rivals constantly speak of the church as the competitor and supplanter of the synagogue, and modern authorities are agreed that in ritual and liturgy the Christian church grew up “in the shadow of the Synagogue.”1 This is a most significant fact. While the temple stood the Jews had both its ancient ordinances and the practices of the synagogue, but they were not the same. The temple was unique, and when it was destroyed the synagogue of the Jews did not take over its peculiarly sacred functions—they were in no wise authorized to do so.2

The Loss of the Temple

Is it not strange that the Christian church should take its ritual and liturgy from the synagogue rather than the temple? The ready explanation for that was that the temple had been destroyed by God, the old law abolished, and a spiritual temple—a much higher and finer thing—had taken its place.3 But if God had abandoned the temple, he had no less abandoned the synagogue—why copy it? If a “spiritual” temple was so much superior to the crass physical thing, why did the Christians go out of their way to borrow equally physical Jewish and Gentile rites and practices of a much lower origin? Those same churchmen who expressed a fastidious disdain for the crude and outmoded rites of the temple at the same time diligently cultivated the rites of the synagogue (at best a second-class temple) with a generous and ever-increasing intermixture of popular pagan practices.4 Plainly the Christian world was not satisfied with the rhetorical abstractions of a purely spiritual successor to the Temple. But if the boast of the church was that it took up and continued where the old law left off, why did it not continue along the line of the Temple rather than of the synagogue?5

The answer is, as we shall see below, that the primitive church did just that, while the later church, by all accounts a totally different thing, tried to and failed, attempting for a time to establish its own substitutes for the temple. Jerome argues that if the Jews had the temple, the Christians have the holy sepulchre, and asks, “Doesn’t the Holy Sepulchre of the Lord appear more venerable to you?”6 This was no empty rhetoric. The Christians of the fourth century looked upon the holy sepulchre in dead earnest as the legitimate successor of the temple. The great bishops of the time protested loudly but in vain against the fixed idea that to be really saved a Christian had to visit Jerusalem and the holy sepulchre,7 and many modern studies have shown that the appointments and rites of the holy sepulchre represent a conscious attempt to continue the ways of the temple.8 Only later was the doctrine cultivated that any church might be considered as equivalent to the temple, and it never proved very convincing. Ambrose was the first Christian writer to call a church a temple, and the editors of the Patrologia, commenting on this, remind us that a church is definitely not a temple in the sense of Solomon’s Temple.9 Rome itself, after centuries of bitter rivalry, was unable to supplant Jerusalem as the supreme object of the pilgrim’s desire.10 Early Christian liturgies reveal a constant concern to reproduce physically something as near as possible to the temple rites of Jerusalem. The bulk of the liturgy is taken up with the Davidic Psalms, the old ritual texts of the temple; from the introit to the acclamation of the final psalm (Psalm 150), the imagery is that of the temple; the priests are regularly referred to as Levites, and the bishop (though his office and title derive from the synagogue and not the temple) is equated with Aaron the High Priest. Students of Christian ritual and liturgy agree today that no church possesses anything near to the original rites and ordinances of the primitive church; they point to the “gaping holes” in Christian ritual, and describe at length how through the centuries these have been filled with substitute material from Jewish, classical, and Germanic sources.11 It was not a satisfactory arrangement: the shadow of the Temple never ceased to disquiet the churchmen, who almost panic at the suggestion that the Jews might sometime rebuild their temple.12 For since the traditions of conventional Christianity are those of the synagogue, they could no more compete with a true temple than the synagogue itself could.

What Makes a Temple? The Cosmic Plan

Though the words synagogue, ecclesia, and temple are commonly employed by the doctors of the church to designate the religions of the Jews, Christians, and Pagans, respectively; still the authorities do not hesitate to apply the word temple both to the temple of the Jews and to their own churches.13 If there are unholy temples, there are also holy ones: what makes a temple different from other buildings is not its sacredness, but its form and function.

What is that form? We can summarize a hundred studies of recent date in the formula: a temple, good or bad, is a scale-model of the universe. 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.14 The root tem– in Greek and Latin denotes a “cutting” or intersection of two lines at right angles, “the point where the cardo and decumanuscross,” hence where the four regions come together,15 every temple being carefully oriented to express “the idea of pre-established harmony between a celestial and a terrestrial image.”16 Eusebius expressed the idea clearly long ago when he said that the church was “a great Temple, which the divine Word . . . had established upon earth as the intellectual image of the celestial pattern, . . . the earthly exemplification of celestial regions in their revolutions, the supernal Jerusalem, the celestial Mt. Zion,” etc.17 Varro himself says that there are three temples, one in heaven, one on earth, and one beneath the earth.18 In the universal temple concept these three are identical, one being built exactly over the other, with the earth temple in the very middle of everything representing “the Pole of the heavens, around which all heavenly motions revolve, the knot that ties earth and heaven together, the seat of universal dominion.”19 Here the four horizontal regions meet and here the three worlds make contact. Whether in the Old World or the New, the idea of the three levels and four directions dominated the whole economy of the temples and of the societies which the temples formed and guided.20

The temple at Jerusalem, like God’s throne and the law itself, existed before the foundations of the world, according to the Talmud.21 Its middoth or measurements were all sacred and prescribed, with strict rules for orientation.22 Its nature as a cosmic center is vividly recalled in many medieval representations of the city of Jerusalem and the holy sepulchre, which are shown as the exact center and navel of the earth.23 It was in conscious imitation of both Jewish and Christian ideas that the Moslems conceived of their Kaaba as

not only the centre of the earth, it is the centre of the universe. . . . . Every heaven and every earth has its centre marked by a sanctuary as its navel. . . . At each of them the same ceremonies are carried out that are carried out at the Kaaba. So the sanctuary of Mecca is established as the religious centre of the universe and the cosmic significance of any ritual act performed there is clearly demonstrated.24

What is bound on earth is bound in heaven.

From the temple at Jerusalem went forth the ideas and traditions which are found all over the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem worlds. Thus the earliest Christian rites and buildings show a marked concern for orientation, commenting on which Voelkl observes:

It is usual for people to locate themselves with reference to some immovable point in the universe. . . . The dogmatic tendency of the first centuries which created the “holy line” pointing East . . . reached its final form in the mystical depths of Scholasticism.25

What began as tangible reality petered out in the abstractions of the schoolmen, but the source of the idea is unmistakably the temple.

The Place of Contact

As the ritual center of the universe, the temple was anciently viewed as the one point on earth at which men could establish contact with other worlds. This aspect of the temple idea has been the object of intense research in the past decade. It is now generally recognized that the earliest temples were not, as formerly supposed, dwelling places of divinity, but rather meeting places at which men at specific times attempted to make contact with the powers above. “Though in time it became the dwelling of the divinity,” according to Contenau, “originally it may have had the aspect of a temple of passage, a place of arrival.”26 The temple was a building

which the gods transversed to pass from their celestial habitation to their earthly residence. . . . The ziggurat is thus nothing but a support for the edifice on top of it, and the stairway that leads from the same between the upper and lower worlds.27

In this respect it resembled a mountain, for “the mountain itself was originally such a place of contact between this and the upper world.” 28 A long list might be made of holy mountains on which God was believed to have talked with men in ancient times, including “the mountain of the Lord’s house.”29 A great many studies have appeared in the 1950s describing the basic idea of the temple as a sort of antechamber between the worlds, and particular attention has been given to the fact that in both Egypt and Mesopotamia temples had regular wharves for the landing of celestial barks. 30

An investigation of the oldest temples, those represented on prehistoric seals, concludes that those high structures were also “gigantic altars,” built both to attract the attention of the powers above (the burnt offering being a sort of smoke signal, as it were) and to provide “the stairways which the god, in answer to these prayers, used in order to descend to the earth. . . . He comes bringing a renewal of life in all its forms.” 31 From the first, it would seem, men built altars in the hopes of establishing contact with heaven, and built high towers for the same purpose (see Genesis 11:4).

As the pivot and pole of the universe, the temple is also peculiarly tied to the North Star, around which all things revolve.32 At the same time, it is the place of meeting with the lower as well as the upper world, and the one point at which passage between the two is possible.33 That is why in the earliest Christian records the gates and the keys are so closely connected with the Temple. Scholars have often noted that the keys of Peter (Matthew 16:19) can only be the keys of the temple with its work for the dead.34 Many studies have demonstrated the identity of tomb, temple, and palace as the place where the powers of the other world are exercised for the benefit of the human race.35 In the fourth century there was a massive and permanent transfer of the pilgrim’s goal from temples to tombs, though the two had always been connected.36 Invariably the rites of the Temple are those of the ancestors, and appropriately the chief character in those rites is the first ancestor and father of the race.37

Naturally the temple at Jerusalem has been studied along with the rest, and it has been found that its rites fit easily and naturally into the general pattern.38 Professor Albright, while noting that Solomon’s Temple was not of pagan origin, describes it as a point of contact with the other world, presenting “a rich cosmic symbolism which was largely lost in later Israelite and Jewish tradition.”39 That is, the farther back we go in time, the more uniform is the concept of the temple among the ancients as a whole, with everything pointing to a single tradition. Albright duly comments on the twelve oxen as the cosmic symbol of the circle of the year and the three stages of the great altar as representing the three worlds.40

The Ritual Drama

The rites of the temple are always a repetition of those that marked its founding in the beginning of the world, telling how it all came to be in the first place. The foundation of the sanctuary coincides with the foundation or creation of the earth itself: “The first fixed point in the chaotic waters . . . is the place of the sanctuary, which becomes the earthly seat of the world-order, having its palladium in throne and altar. The foundation of the sanctuary, therefore, coincides with the creation.”41After a lifetime of study Lord Raglan assures us that when we study all the rituals of the world we come up with the discovery that the pristine and original ritual of them all, from which all others take their rise, was the dramatization of the creation of the world.42 And Mowinckel sums up the common cult pattern of all the earliest civilizations: “It is the creation of the World that is being repeated.”43

This creation drama was not a simple one for, as the above authorities remind us, an indispensable part of the story is the ritual death and resurrection of the King, who represents the founder and first parent of the race, and his ultimate triumph over death as priest and king, followed by some form of hieros gamos or ritual marriage for the purpose of begetting the race. 44 All this has become stock-intrade of students of comparative religion today, but at the beginning of the century nobody knew anything about it. We find this now familiar “Year-Drama” with its familiar episodes wherever we turn—in the Memphite Theology of Egypt (recently held to have had great influence on the Hebrew religion), in the well-documented Babylonian New Year’s rites, in the great secular celebration of the Romans, in the ritual beginnings of Greek drama, in the temple-texts of Ras Shamra, in the Celtic mythological cycles, or in the medieval mystery plays.45 And if we ask why this drama is performed, we always get the same answer, according to Mowinckel: “Because the Divinity—the First Father of the Race—did so once in the beginning, and commanded us to do the same.”46

The temple drama is essentially a problem-play, with a combat as its central theme. The combat at the New Year takes various mimetic forms throughout the world—games, races, sham-battles, mummings, dances, plays, etc.—but the essential part is that the hero is temporarily beaten and overcome by death: “The King . . . is even trampled upon by the powers of chaos, but he rises again and puts the false king, the false Messiah, to death.”47 This resurrection motif is absolutely essential to the rites, the purpose of which is ultimate victory over death.

The Initiation

But the individual who toiled as a pilgrim in a weary land to reach the waters of life that flowed from the temple was no mere passive spectator. He came to share in all the blessings of knowledge and regeneration. It was not just the symbolic immortality of a society that was sought, but the personal attainment of eternal life and glory by the individual.48 This the individual attempted to achieve through a process of initiation. “Initiation,” writes Professor Rostovzeff, “is notoriously a symbol of death, . . . the symbolic act of death and rebirth, resurrection.”49 The essence of the great rites that marked the New Year (in Israel as elsewhere the one time when all were expected to come to the temple) was “transition, rite de passage, succession of lives, following the revolutions of Nature”—though it should be noted that the revolutions of nature definitely did not furnish the original pattern for the thing.50 The actual initiation rites have been studied often and in detail, and found to exhibit a very clear and consistent pattern. We can give but one illustration here, taken from a short but remarkable writing by Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem, a particularly valuable witness, since he is the last church father to be in close contact with the old Jerusalem rites.

The general impression one gets from reading the long discussions in the Talmud is that people in the temple at Jerusalem spent most of their time at baptisms and ablutions. Certainly baptism is one specific ordinance always mentioned in connection with the temple. “When one is baptised one becomes a Christian,” writes Cyril, “exactly as in Egypt by the same rite one becomes an Osiris.” Not only does Cyril recognize the undeniable resemblance between the Christian and non-Christian rites, but he also notes that they have the identical significance, which is initiation into immortality. 51 The baptism in question, Cyril explains, is rather a washing than a baptism, since it is not by immersion. It is followed by an anointing, which our guide calls “the antitype of the anointing of Christ himself,” making every candidate as it were a Messiah.52 Elsewhere he describes this rite specifically as the anointing of the brow, face, ears, nose, breast, etc., “which represents,” he says, “the clothing of the candidate in the protective panoply of the Holy Spirit,” which however does not hinder the initiate from receiving a real garment on the occasion.53 Furthermore, the candidate was reminded that the whole ordinance “is in imitation of the sufferings of Christ,” in which “we suffer without pain by mere imitation his receiving of the nails in his hands and feet: the antitype of Christ’s sufferings.”54 Bishop Cyril further insists that Moses and Solomon had both been duly baptized in this manner: “After being washed in water, he [Moses] was anointed and called a Christ, because of the anointing which was a type. When Solomon came forth to be king, the High Priest anointed him, after a bath in Gihon. This again was a type. But with us these things are not a type but a reality.”55 From his last remark it is plain that the early Christians actually performed the rites described. The Jews once taught that when Michael and Gabriel lead all the sinners up out of the lower world, “they will wash and anoint them, healing them of their wounds of hell, and clothe them with beautiful pure garments and bring them into the presence of God.”56 These things are often referred to in the earliest Christian writings, but were soon lost in a manner we must now describe.

Loss and Diffusion of the Temple Ordinances

No one can consider the temples and their ancient rites (at which we have merely hinted in these pages) without asking how they came to be both so widespread and so corrupt in the world. Let us first consider the question of corruption.

1. It can be shown that both the Jews and Christians suffered greatly at the hands of their enemies because of the secrecy of their rites, which they steadfastly refused to discuss or divulge.57 When the key to the ordinances was lost, this very secrecy made for a great deal of misunderstanding and above all opened the door to unbridled fraud: every Gnostic sect, for example, claimed to have the lost rites and ordinances, the keys and the teachings, as they had been given to the apostles and patriarchs of old.58

2. It is doubtful if a religious organization ever existed which did not have its splits and factions. A common cause of schism, among both Jews and Christians, was the claim of a particular group that it alone still possessed the mysteries.59 Hence from early times many competing versions of the true rites and ordinances have been current.

3. Even in good times, the rites like the doctrines inevitably become the object of various conflicting schools of interpretation and become darkened and obscured as a result. Indeed, it is now generally held that mythology is simply an attempt to explain the origin and meaning of rituals that men no longer understand.60 The clouding and corruption of ritual is apparent in the oldest texts known,61 and painfully so in Jewish and Christian literature. The Talmud tells of a pious Jew who left Jerusalem in disgust, saying, “What answer will the Israelites give to Elijah when he comes,” and asks why the scholars don’t agree on the rites of the temple.62 For in Jewish and Christian tradition alike, it is Elijah who is to come and restore the rites of the temple in their purity.

4. The early fathers had a ready explanation for any suspicious resemblances between Christian and non-Christian practices. The former, they explained, had come down from the ancient Hebrews and were thus really much older than their pagan counterparts, which had been borrowed or stolen from them. Actually there is a great deal of evidence for the widespread usurpation of the temple rites at a very early time. One would hardly expect people to view their own highest rites as stolen and their highest god as a usurper, yet wherever we look that is what we find. Every major mythology tells of the great usurper who rules the world and who upon examination turns out to be the father and founder of the race!63

Since we cannot here treat them individually, we must be content to note that the archetype of all usurpers is Nimrod, who claims kingship and priesthood by right of “the cosmic garment of Adam,” which his father Ham stole from Noah.64 When in turn Esau, that other great hunter, by a ruse got this garment from Nimrod, he sold it as a “birthright” to Jacob, and then tried to get it back again “and force his way into the temple,” according to the Leptogenesis.65 Early Jewish and Christian traditions report that Nimrod it was who built the Tower of Babel, the first pagan temple, in an attempt to contact heaven; it was he who challenged the priesthood of Abraham; it was he who built the first city, founded the first state, organized the first army, ruling the world by force; he challenged God to an archery contest and, when he thought he had won, claimed to be no less than God’s successor. 66 The interesting thing is that all his activities center around the temple, whose rites and whose priesthood he boldly attempts to seize for himself.

5. The same comparative studies that discovered the common pattern in all ancient religions—a phenomenon now designated as “patternism”—have also demonstrated the processes of diffusion by which that pattern was spread throughout the world—and in the process torn to shreds, of which recognizable remnants may be found in almost any land and time. It would now appear that the early fathers were not far from the mark in explaining the resemblances: the rites do look alike wherever we find them, however modern Christians may insist on denying the fact, for they all come from a common source.67 The business of reconstructing the original prototype from the scattered fragments has been a long and laborious one, and it is as yet far from completed. Yet an unmistakable pattern emerges more clearly every day. This raises the question of priority: How did the Mormons get hold of the temple idea?

The Question of Priority

Let the reader study some photographs of the Salt Lake Temple, a structure whose design the Mormons believe to have been revealed to the Prophet Brigham Young. Consider how perfectly this edifice inside and out embodies the temple idea. The emphasis on the three levels is apparent at once; the orientation is basic—every pioneer community, in fact, was located and oriented with reference to the temple as the center of Zion; the crenelated walls and buttresses are familiar from the oldest monumental temples as “the pillars of heaven”; the series of stars, moon, and sunstones on the buttresses indicate the levels of celestial glory; at the lowest point in the temple is a brazen sea on the back of twelve oxen, and there are the waters through which the dead, by proxy, pass to eternal life, the gates of salvation; on the center of the west towers is the North Star and its attendant constellation, a symbol recognized throughout human history as depicting the center of time and the revolution of the universe; the battlements that impart a somewhat grim air to the building signify its isolation from a hostile world; on the main tower the inscription in gold “Holiness to the Lord” serves notice that this place is set apart from the world of mundane things, as do the gates that shut out all but a few; yet the temple itself is a reminder that none can receive the highest blessings without entering its portals—so that the whole human race shall eventually repair hither, either in the flesh or by proxy. Within the building, as many visitors have seen before its dedication, are rooms obviously appointed for rites rehearsing the creation of the world, the fall of man, and his final exaltation.68

But 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 whole human family meets in a common enterprise; 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. The work of the temple is exciting, and through the years has been rewarded and stimulated by many marvelous blessings and manifestations. In a very real sense all humanity participates in the same work of salvation—for we cannot be saved without our fathers, nor they without us. It is a grandiose concept. Here for the first time in many centuries men may behold a genuine temple, functioning as a temple should—a temple in the fullest and purest sense of the word.

Are we to believe that this uniquely perfect institution was copied from any of the thousand-and-one battered remnants of the temple and its ordinances that have survived in the world? The fundamental nature and far-reaching implications of the temple idea are just beginning to dawn upon scholars in our own day; nothing was known about them a hundred years ago—indeed, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that Christian churches, in competitive zeal to return to the ways of the primitive church began to orient their buildings. 69 Throughout this brief study we have indicated that surviving remnants of the temple concept and rites may be found wherever there is religion and cult in the world. It is not surprising, therefore, that merely by looking about him one may discover all sorts of parallels to Mormon—or any other!—practices. Thousands of American Indians and Pacific islanders, including many of the greatest chiefs and wise men, have become Mormons in their time and engaged in the work of the temple. They have been quick to detect the often surprising parallels between the rites of the temple and the traditions and practices of their own tribes—though those have been guarded with the greatest secrecy. Far from being disaffected by this discovery, these devoted workers have rejoiced that at last they could understand the real meaning of what they had inherited from their fathers, corroded as it was by time and overlaid with thick deposits of legend and folklore. Among the first to engage in the Latter-day temple work were many members of the Masons, a society that “is not, and does not profess to be, a religion,”70 but whose rites present unmistakable parallels to those of the temple. Yet, like the Indians, those men experienced only an expansion of understanding.71

So universally is religious ritual today burdened with the defects of oddness, incongruity, quaintness, jumbled complexity, mere traditionalism, obvious faking and filling in, and 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. No moral, allegorical, or abstruse symbolism has been read into these rites; no scholars and poets have worked them over; no learned divines have taken the liberty to interpret them; they have never been the subject of speculation and theory; they show no signs of invention, evolution, or elaboration. Josiah Quincy said that the Nauvoo Temple “certainly cannot be compared with any ecclesiastical building which may be discerned by the natural sight,” 72 and architects have said much the same about the Salt Lake Temple. That is high, if unconscious, tribute, advertising the clear fact that in establishing their temples the Mormons did not adopt traditional forms: with them the temple and its rites are absolutely pristine. In contrast the church and temple architecture of the world is an exotic jumble, a bewildering complex of borrowed motifs, a persistent effort to work back through the centuries to some golden time and place when men still had the light.

In the fourth decade of the nineteenth century the idea of the temple suddenly emerged full-blown in its perfection, not as a theory alone, but as a program of intense and absorbing activity which rewarded the faithful by showing them the full scope and meaning of the plan of salvation.

Looking Backward

The preceding part of this article was written twenty-five years ago when the London Temple was dedicated. Since then the “scientific” study of ancient temples has completed a full circle—back to where it started some three hundred years ago. We hasten to explain.

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.

I have called those studies “scientific” because they were undertaken in the same spirit, employed much the same methods, and reached the same conclusions as those of the present generation of researchers, who insist that they are scientific. Here, for example, is a recent cover story from the (very) Scientific American (July 1980), in which the author expresses the same conviction as did Sir William Stukeley and John Aubrey in the mid-seventeenth century.73 He 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.

After the eighteenth century less and less attention was paid to the megalithic complexes, upon which little remained to be said until new lines of research could be opened up. The first forward step was taken by philology, predictably enough, since the learning of the times was classical and biblical. The British presence in India set such researches in a new and fruitful direction by creating a general interest in the glamour and color of the mysterious East, and by calling the attention of scholars to strange texts in strange languages. By the middle of the nineteenth century comparative philology had become the queen of studies, thanks to the great Max Mueller, who believed that he had discovered in Sanskrit the parent and original of all the Aryan family of languages from India to Ireland, and in the Vedas “the primal form of their mythology and religion.” For the ancient texts on which all such study was necessarily based were profoundly religious documents, combining myth, ritual, pious exercises, edifying doctrine, and bits of history.

Shortly before Mueller, Jacob Grimm, in gathering material for his great Deutsche Grammatik74, introduced the comparative study of folktales, folk songs, myths, customs, arts, and artifacts (Grimm’s Fairy Tales have proven to be as scientifically relevant as Grimm’s Law). In the process he anticipated the conclusion of Max Mueller, that if everybody from Ireland to India spoke related languages it was because originally they were all one and the same family, living in the East. Mueller held that what survived of their religion represents a letdown and deterioration from a higher order of things, an archaic original of monotheistic persuasion, from which historic religions betray a moral and intellectual decline. This is a position being taken by some eminent scholars today. Mueller’s Oxford colleagues E. Tylor and Andrew Lang felt that the master was too much under the literary influences of an earlier day (e.g., Herder), and, discounting the old romantic idea of a primal “nature mythology,” gave second billing to myth, viewing it as an attempt to explain cult and custom, which really had priority. After the mid-nineteenth century, evolution of course became the answer; religion, like everything else, must necessarily have had a primitive beginning—for Lang it was in primitive magic. For Theodor Waitz it was a primitive obsession with ghosts and spirits. Herbert Spencer made it a fixed principle, universally received, that religion is superstition and superstition is primitive, and that evolution required a steady ascent from religion toward the pure light of ever more rational thinking, culminating in the modern civilized man.

At the turn of the century the watchwords were animism and totemism, which for many years explained everything for many students. The determination to reduce religion, like everything else, to scientific laws actually led to simplistic solutions, and with the desire for more thorough and methodical special studies the wide-ranging pronouncements of deep-browed armchair scientists were supplanted by a swelling outpouring of regional monographs and statistical studies aspiring to the status of exact science. The great biologist J. Arthur Thompson made sport of the excesses of the solemn “brass instrument school,” laboriously compiling endless columns of figures giving the physical and mental measurements of tribes and races, which in the end could tell the student no more than a casual association with the natives in question would have provided. Given patience and a body, it was no great task for a thousand investigators to fill the books and journals with information, but beyond the most pedestrian generalities no real progress was made. As Theodor Gaster observes, “It was Frazer more than anyone else who first sought to classify and coordinate this vast body of material.”75 Today most of Frazer’s main assumptions and conclusions have been discredited—for example, the “magical” origins of religion, which Gaster calls “a mere product of late nineteenth-century evolutionism”; the principle of “homeopathy,” by which the magical action produced a real counterpart; the yearly celebrations of the death and rebirth of vegetation, which neglected the more immediate human experience of life and death; the obsession of an earlier time with solar religion; and above all the idea of a “primitive” level of culture which remains undefined but is the same everywhere and always, the word being worked to death by Frazer’s colleagues (e.g., J. Harrison), many of whom never laid eyes on a primitive. Yet most of these discredited ideas are still accepted and taught in schools everywhere.

To explain the remarkable resemblances between the prehistoric ritual centers and their rites separated by thousands of miles and as many years, Frazer and others took for granted that at a certain stage of evolution the human mind spontaneously fell into the thought patterns that would produce identical myths and rules independently in various parts of the world. Diffusionism was rejected and still is by many. This interesting psychological explanation got some support from the famous psychologist C. G. Jung, a diligent student of ancient myth and religion. Just as in the process of evolution creatures retain vestigial organs from earlier times, so the mind, Jung insisted, being subject to evolution like everything else, retains in its unconscious what he calls “archetypes” or “primordial images.” They are as natural “as the impulse of birds to build nests, and present the mind with whole mythological motifs,” which lead to stories and dramatizations. Where do they come from? “They are without known origin,” writes Jung, “and they reproduce themselves in any time or in any part of the world”—don’t ask how. Thus “the hero figure is an archetype which has existed since time immemorial,” though as to “when and where such a motif originated . . . we do not even know how to go about investigating the problem.” So the cause of evolutionism is saved if we do not ask too many questions.

C. P. Thiele, a Dutch theologian, came closer than anyone else since Max Mueller to combining vast scope and detail of information with meaningful summaries, striking a balance between the old romantic school of Herder, Mueller, and Andrew Lang, and the pedantically limited studies of single tribes, families, and problems, which became as numerous as they were trivial. Few have equaled Thiele’s learning, but how to take account of all that data in a convincing summary with meaningful conclusions is a problem of more urgency now than ever. A promising new development, the TV documentary, seeks to address the public on a high and authoritative level while keeping everything simple and clear, covering an immense expanse of knowledge while giving an understandable presentation of general principles.

The present writer struggled with the problem prematurely, of course, growing up on Spencer’s First Principles, H. G. Wells, and T. H. Buckle, and practically memorizing Spengler. The first half of the twentieth century produced pretentious works purporting to convey all knowledge, such as the University of Chicago Synopticon, big “Western Civilization” college texts, the Cambridge histories, various encyclopedias, the Columbia University Chapters in Western Civilization, and so forth. More impressive were the big corroborative works combining contributions of leading scholars in different areas. Such a one was Chantepie de la Saussaye’s Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, which the present writer acquired hot off the press and perused with dogged diligence—to no avail! The facts were there, but they added up to nothing. The compilers followed the Baconian gospel, that one has simply to collect the facts and let them speak for themselves. However one may accuse the over-eager and ill-prepared of leaping to conclusions, it is precisely that leap that the scholars have never been able or willing to make; for when they finish collecting and typing their notes, they see nowhere to go—but more notes. Will Durant was a full-time philosopher who gathered nine volumes on the history of Western civilization. And what did the philosopher learn from that? Nothing at all that we had not already heard.

A good example of this is Joseph Campbell, one of the latest and best popularizers, who assures us that he is bringing together for the first time “a single picture of the new perspectives . . . in comparative symbolism, religion, mythology, and philosophy, by the scholarship of recent years.” 76 This is merely an updating of the old game, reaching exactly the same conclusions as Grimm, Max Mueller, and the rural clergymen who studied the old stones of the English countryside, that “the comparative study of the mythologies of the world compels us to view the cultural history of mankind as a unit,” in which the various motifs, instead of being wildly exotic, endlessly varied, and without number, as one would expect (and as German scholars once described them), are really “only a few and always the same.” The old biblical picture now emerges as the latest scientific discovery.

The boldest and clearest recent statement embracing the world landscape of culture and religion is in the works of M. Eliade, and he brings it all back to the temple. “The Temple, . . . preeminently the sacred place, . . . a celestial prototype” and holy mountain, typifies “the act of Creation . . . [which] brought the ordered cosmos out of chaos”; it is the scene of the sacred marriage, the ritual confrontation with evil appearing as the dragon, serpent, or other figures of death and destruction, ending in the victory of the king, whose triumphant coronation inaugurates the New Year and a new age of the world. The combat is an expression of that “ambivalence and polarity” which characterize the rites in which all things must have their opposite, and where an atoning sacrifice is necessary “to restore the primal unity” between God and man, and enable the latter to regain the divine presence. The whole, according to Eliade, is suffused with “memories of paradise,” the loss of which is the result of sin, converting this world into a testing ground in which “suffering always has meaning.”77

Thus Eliade shows us how the studies of two centuries have steadily converged on the temple. But before Eliade, your humble informant was bringing out much of the picture in a doctoral thesis which disturbed and puzzled his committee in the 1930’s. In 1940 a section of the Pacific Coast Meeting of the American Historical Association slept through a discourse on the feasting of the multitudes at the holy places, and in the following year a like gathering of the American Archaeological Association in San Diego listened with remarkable composure to a paper on “National Assemblies in the Bronze Age.” This is to show for the record that we were getting in on the ground floor. An article comparing the earliest Roman rites to those all over the ancient world was held up by World War II (which was then considered more urgent), not appearing until 1945 (in the Classical Journal).78 At that time I had been to the temple only twice, once when I was seventeen and again when I was twenty—both times in something of a daze. So it was not until I moved to Utah and started going to the temple and wrote a mini-series in the Improvement Era on “Baptism for the Dead in Ancient Times” (1948)79 that it ever occurred to me that any of what I had been doing had anything to do with Joseph Smith. Beginning to see the light, I started pulling out the stops in a Pi Sigma Alpha lecture given during the centennial celebration of the University of Utah in 1950. Entitled “The Hierocentric State,” it was expanded and published the following year in the Western Political Quarterly.80

The dedication of the London Temple in 1958 produced, on request, the first part of this effusion. This was followed in 1958—60 by a study in the Jewish Quarterly Review on “Christian Envy of the Temple,”81 demonstrating that “where there is no Temple there is no true Israel,” and showing how the Christian churches have always missed the temple while retaining various survivals of it in their rites and liturgies. In 1966 we discussed those migratory temples, wheeled and domed structures, that moved over the steppes of Asia, and how they took their bearings on the universe, remaining holy centers in spite of their mobility—like the Ark of the Covenant (Western Political Quarterly, 1966).82 An article on “Jerusalem in Christian Thought” in the first edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica (1973)83 dealt with the role in history of the well-known idea of Jerusalem as the holy center of the world, thanks to the presence of the temple, and sketched the fierce competitive drives of Christians, Moslems, and Jews to possess it. In the same year, in a study ambitiously titled “The Genesis of the Written Word,” we pointed out that the oldest written documents of the race are temple records. 84 The rich Egyptian documentation justified writing about The Egyptian Endowment (1975), and comparing it in an appendix with some of the ordinances and doctrines contained in the Manual of Disciplines (1QS) from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Odes of Solomon, the Pearl, the Pistis Sophia, and Cyril of Jerusalem’s Lectures on the Ordinances (mid-fourth century).85 An important performance which has very ancient parallels throughout Asia as well as the Near East was “The Early Christian Prayer Circle” (BYU Studies, (1978).86 A long series of articles in the Improvement Era (1968—70) called attention to sacrificial aspects of the later temple ordinances as anticipated in the “arrested” sacrifice of Abraham himself, of Sarah (in Egypt), and of Isaac.87 Finally, the book Abraham in Egypt (1981) describes ties between Egyptian and Israelite wisdom and doctrine, a subject being much studied by scholars at the present time.88

To resume our story, imaginary reconstructions presented over the past three hundred years of great gatherings of people at imposing ceremonial complexes for rites dedicated to the renewal of life on earth are, over that long stretch of time, surprisingly uniform. In spite of the accumulation of evidence, there has never been a drastic reversal or revision of the picture, which always remains the same.

First, we still have the tangible evidence, the scenery and properties of the drama: megaliths; artifical giant mounds or pyramids amounting to artificial mountains; stone and ditch alignments of mathematical sophistication, correlating time and space; passage graves and great tholoi or domed tombs; sacred roads (often discovered from the air); remains of booths, grandstands, processional ways, and gates—these still survive in awesome combination, with all their cosmic symbolism.

In the second place is the less tangible evidence of customs, traditions, legends, folk festivals, ancient writings, and so forth, which when put together conjure up (with considerable authority, thanks to their abundance and consistency) memories of dramatic and choral celebrations of the Creation; ritual contests between life and death, good and evil, and light and darkness, followed by the triumphant coronation of the king to rule for the new age, the progenitor of the race by a sacred marriage; feasts of abundance attended by ancestors and spirits; covenants; initiations (including baptism and clothing); sacrifices and scapegoats to rid the people of a year of guilt and pollution; and various types of divination and oracular consultation for the new life cycle. And what is being emphasized today, after centuries of converging studies, is that they were all doing it, everywhere!

To these types of evidence must be added the most impressive—and neglected—of all, those “spin-offs” of the temple which have long attracted my interest as such. The “spin-offs” are things not essential to the temple’s form and function, but the inevitable products of its existence. To begin with, there was an urgent need of accommodations for all those pilgrims from far away; hence those booths, memorialized in the Hebrew Festival of Booths, remains or records of which we find in many parts of the world. Our words hotel and hospital go back to those charitable organizations which took care of sick and weary pilgrims to the holy places—the Hospitalers of the Crusades offered hospitality also under the name of Templars, for it was travelers to the temple that they were aiding and protecting. Since all who came had to bring food for the festival as well as animals for offerings and sacrifice, those who lived a great distance (more than three days away in Israel; see Deuteronomy 14:22—27; 26:12—14), finding the transport of such items of great difficulty, could instead bring the money value of those offerings to the Temple, which thus became a place of exchange and banking—our word money comes from the temple of Juno Moneta, the holy center of the Roman world. Along with that, the bringing of a variety of different goods and products from widely separated places inevitably gave rise to a lively barter and exchange of goods, and everywhere a fixture of the great year rites was the yearly fair, the market-booths of the merchants added to those of the visiting pilgrims, with artisans, performers, and mountebanks also displaying their wares.

The main action at the temple was the actio, for which the Greek word is drama, with parts played by priestly temple actors and royalty. Creation was celebrated with the Creation Hymn or poema—the word poem means, in fact, Creation—sung by a chorus which, as the name shows, formed a circle and danced as they sang. Since nothing goes unchallenged in this world, a central theme of the temple rites was the dramatization (often athletic) of the combat between the powers of life and death which could take many forms—wrestling, boxing, dueling, foot or chariot races, beauty contests to choose a queen, competitions in song and dance. The temple was the original center of learning, beginning with the heavenly instructions received there. It was the Museon or home of the Muses, each representing a branch of study, and the scene of learned discussions among the wise men who from the earliest recorded times would travel from shrine to shrine exchanging wisdom with the wise, as Abraham did in Egypt. For the all-important setting of times and seasons, careful astronomical observations were taken and recorded at the place with mathematicalprecision, while the measurements of fields and buildings called for sophisticated geometry followed by great architectural and engineering skill that commands the highest respect to this day. The Garden-of-Eden or Golden-Age motif was essential to this ritual paradise, and the temple grounds contained all manner of trees and animals, often collected with great botanical and zoological zeal from distant places. Central to the temple school for the training of priests and nobles was the great library containing both the holy books revealed from on high, whether as divine revelation or as star readings (both declared the glory of God), and the records of human history including the “Books of Life,” the names of all the living and the dead—genealogy. Aside from memorials kept in writing (the art, as we have seen, originating in the economy of the temple) were the ancestral pictures—statues, busts, and paintings giving inspiration to the fine arts. The purpose of the rites being to establish and acknowledge the rule of God on earth through his agent and offspring the King, who represented both the first man and everyman, the temple was the ultimate seat and sanction of government. Our government buildings with their massive columns, domes, marble and bronze, and so forth are copies of classic Greek and Roman temples. The meeting of the people at the holy place made the New Year the time for contracts and covenants, and all of these were recorded and stored in the temple, which was of course the seat of law, both for the handing down of new laws and ordinances by divine authority and for the settling of disputes between mortals. The king was a Solomon sitting as Judge on the occasion, as one who had been tested to the limit and, after calling upon God from the depths, had emerged triumphant, worthy to lead the army of the Lord to spread his rule over the as yet unconquered realms of darkness beyond the holy influence of the temple.

All of these matters and much, much more this writer has treated somewhere or other. The fact that the one thing they all have in common is the temple is enough in itself to indicate that the temple is the source, and not one of the derivatives, of the civilizing process. If, as noted above, “where there is no temple there is no true Israel,” it is equally true that where there is no true temple, civilization itself is but an empty shell—a material structure of expediency and tradition alone, bereft of the living organism at its center that once gave it life and brought it forth.

Since the Temple is the parent and original, it is only to be expected that one should find ruins and fragments of it surviving everywhere, along with more or less ambitious attempts to recapture its lost glory and authority. And since Evil cannot create or beget but can only pervert, corrupt, wrest, and destroy what Good has accomplished, it is not surprising that the most depraved of practices take their rise in the Temple. Let us recall that the mysterious “Watchers” in Enoch’s day carefully kept the ordinances that had come down from Adam, and claimed sanctity by reason of possessing a knowledge which they had completely subverted. How roundly Isaiah rebukes and denounces the ordinances of the temple—the new moons, the fasts, the prayers, the offerings, and so on, when performed by the Jews in the wrong spirit! While the temple still stood in Jerusalem, the brethren of Qumran looked forward for the coming of “a true Temple” after God’s own heart. When Satan assayed to try the Lord, it was to the pinnacle of the temple that he took him; did the Evil One, then, have access to the holy place? For answer we need only recall that Jesus declared that the House of his Father had been turned into a den of thieves as he drove the money changers from its courts—a reminder that large financial institutions today, as well as government buildings, occupy structures faithfully copied from the classical fanes of ancient temples and add to the bronze and marble the sanctimonious hush of holy places. Thus the temple economy has been perverted along with the rest.

When the symbolic killing and eating of beasts were supplanted by lustful and vengeful rites of human sacrifice; when the feasts of joy and abundance became orgies, and the sacred rites of marriage were perverted to the arts of the temple hierodules; when the keepers of the records and teachers of wisdom became haughty and self-righteous scribes and Pharisees—then was demonstrated the principle that any good thing can be corrupted in this world, and as Aristotle notes, as a rule, the better the original, the more vicious the corrupted version. When “two men went up into the temple to pray” (Luke 18:10), both were ostensibly going about their devotions; yet the one was bringing hypocrisy and vanity into the holy place. So we might seriously consider the proposition that whatever we see about us in the way of the institutions of civilization, good or bad, may in the end be traced to the temple.

Did Joseph Smith reinvent the temple by putting all the fragments—Jewish, Orthodox, Masonic, Gnostic, Hindu, Egyptian, and so forth—together again? No, that is not how it is done. Very few of the fragments were available in his day, and the job of putting them together was begun, as we have seen, only in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Even when they are available, those poor fragments do not come together of themselves to make a whole; to this day the scholars who collect them do not know what to make of them. The temple is not to be derived from them, but the other way around. If the temple, as the Latter-day Saints know it, had been introduced at any date later than it was, or at some great center of learning, it could well have been suspect as a human contrivance; but that anything of such fulness, consistency, ingenuity, and perfection could have been brought forth at a single time and place—overnight, as it were—is quite adequate proof of a special dispensation.

* This article first appeared under the title “The Idea of the Temple in History,” in Millennial Star 120 (1958): 228—37, 247—49. Nibley’s article was reprinted as What is a Temple? The Idea of the Temple in History (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1963). A second edition appeared under the same title in 1968. A German translation, “Die Templesidae in der Geschichte,” was published in Der Stern 2 (1959): 43—60. The concluding section entitled “Looking Backward” was added when this article was again reprinted in Truman G. Madsen, ed., The Temple in Antiquity (Provo: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1983), 39—51.

1. Orazio Marucchi, Handbuch der christlichen Archäologie (Einsiedeln: Benzinger, 1912), 25.

2. On the uniqueness of the temple, see TB Megilla 9b—10a.

3. A very common theme. Thus Eusebius says that the church is the intellectual image of the temple, Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, 2 vols., Kirsopp Lake, trans. (London: Heinemann, 1926), X, 4, 69. Moses entering and leaving the Holy of Holies is for St. Gregory “the mind as it enters and leaves a state of contemplation”; the gold on the garment of the high priest is the gleam of intellect, etc., Epistolae (Letters) 25, in PL 77:471, 474.

4. Ambrose is a good example. See Henri Leclerq, “Gallicane (Liturgie),” in DACL 6:485—88.

5. An instructive parallel is furnished by Islam, where the Mosque follows the pattern of the synagogue, as Christian churches do, while the Kaaba, a wholly different institution, represents the temple; Gustav E. von Grunebaum, Mohammadan Festivals (New York: Schuman, 1951), 20—21; Elie Lambert, “La Synagogue de Doura-Europos et les origines de la mosquée,” Semitica 3 (1950): 67—72.

6. Jerome, Epistolae (Letters) 46, in PL 22:486.

7. Thus Gregorius Nyssenus, Epistolae (Letters) 2, in PG 46:1012, 1016.

8. William Simpson, “The Middle of the World in the Holy Sepulchre,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly (1888): 260—63. When St. Helen built the great church “at the very spot of the Sepulchre” to contain the wood of the cross, she actually called it “the New Jerusalem, in opposition to the old one, which had been deserted,” Socrates, HE 1, 17, in PG 67:117—22.

9. Ambrose, Epistolae (Letters) 20, note 2, discussed in PL 11:307—08.

10. H. Hubert, “Le Culte des héros et ses conditions sociales,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 71 (1915): 246—47. Maximus, Homiliae (Homilies) 72, in PL 57:405—06, expresses the sense of competition.

11. The “gaping hole” (trou beant) is Leclerq’s expression, “Gallicane (Liturgie),” 6:480. On the filling in, see Louis Duchesne, Origines du culte chrétien (Paris: Fontemoing, 1898), 8—10, and the English translation, Early History of the Christian Church: From Its Foundation to the End of the Fifth Century, Claude Jenkins, tr., 3 vols. (London: Hunt, 1950), 1:8—10; and more recently, Joseph Lechner and Ludwig Eisenhofer, Liturgik des römischen Ritus (Freiburg: Herder, 1953), 5—6, 191—93.

12. The ardent desire to lay down the ghost of the temple once and for all is apparent in Cyprian, Adversus Judaeos I, 20; II, 16—18, in PL 4:716—17, 739, 741; Lactantius, De Vera Sapientia (On True Wisdom) 4, 14, in PL 6:487; Athanasius, Oratio de Incarnatione Verbi (On the Incarnation of the Word) 40, in PG 25:165; Epiphanius, Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies) I, 2, 24, in PG 41:392—93; Basil, Commentaria in Isaiam (Commentary on Isaiah) 2, in PG 24:249.

13. It is rare to call a church a temple, but it causes no offence. Zeno was opposed to building imposing churches “because such a thing is not a real temple . . . the faithful people are the real Temple of God,” Tractatus (Tractate) I, 14, in PL 11:356. Athanasius says the true Holy of Holies is heaven itself, not those “temples of churches erected by men,” Quaestiones in Epistolas Pauli (On the Epistles of Paul) 127, in PG 28:769. Socrates reports that a pagan temple (naos) was converted into a Christian church, HE IV, 24 in PG 67:521—25. But the terms are used freely and interchangeably.

14. Varro, De Lingua Latina VII, 6—9; discussed by S. Weinstock, “Templum,” Römische Mittheilungen 47 (1932): 100—101. Cf. Alfred Jeramias, Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1913), 146, 185.

15. Wilhelm Kroll’s statement in “Mundus,” in RE 16:1.563; Jeremias, Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur, 146, 185.

16. Alfred Jeremias, Das alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1916), 49—51.

17. Eusebius, HE X, 4 in PG 20:848—80.

18. Varro, De Lingua Latina VII, 8.

19. Alfred Jeremias, “Semitische Völker in Vorderasien,” in Daniel P. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925), 1:513. The concept is fully developed by E. Burrows in his chapter, “Some Cosmological Patterns in Babylonian Religion,” in Samuel H. Hooke, ed., The Labyrinth(London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, 1935), 45—70.

20. It should be born in mind that ancient society was sacral in structure. One of the best discussions of the temple concept is by Zelia Nuttall, The Fundamental Principles of Old and New World Civilizations (Cambridge: Peabody Museum, 1901).

21. TB Pesahim 54a—b.

22. TB Erubin 56a. Anonymous, “The Herodian Temple, According to the Treatise Middoth and Flavius Josephus,” Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly (1886): 92—113, 224—28; (1887): 116—28.

23. Simpson, “Middle of the World,” 260—63. For illustrations, see Kenneth John Conant and Glanville Downey, “The Original Buildings at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem,” Speculum 31 (1956): 1—48.

24. Von Grunebaum, Mohammadan Festivals, 20—21.

25. L. Voelkl, “Orientierung im Weltbild der ersten christlichen Jahrhunderte,” Rivista di Archeologia Cristiana 25 (1949): 155.

26. George Contenau, Le Déluge babylonien (Paris: Payot, 1952), 246.

27. André Parrot, Ziggurats et Tour de Babel (Paris: Michel, 1949), 208.

28. Contenau, Le Déluge babylonien, 246.

29. Henri Frankfort, Birth of Civilisation in the Near East (Garden City: Doubleday, 1956), 56, n. 5. Pierre Amiet, “Ziggurats et ‘Culte de Hauteur’ des origines a l’Epoque d’Akkad,” Revue d’Assyriologie 47 (1953): 23—33.

30. André Parrot, “La Tour de Babel et les Ziggurats,” Nouvelle Clio, vol. 2, no. 4 (1950): 159; Herbert Ricke, Bemerkungen zur aegyptischen Baukunst des alten Reiches (Zurich: Borchardt-Institut für Ägyptische Bauforschung und Altertumskunde in Kairo, 1944).

31. Amiet, “Ziggurats,” 30; Parrot, Ziggurat et Tour de Babel, 209; especially see Heinrich J. Lenzen, Die Entwicklung der Zikurrat von ihren Anfängen bis zur Zeit der III. Dynastie von Ur (Leipzig: Harrasowitz, 1941), for the altar idea.

32. Hermann Kees, Aegypten (Munich: Beck, 1933), 298; Jeremias, Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur, 33, 53, 125, 236, 343; for Israel, Robert Eisler, Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1930), 2:670.

33. Eric Burrows, “Problems of the Abzu,” Orientalia 1 (1932): 231—56; Burrows, “Cosmological Patterns,” 49—51. The concept is very familiar to classical students, J.-A. Hild, “Mundus,” in Charles Daremberg and Edmond Saglio, eds., Dictionnaire des antiquités Classiques, 6 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1904), 3:2021—22; Kroll, “Mundus,” 561—63.

34. The classic study is Ludwig Köhler, “Die Schlüssel des Petrus,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft 8 (1905): 215—17; more recently Oscar Cullmann, Urchristentum und Gottesdienst (Zürich: Zwingli, 1950), 274—75. August Dell, “Mt. 16, 17—19,” Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 15 (1914): 27—29; Hermann Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1910), 73, n. 7; A. Sulzbach, “Die Schlüssel des Himmelreiches,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 4 (1903): 190—93.

35. Alexandre Moret, Histoire de l’Orient (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1929), 1:218—37, 365, 377. The theme is treated at length in Hooke, The Labyrinth.

36. This is strikingly depicted in John Chrysostom, Sermo post Reditum ab Exsilio (Discourse following the Return from Exile), n. 2, in PG 52:440.

37. A convenient presentation of this much-treated theme is in Otto Huth, Janus: ein Beitrag zur altrömischen Religionsgeschichte (Bonn: Rohrscheid, 1932), passim.

38. The chapter by Aubrey R. Johnson, “The Role of the King in the Jerusalem Cultus,” in Hooke, The Labyrinth, 73—111, is devoted to this theme.

39. William F. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1942), 154—55, 167.

40. Albright, Archaeology and the Religion of Israel, 150—55.

41. Arendt J. Wensinck, “The Semitic New Year and the Origins of Eschatology,” Acta Orientalia 1 (1922): 160.

42. Lord Fitz Roy Raglan, The Origins of Religion (London: Watts, 1949), 58—69.

43. Sigmund Mowinckel, Religion und Kultus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1953), 76.

44. Johnson, “The Role of the King,” 99—107; Wensinck, “Semitic New Year,” 160, 183; Mowinckel, Religion and Kultus, 73—76.

45. Theodore Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth, and Drama in the Near East (New York: Schuman, 1950), compares the ritual dramas of Ras Shamra, the Hittites, Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews, English Mummer’s Plays, and Christian Hymns.

46. Mowinckel, Religion and Kultus, 94.

47. Wensinck, “Semitic New Year,” 184—85.

48. Illustrated by the Babylonian formulae, e.g., “If he go to the house (temple) of the Seven, he will attain perfection.” “If he go to Babylon, trouble of a day, peace of a year,” etc., given by T. G. Pinches, “Pilgrimage (Babylonian),” in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1951), 10:12.

49. Mikhail I. Rostovzeff, Mystic Italy (New York: Holt, 1927), 76—78. An initiation is “really a pre-enactment of death and of the rising which it is desired should follow death,” Adolphus Peter Elkin, The Australian Aborigines (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1954), 159.

50. This important fact is emphasized by Cyrus H. Gordon, Ugaritic Literature (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1949), 57.

51. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis XXI, Mystagogica III de Chrismate (Catechetical Lecture on the Chrism), in PG 33:1088. Julius Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanarum Religionum (The Error of the Pagan Religions) 23, in PL 12:1031, also comments on the perfect identity of Christian and Egyptian initiation rites, and attributes it to the plagiarism of the latter.

52. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechesis XX, Mystagogica II de Baptismi Caeremoniis (Catechetical Lecture on the Rites of Baptism) in PG 33:1077—78.

53. Ibid., in PG 33:1089; on the real garment, see PG 33:1078. Cf. Tertullian, De Baptismo (On Baptism) 13, in PL 1:1323.

54. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lecture on the Rites of Baptism, in PG 33:1081.

55. Ibid., Catechetical, in PG 33:1093, 1068.

56. Rabbi Akiba, cited by Samuel Aba Horodezky, “Michael und Gabriel,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 72 (1928): 505.

57. Thus Marcus Minucius Felix, Octavius, ed. Bernhard Kytzler, (Leipzig: Teubner, 1982), ix—x.

58. Hugh W. Nibley, The World and the Prophets (Salt Lake City: Deseret and Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1987), 65—69.

59. This fact is noted in Theodosius, Selecta de Religione Decreta (Selected Decrees Concerning Religion) 5—19, in PL 13:533—37.

60. Gaster, Thespis, 49, states: “The function of Myth . . . is to bring out in articulate fashion the inherent durative significance of the ritual program.” Gordon, Ugaritic Literature, 7, says: “As a rule, when a ritual is associated with a myth or legend, the ritual is the older, for the myth or legend tends to be an explanation of the already existing ritual.”

61. Even in the Pyramid Texts the “others say” formula occurs. “The two plumes on his head are Isis and Nephthys . . . but others say that the two plumes are the two very large uraei . . . and yet others say that the two plumes are his eyes,” in E. A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead: Papyrus of Ani, 3 vols. (New York: Putnam, 1913), vol. 3, pl. 7, line 32.

62. TB Pesahim 70b. In his famous letter to Gubbio in 416 A.D., Innocent I complains that “when everyone feels free to observe . . . whatever practices he likes, we see established observances and ways of celebrating of diverse nature. . . . The result is a scandal for the people who, not knowing that the ancient traditions have been altered by human presumption, think . . . that the Apostles established contradictory things;” Epistolae et Decreta (Letters and Decrees) 25, 1—3, in PL 20:551—52.

63. That is why, e.g., the Priestly Corporation of Heliopolis had to sit in judgement yearly to clear the dubious title of Pharaoh and Osiris; Rudolf Anthes, “The Original Meaning of M3c hrw,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 13 (1954): 49—50, 191—92; that is why the kingly title in Mesopotamia “carried in some degree the taint of usurpation, especially in early times;” Frankfort, Birth of Civilisation in the Near East, 80; and why Prometheus can call Zeus himself a sham and usurper; Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, lines 937—43, 953—63; and why Loki can alarm Odin and the gods by threatening to reveal their secret—that they are frauds; Poetic Edda, Lokasenna.

64. For a preliminary account, Hugh W. Nibley, Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1952), 160—64. “Cosmic garment” is the designation of Jeremias, Das Alte Testament, 159.

65. Quoted in Eisler, Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas 1:525; cf. Book of Jasher 27:2, 7, 10; 7:24—27.

66. Hugh W. Nibley, “The Arrow, the Hunter, and the State,” Western Political Quarterly 2 (1949): 339—41.

67. From the first, the emergence of the pattern has alarmed Catholic divines, whose explanation of the widespread uniformities of ritual and liturgy has been that they exist only in the imaginations of scholars. Thus W. Paulus, “Marduk Urtyp Christi?” Orientalia 29 (1928): 63—66; J. de Fraine, “Les Implications du ‘patternism,'” Biblica 37 (1956): 59—73. While the ancients freely admitted the parallels and explained them as borrowings by the heathen from remnants of earlier dispensations of the gospel, the modern Catholic church, denying all dispensations but one, ignore the teachings of the Fathers and leave “patternism” unexplained.

68. Doyle Green, “Los Angeles Temple Dedication,” Improvement Era 59 (April 1956): 228—32.

69. Voelkl, “Orientierung im Weltbild,” 155. How little aware even scholars are of the temple concept in our own day is apparent from Sidney B. Sperry’s “Some Thoughts Concerning Ancient Temples and Their Functions,” Improvement Era 58 (1955): 814—16. If a modern Mormon student knows so little of the ideas here discussed, what are the chances of the elders of over a hundred years ago knowing anything at all about them?

70. E. L. Hawkings, “Freemasonry,” in Hastings, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics 6:120.

71. Ibid., describes Freemasonry as “a peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols.” Pending the exhaustive study that the subject deserves, we will only say here that an extensive reading of Masonic and Mormon teachings and history should make it clear to any reader that the former is the shadow, the latter the substance. The one is literal, the other allegorical.

72. J. Quincy, Figures of the Past: From the Leaves of Old Journals (Boston: Little, Brown, 1910), 389.

73. Glyn Danial, “Megalithic Monuments,” Scientific American 243 (July 1980): 88—90.

74. Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 5 vols. (Hildesheim: Olm, 1967).

75. James G. Frazer, The New Golden Bough, Theodor H. Gaster ed. (New York: Phillips, 1959), xv—xx.

76. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: Viking, 1959), 4—5.

77. M. Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper, 1959), 7—10.

78. “Sparsiones,” Classical Journal 40 (1945): 515—43.

79. See above, chapter 4.

80. “The Hierocentric State,” Western Political Quarterly 4 (1951): 226—53.

81. See below, chapter 9.

82. “Tenting, Toll, and Taxing,” Western Political Quarterly 29 (1966): 599—630.

83. See above, chapter 7.

84. “The Genesis of the Written Word” (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, Commissioner’s Lecture, 1973); reprinted New Era 3 (1973): 38—50

85. The Message of The Joseph Smith Papyri: An Egyptian Endowment (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1975).

86. See above, chapter 3.

87. “A New Look at the Pearl of Great Price,” Improvement Era 71 (1968): 18—24, running serially until 73 (1970): 82—89, 91—94.

88. Abraham in Egypt (Salt Lake City: Deseret, 1981).

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