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I\u2019ve already<\/span> written at great length<\/span><\/a> about how the Latter-day Saint temple ceremonies tap into various primal archetypes, and how that <\/span>might relate to its Masonic connections<\/span><\/a>. Again, the point isn\u2019t to score some kind of point in favor of the Church\u2019s truth claims, but, in a sense more interestingly, to appreciate the universality and Jungian richness of the Latter-day Saint temple tradition, whether you think the temple ceremonies were inspired from a God who spoke to other children and traditions using the same themes and motifs, or whether Joseph Smith was a religious genius that was able to tap into universal religious themes from a low-church backwater Protestant background and a dash of Masonry (or a mix of the two). (To be clear, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a fairly traditional believer in the revelatory provenance of the temple ceremonies, but for this post I’m temporarily bracketing the discussion so that it doesn’t take up all the oxygen here).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A common touchstone for ancient\/modern temple comparisons are the Elueysian mysteries, by far the most prominent \u201cmystery cult\u201d in the ancient world. For a thousand years both Roman Emperors and Greek philosophers travelled to the temple outside of Athens to reenact the \u201cfall and redemption\u201d story of Demeter being captured by Hades and then returned to the world so that crops could grow again. The climax of this liturgical reenactment and religious festival was a sacred ceremony held in the most sacred part of the temple where very secret things were done\u2013so secret, that to this day scholars can only guesstimate what they might have been.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWhat happens in Eleusis during the mystery rites themselves remains, in large part, a secret. To be sure, there were legomena, dromena, and deiknymena, but exactly what was spoken, performed, and shown is unclear.\u201d<\/em> (Meyer : The Ancient Mysteries, a Sourcebook of Ancient Texts).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0(Evidently they were better at keeping a secret than we have been with the temple ceremonies. I sometimes wonder if anthropologists a thousand years from now with an archived YouTube database will know all about the vengeance oaths but will have only the fuzziest idea that temples have anything to do with ancestors).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Through his Book of Abraham-related and other works Nibley drew out the thematic connections between the temple ceremonies and the mystery cults, but since then I get the sense that the pendulum has swung against doing this kind of esoteric modern\/ancient temple comparison. This kind of comparative religious comparison is not new, of course. <\/span>In a different era, Herodotus and other ancient Greeks explicitly connected the ancient Greek mysteries to a similar ritual conducted in Egypt reenacting the death and resurrection of Osiris, and the Masons made a similar connection.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I initially planned to do a two-parter on the Ancient Greek endowment and the Ancient Egyptian endowment, but in the little reading I did it\u2019s hard to disentangle authentic earlier ancient Egyptian Osiris rituals where they liturgically reenacted the death and resurrection of Osiris from the later largely Greco-Roman mystery cult, even though the latter at least has some similarities like having the ritual end in the presence of Gods in a well-lit room. (And, according to Plutarch, the rituals \u201crevealed the divine things to those who are truly and rightly called \u2018carriers of sacred things\u2019 and \u2018wearers [or keepers] of sacred robes” and \u201cthe reason why the [mystery] priests shave off their hair and wear linen garments.\u201d)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So here we\u2019ll focus on the Ancient Greek endowment.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Taking advantage of my access to a decent academic library with interlibrary loan I decided to check out the latest scholarship on the Mysteries. Again, because of the secretive nature of the mystery cults we only have vague allusions, at least after the initial festivities when they retired to the sacred temple structure. The primary sources we have are threadbare but elucidating.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While accusing a man of violating the secrecy, Lysias said:<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThis man donned a ceremonial robe, and in imitation he revealed the secret things to the uninitiated, and spoke with his lips the forbidden words.\u201d (Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World, 38).<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n So robes, initiations, and secret words.<\/p>\n Another account comes from Clement of Alexandria: <\/span>\u201cI fasted, I drank the kykeon, I took from the chest, when I had done the deed I put into the basket, and from the basket into the chest.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n So the Elueysian mysteries also involved a holy object in a chest. A lot of ink has been spilled about what was in that chest but we really don\u2019t know. The most common speculation was that it was a common ear of corn as a symbol of Demeter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The same Bowden book has the following account (42), but it\u2019s unclear which primary sources it\u2019s drawing from.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cSuddenly, the Telestrion [their Holy of Holies] opens, and the hierophant stands in the doorway, silhouetted against a brilliant light streaming from the interior. The initiates enter, passing from darkness into an immense space blazing with extraordinary light, coming from thousands of torches held by the Epoptai.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n So the climax of the Mysteries was a moment when they pass into a version of the celestial room. <\/span><\/p>\n Like our endowment, the Roman statesman Cicero alluded to the Mysteries as aiding one in the afterlife: <\/span><\/p>\n \u201c<\/span>Just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have <\/span>learned from them the fundamentals of life<\/span>, and have <\/span>grasped the basis not only for living with joy but also for dying with a better hope<\/span><\/em>\u201d<\/em> (Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook). <\/em><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n Of course, we can\u2019t just cherry pick the similarities and ignore places where they don\u2019t fit. One very common, almost ubiquitous aspect in Mystery cults is the Sacred Object. We don\u2019t really have anything like that in temples. As I\u2019ve written about, we have <\/span>Sacred Spaces, Sacred Sounds<\/span><\/a>, and the like, but there is no object that can fit in, say, a box that is the focal point of our worship or that can only be seen with certain eyes. (And again, this isn\u2019t just a Mediterranean theme, the imperial regalia of Japan <\/span>can only be seen by the Emperor<\/span><\/a> and a few select Shinto priests. When the capital of Japan moved<\/span> a special train car<\/span><\/a> was built just to house the Sacred Mirror, the holiest of the regalia).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Finally, in my reading I was surprised at how common these mystery cults were. <\/span>There were at least a dozen of them, probably more, with the Elueysian rites simply being the most prominent. (And maybe one of the more banal; the cover of the Meyer Sourcebook<\/i> had a fresco from Pompeii showing a woman giving fellatio to a man during the Bacchus rituals- now that’s how you sell books), so again, the central themes are found throughout time and space, although the mystery cults probably influenced each other. In a sense if the official Roman state religion was the staid establishment churches and mainline Protestants, the mystery cults were the circuit-riding evangelicals, and was where intense religiosity was vectored in late-period pagan Rome.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So to summarize, the sacred oaths, robes, sacred performances, sacred and secret words and symbols, and a passing-through-the-veil admission into a central, brightly lit space, all of which is meant to aid one in the afterlife, is found throughout the Mediterranean in a religious context, and is one example of the common themes our temple worship taps into, whether through revelation or Joseph Smith\u2019s own primal religious insight.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve already written at great length about how the Latter-day Saint temple ceremonies tap into various primal archetypes, and how that might relate to its Masonic connections. Again, the point isn\u2019t to score some kind of point in favor of the Church\u2019s truth claims, but, in a sense more interestingly, to appreciate the universality and Jungian richness of the Latter-day Saint temple tradition, whether you think the temple ceremonies were inspired from a God who spoke to other children and traditions using the same themes and motifs, or whether Joseph Smith was a religious genius that was able to tap into universal religious themes from a low-church backwater Protestant background and a dash of Masonry (or a mix of the two). (To be clear, as I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a fairly traditional believer in the revelatory provenance of the temple ceremonies, but for this post I’m temporarily bracketing the discussion so that it doesn’t take up all the oxygen here).\u00a0 A common touchstone for ancient\/modern temple comparisons are the Elueysian mysteries, by far the most prominent \u201cmystery cult\u201d in the ancient world. For a thousand years both Roman Emperors and Greek philosophers travelled to the temple outside of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10403,"featured_media":51491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2900],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-temples"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/ChatGPT-Image-Oct-6-2025-at-10_31_44-AM.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10403"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51488"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51548,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51488\/revisions\/51548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}