The temple - re-enacting myth

Robert Segal's explanation of Mircea Eliade's approach to myth strikes me as particularly applicable to Mormons' motives for enacting the endowment ceremony.

To hear, to read, and especially to re-enact a myth is magically to return to the time when the myth took place, the time of the origin of whatever phenomenon it explains:

But since ritual recitation of the cosmogonic myth implies reactualization of that primordial event, it follows that he for whom it is recited is magically projected in illo tempore, into the 'beginning of the World'; he becomes contemporary with the cosmogony. (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 82)

Playing Adam and Eve in the LDS temple.

... In returning one to primordial time, myth reunites one with the gods, for it is then when they are nearest, as the biblical case of 'the Lord God['s] walking in the garden in the cool of the day' typifies (Genesis 3.8) That 'reunion' reverses the post-Edenic separation from the gods and renews one spiritually:

What is involved is, in short, a return to the original time, the therapeutic purpose of which is to begin life once again, a symbolic rebirth. (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 82)

The ultimate payoff of myth is experiential: encountering divinity. (From Myth: A Very Short Introduction, pp. 55-56)

Aaaaand... welcome to the Celestial Room!

Adam-ondi-Ahman

When the early saints moved down to Missouri Joseph Smith conveniently learned that it was a very cool place. Jesus was going to do some millennial ruling from there and, believe it or not, Adam, the father of mankind, would also be making a return visit! The exact location is called Adam-ondi-Ahman (Adamic for "Adam in the presence of God") but before that it was just good old Spring Hill.

"Spring Hill is named by the Lord Adam-ondi-Ahman, because, said he, it is the place where Adam shall come to visit his people, or the Ancient of Days shall sit, as spoken of by Daniel the prophet." (D&C 116:1)

Actually, before that it was the Adams and Eves family stopping grounds. 

"Three years previous to the death of Adam, he called Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, and Methuselah, who were all high priests, with the residue of his posterity who were righteous, into the valley of Adam-ondi-Ahman, and there bestowed upon them his last blessing." (D&C 107:53)

 No Eden here, try Missouri.

Yes, that means the Garden of Eden was in North America and not somewhere in the vicinity of the Middle East. Here's what Spring Hill/Adam-ondi-Aham/Almost Eden looks like.

I always had a hard time with believing this story. Adam, as in an actual historical non-literary first man created by God 6000 years ago? Missouri, really? God's mentioning mountains, I don't think this can be the right place. What about the whole scientifically-based "out of Africa" thing? And why's Adam coming back for the Second Coming anyway? Won't that steal some of Jesus' thunder? What other big names are billed for the event? If I get tickets for Adam's Blessing will I still be able to catch the Destruction of Gog and Magogs? I hear that show's gonna kick ass.

And how about the Adam-ondi-Ahman temple? Is that venue up yet? I can't wait! I hear it's gonna be sweet!

The temple - Adam and Eve

So the temple endowment film is essentially a rehashing of the Adam and Eve story and how they got kicked out of the Garden and then had to learn how to once again gain Elohim's presence. It's not exactly the freshest, most riveting tale anymore but that doesn't mean it can't be interesting. Don't forget that Adam and Eve start things off in their birthday suits!

The Church did a decent job of choosing attractive actors to play the roles and, yes, for all the audience can see, they're naked. Which was weird. It was a little uncomfortable for me to be sitting next to my dad in an amazingly sacred, super sacred place watching a couple of naked people through a camera that's slowly panning around strategically placed plants and rocks. The way it was shot made the whole thing feel rather voyeuristic. I don't think I was the only one who was both nervous and hopeful about seeing a nip slip.

Then again it also felt a bit like the end of Austin Powers - International Man of Mystery. Pretty comical with all those bushes and leaves popping up in just the right places and the shot cutting away just before you see too much.

Once I got over the weirdness of the ceremony in general I found myself thinking more about how hot the two Eves were. I was getting an erection every time I went to do a session. It really didn't feel right.

I wondered who was calling the shots on this whole movie thing. Whoever it was, did they actually watch the final product? And why was I finding the stupid movie even slightly erotic at all? I decided I just had to grow up a bit. It would all make sense one day. No use dwelling on doubts.

True science

Growing up Mormon I learned that God was the Ultimate Scientist; He used science to make the Universe and uses it still to carry out miracles. What we know of science now is unfortunately little more than the grossest approximation to the kind of scientific knowledge God possesses.

The understanding of man is nothing next to the understanding of God, but thank God He's bestowed upon us such wonderful truths as our dire need for repentance and baptism, both of which are infinitely more important than any silly vaccine or some pointless taxonomy of life on our planet. I mean think about it, we all know that illness and pestilence come about because of our disobedience to God and that life on earth began in the Garden and spread from there. We don't even need science. Ok, I'm done being facetious. 

Here's a serious question: when has science ever confirmed the explanations of the natural world offered in the Standard Works? The Book of Mormon has that silly verse about how the earth revolving around the Sun, but the fact that the BoM shows up long after the scientific debate on the heliocentricity of our solar system makes Joseph Smith and his Nephi character (no, this is one of the other Nephis) look like a regular Johnny-come-lately.

Pairing up science with the Gospel was an obvious lost cause from the get go, but I did my best to remind myself that my brain was just too tiny to understand how revelation and science work together and that my heart yearned too impatiently to see the pieces fit. For years I put the issue on hold and trusted my faith.

The dawn of Man

The story of Adam and Eve was an easy favorite for me as a child, second only to the story of Noah's ark. Probably because even though it had just as many animal species it lacked the adventure of the roundup and the violence of the Flood. I loved that Adam got to name all the animals and live with them and Eve happily in a kind of Tarzan-Jane-like existence. Even thinking about it now makes me happy.

Despite the thrill of such a wonderful story I knew there were some problems with it. For starters there were the likes of these guys

and plenty of others. Then again my parents never showed any indication of subscribing to young earth creationism. In fact my dad had taken me and my siblings out trilobite hunting once or twice and he was sure to explain that the fossils we found pre-dated the dinosaurs, who were themselves hundreds of millions of years old and probably never in the Garden of Eden. I was told at home, in church, and later at BYU that the details of the Creation would be revealed to us at some point after we died, so I kept the whole issue of where prehistoric creatures came from on the shelf labeled "We won't know, so we don't care" for a surprisingly long time. Admittedly I noticed the shelf bowing horribly when I was studying the Old Testament on my mission and read quote after quote from general authorities stating that the Church's stance on the matter was unbendingly pro-young earth and therefore aggressively anti-scientific. It hurt to read that kind of senselessness. I didn't want to be wrapped up with it, nor did I want to place my faith in something so demonstrably inaccurate.

Now let me return to the question of Adam and Eve. I was taught that they were literally our "first parents", meaning that all human beings can trace their ancestry back directly to them. I believed that my physical existence resulted directly from their procreative efforts so many millennia ago. (No, Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve do not fit the biblical narrative, people!) As a youngster I oscillated between thinking they were folks who looked like my family and our church-going neighbors and thinking they were probably special cavemen who had, you know, touched the obelisk or something.  

It's embarrassing now to think back on these things. It's painfully embarrassing to hear people defend creationism and attack evolution. The last two times I've attended LDS church services I was treated to witnessing explicit attacks on Darwin and the scientific method! Of course this was only a couple of months after Mormon apostle, Russell Nelson took a stab at refuting the Big Bang in General Conference with a snide and ignorant remark about an explosion in a printing press producing a dictionary... 

How does anyone stay a believer when this stuff is obviously wrong even to a small child? These are issues that extend far beyond Mormonism to all of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. How could this absolute nonsense persist and flourish still today among billions of people? I'm guessing that many people do what I did: they doubt their doubts and not their faith.

The literal baptism of the earth

Growing up my favorite stories in the Bible were always the ones that had the most to do with animals. The more prominent role animals played in the story, the more I liked it. favorites included Daniel and the lion's den, Jonah and the whale, the plague of frogs in Egypt, Adam naming all things living in the Garden of Eden (duh!), and of course Noah's ark. The story of the ark is still hard to beat. I love the idea of saving and caring for all the animals in the entire world and being up close with so many exotic species in all their well-behaved glory. I would have given anything to be on that boat with essentially every kind of Earth’s land animals as my pets. 

My enthusiasm for the animals, however, did not deter me from posing the question of just how exactly Noah would have found them all (think of all the animals living near the poles or in Australia or the Americas), sexed them, brought them back to his ark (I liked to imagine a Divine hand guiding them all in a mysterious migration pointed in Noah’s direction), somehow fit them all in (maybe he knew Merlin’s song from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone), kept them fed (I remembered seeing a picture in my Zoo Books of how much food an elephant eats in a year and it was basically a small hill), kept their pens clean (cows on farms for example always seemed to be up to their knees in manure), and kept them from killing each other (because animals do that quite naturally). Then I couldn’t help but wonder how in the world they managed to get back to their respective habitats (imagine the box turtles hiking from the Middle East to the Eastern United States, for example). 

Even as a little kid I knew the story was fishy, to say the least, but I held on to it as best I could. Years later as a missionary I found myself reading the Student Manual to the Old Testament about how the earth had to be literallybaptized by immersion to eventually attain its celestial glory, and how maybe - just maybe! - the continents moved to their current locations during the year of total submersion. It was clear, just as it had been from my earliest memories of the story, that the contents of Genesis 6-9 were to be understood as literal, historical events.

It was all too staggeringly hopeful. The story of Noah's ark full of pairs of some ten million species and the supposed flood that covered every mountain top on planet earth pointed me to one single conclusion: THIS IS FICTION, NOT HISTORY. 

And yet I doubted my doubts and believed on.