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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome to Keystone! On Keystone, our goal is to fortify Latter-day Saint faith and combat misinformation through good old-fashioned research. I’m your host, David Snell. Let’s jump right in!
Today, inverted stars or pentagrams are commonly associated with Satanism.
But if you take a closer look at some Latter-day Saint temples, you might spot some inverted stars in the architecture. What the heck is going on here? Why do we find Satanic symbols on Latter-day Saint temples?!
Here’s the deal: Symbols can mean different things to different people at different times and in different places. For example, before Christians associated the Jesus fish with Jesus, it was a pagan symbol of fertility. Before the Nazi swastika was associated with racism, it was a symbol of luck you could find on American postcards. For Buddhists and Hindus, the swastika held and continues to hold religious significance.
You can find upside-down stars (as far as I am aware) on only 3 Latter-day Saint temples: the Nauvoo, Logan, and Salt Lake City temples. But you can find this symbol in a variety of other places as well — religious and otherwise. There’s one on the Catholic cathedral in Amiens, France. There’s one belonging to the Church of England in Adderbury. There’s one on the highest military award in the United States, the Medal of Honor. There’s one on the Arkansas state flag, the Grammy Awards logo, the 1837 Great Star American Flag, the Victoria Australia police department badge, the logo of the Republican Party — you get the picture.
If you want to insist that Latter-day Saints are just Satanists hiding in plain sight, I can’t stop you. But I would hope that you’d have some evidence to back that claim up. I have not been able to find any evidence indicating that early Latter-day Saints associated these stars with Satan. But here’s what I have found:
In the autobiography of Wandle Mace (who helped build the Nauvoo Temple), we read: “The order of architecture [of the Nauvoo temple] was unlike anything in existence; it was purely original, being a representation of the Church, the Bride, the Lamb’s wife. John, the Revelation [sic] in the 12 chapter, first verse says, ‘And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.’ This is portrayed in the beautifully cut stone of this grand temple….”
The Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible tells us that the woman in Revelation chapter 12 represents the Church. Again, she was crowned with stars, clothed in the sun, and had the moon under her feet. In this context, the Nauvoo temple would also represent Christ’s church, similarly adorned in the architecture with a crown of stars, followed by sunstones and moonstones at the bottom or towards the base of the structure.
Now, the original Nauvoo Temple burned down in 1848 and was further damaged by a tornado in 1850. The new Nauvoo temple was patterned after the old one, with some changes. One change is that the inverted star windows are now surrounded by 12 stones. In the book “Sacred Walls,” author Gerald Hansen compares this setup to the camp of Israel, where 3 tribes camped on each side of the Israelite tabernacle or temple, which represented the presence of Jehovah. Jehovah was their center, the focal point of their lives, just as Christ should be in our lives.
But wait, there’s more! In Symbols in Stone by Matthew Brown and Paul Smith, we read that, “To the early Saints of our dispensation this emblem was known as ‘The Star of the Morning.’” This is evidenced by an 1880 Deseret News article commenting on the installation of the inverted star on the eastern side of the Logan Utah Temple: “Carved upon the keystone is a magnificent star, called the Star of the Morning, being in an elevated position, it looks out in bold relief upon the rising sun.”
The morning star, also called the day star and the evening star, is the brightest star in the sky just before dawn in the east and after sunset in the west. Literally, it’s the planet Venus, whose rotation in the sky relative to Earth creates a pentagram shape over an 8-year period. Sometimes the morning star is represented with an elongated bottom ray, perhaps pointing towards its source of light below the horizon — the sun.
Now, some people might rightly point out that the morning star has sometimes been associated with Lucifer because Isaiah 14:12 refers to Lucifer as the “son of the morning,” but the early Latter-day Saint interpretation was clearly based on Revelation 22:16, which says, “I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.” Jesus Christ is the morning star.
An 1846 issue of the Millennial Star clearly identifies Christ as the morning star.
The early Saints sang about Christ as the Morning Star. In verse 6 of Hymn 57 called “On Sacrament” from the 1835 hymnal we read,
“He is the true Messiah,
That died and lives again;
We look not for another,
He is the Lamb ’twas slain;
He is the Stone and Shepherd
Of Israel—scatter’d far;
The glorious Branch from Jesse:
The bright and Morning Star.”
Interestingly, the very first Latter-day Saint newspaper, first published in 1832, was called The Evening and Morning Star.
As sort of an interesting side-note, if you look up “star” in the 1828 Webster’s Dictionary, you’ll find references to both the Revelation 12 & Revelation 22 layers of meaning — and nothing about Satan.
Now, you might be thinking, if the inverted star has historically represented good, when did it start to represent evil for some people? Most sources I’ve seen agree that a Frenchman named Eliphas Levi was the first person to connect the inverted star with Satan in the 1850s — after the Nauvoo temple had already been completed. Levi was the first person to describe what is known today as the Sigil of Baphomet, which became the preeminent symbol of the Church of Satan in 1966.
Thanks so much for listening. This is one of our first episodes on this podcast. If you enjoyed it or learned something, give us a review and let us know how we’re doing, and have a great day!