Review
Title: 175 Temple Symbols and their Meanings
Author: Donald W. Parry
Publisher: Deseret Book
Genre: Non-Fiction, Doctrine
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 310
Binding: Cloth
ISBN: 978-1629727523
Price: 26.99
Reviewed by Dan Call for the Association of Mormon Letters
During college, I was privileged to live close enough to the Logan, UT temple that I could make regular temple worship a part of my life. On one occasion, after my friends and I finished a session, we began to visit with a gregarious temple worker who offered to take us on a tour of some parts of the temple with which we were unfamiliar. We wandered up staircases, peered through windows, learned some history, and ended up in conversation in the assembly room for a few brief moments. For as aged as our guide was, we just couldn’t keep up with all he was trying to tell us. My head spinning as we trod through the snow back to our dorm rooms, I couldn’t recall most of the detail I’d just heard, but was instead most impressed with the feeling of getting to see a little more than I was used to, and how it, in turn, was altering my understanding of other parts of temple worship which I had spent several years trying to understand.
I got the same feeling from reading Donald Parry’s 175 Temple Symbols and Their Meanings. There’s an abundance of things to ponder in this book, laid out as an appealing reference guide. I was unfamiliar with previous work by Parry, but he impressed me with his extensive knowledge of temple worship both in Ancient Israel and in Restoration times. Yet for all the research laid out here, I found myself slowing down after each entry, asking more questions, thinking about what was left unwritten. This isn’t a complaint as much as a gesture of satisfaction that this book, although chock-full with fascinating information and observations, doesn’t attempt to be exhaustive. Instead, like a temple itself, Parry’s book feels nicely constructed to accommodate multiple exploratory visits.
I instantly loved the layout of this book. The alphabetical organization of entries encourages readers to look for specific symbols, which seems handy since temple learning is a lifelong endeavor, and being able to return to this reference over time may yield different results. This volume also flows with gorgeous photos, illustrations, and explanatory charts that bring the subject to life. I found that these graphics serve as an effective alternative way to approaching the text since most of our temple symbols are experienced visually. Just as I have often stumbled into temple symbols by going through the motions and keeping my eyes wide open for things I have missed, casually thumbing through this guide and stopping to study when something grabs my attention actually felt like a rational and rewarding technique.
The introduction lays out numerous prescriptions to readers for making sense of temple symbols in general. This portion of the book can also be read as an explanation of the author’s thought process for what he chose to leave out, or how he frames his understanding of the temple. For instance, Parry makes clear his intent to defer to authoritative sources on this topic: the Holy Ghost, scriptures, and contemporary church leaders. This feels wise, but I was also a bit discouraged when I read his admonition to leave “our cultural understandings” out of the process of making sense of temple worship (p. 9), although, thankfully, he breaks his own rule at several points in the book.
A general Mormon orientation toward temple symbology, and one with which Parry evidently agrees, is that the design of and worship taking place within the Lord’s house are entirely revealed from heaven, and therefore our job is to study them and approach them as complete phenomena which we can only be understood through faith and obedience. The author makes his position on this clear through his discouragement of us from passing judgement on certain symbols or practices that trouble the modern reader. The entry titled “Blemishes, Priests and High Priests With,” for instance, objectively describes how in ancient times individuals with any perceived physical defect, ranging from blindness to height, to nose shape, were judged unworthy to officiate in ordinances, and could even be put to death for attempting to do so. From this symbol, the author extrapolates that in our day we ought to “strive to serve without spiritual blemishes,” (p. 67) which is certainly upheld by modern revelations and practices, but it also lets us off the hook from having to do some deeper thinking about the problems of associating spiritual purity with unalterable physical traits – both anciently and contemporarily. Is the only permissible interpretation of my unease with these practices that I am in rebellion or in danger of leaning too much on my own understanding? If the restoration of the fulness of the Gospel, as we have heard so often over these last few years, is still not complete after two centuries, can we not extend the same grace to our ancient counterparts, allowing that maybe they got some things wrong that future generations would correct?
The variations from temple to temple themselves, catalogued in the section on “Architectural features, various temples” suggests that there is room for each temple to draw in or convert autochthonous elements, in addition to universal revealed traits. This leaves my mind racing for possibilities: what other possibilities are out there in the world? Might each new temple going up in India, China, Papua New Guinea, Cote d’Ivoire, et al, be filled with locally inspired symbols and artwork that are analogues of those found in Utah temples, or will we make room for symbols hammered out locally in the millennia-old cultures, carrying the stories of all the family of God? An exercise I often do when reading this sort of text is to imagine how this book might have looked had it been written a hundred years ago, and then how it might look were it to be written in another hundred years. This time around, my thought experiment led me to smile, as I can clearly see that the trajectory is arcing towards more inclusion. Thankfully, 175 Temple Symbols and their Meanings also makes room for this possibility, widening our understanding of the role temples play in the gathering of Israel.