My sister came to town recently with her adult children. She invited me to come to the Salt Lake Temple for a live session. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and noted a few of the unusual differences of a live session versus the typical filmed version. Here are a few things I noticed.
- Eve is REALLY old – Since most of the temple workers are retired, it was interesting to see a white-haired Eve, rather than a 20-something Eve in the films.
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People leave the Creation room and enter the Garden Room through that door Men sit on the left at least in the Creation Room. In the film version, patrons do not move around. But in Salt Lake, the room is setup different. The first 5 rows are in a V shape, and then men sit on the left of the V, rather than the right side of the room as is customary. However, if there are more patrons than simply the V, the men do sit on the right. Because the door to the next room (Garden Room) is on the right, this setup allows men to walk in on the right side of the Garden Room without a problem.
- Peter was a black man. I probably shouldn’t notice this, but it was nice to have some diversity. This only happened one time, but I still thought it was cool.
- Adam gives signs to Eve. In the film versions, the officiator gives the signs or tokens to Adam, and then the temple workers walk around the room to the patrons. However, in Salt Lake, the officiator gives the signs or tokens to Adam, then Adam gives them to his wife, then Adam and Eve give them to the temple workers. Salt Lake definitely has more steps involved here.
- A lot of workers forget the lines. There is a lot to remember!
(Here are more photos inside the SL Temple if you’re interested.) Modern Temples are so bland compared to these wonderful murals in the SL Temple. What have you noticed when attending the live sessions? I know some of the newer temples have patrons move during the endowment sessions. Have you noticed differences among the temples?
Wheat & Tares 
In the SL celestial room above the veil is a statue of Mary given to the church by the Catholics. Brigham Young had it place where it is now.
In LA patrons also travel from room to room, and men start on the left in the creation room and are then on the right in all subsequent rooms. There is no V, however.
The DC temple is the only place I’ve been able to sit by my husband. There is only one section of chairs, and if you sit in the middle you get to stay on your sides, together.
The first time I did a live session in Salt Lake, it was before my mission with my then boyfriend. I wasn’t sure what a live session was, and he said instead of a movie, it was done with actors. I was envisioning, well, ACTORS, not geriatrics mumbling misremembered lines. In that vein, I would love to see a musical version. We need to baptize some broadway songwriters.
Wonderdog, Brigham Young died long before the interior of the Salt Lake Temple was constructed, and did not place anything in it. The suggestion that this statute was donated by the Catholics is apocryphal and most certainly is not true. I was an ordinance worker in the Salt Lake Temple with my wife prior to our children being born. I had heard the rumor about this statue and so I asked about it. I was told that this rumor was not true, and I have been unable to find anything solid to corroborate the story.
#4 – “Endowment, the Musical”…Hawk, you’re a card.
IMHO, the Church ought to build two new modern temples in the Salt Lake area, one in West Valley City and the other on one of the ‘benches’ near Mt. Olympus or Millcreek. The SL Temple itself ought to be preserved and the sessions transferred to the proposed modern temples. They could still do the weddings for those that just gotta have it there.
Of course, there I go again, steadying that ark…
One time when I attended a live session at the SLC Temple the brother who played Michael/Adam was an older man with a very strong German accent. “Ve vill goh down!” was said with such a stern enthusiasm every single time that to this day I still get a little giggle when I’m in the temple and hear this line. Not an insight, just a fun little story.
Wonderdog and Michael, the most authoritative source I’ve been able to find on the statue is from a an 1893 Harper’s Weekly article that describes the statue as “a figure of the Virgin in white, the work of a Utah sculptor.” The article was written by Eugene Young, a grandson of Brigham Young, who toured the temple just prior to it’s dedication in 1893. The full article is quoted here: http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/53525-temple-clamshellfan-design/
I hadn’t seen the article from Eugene Young. An interesting note about him is that his grandmother divorced Brigham Young and left the Church, along with all of her children apparently. He does not appear to have been LDS at the time of the publication and had a history of being against the Church. https://books.google.com/books?id=nNvhAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA1953&lpg=PA1953&dq=Eugene+Young,+of+Salt+Lake+City&source=bl&ots=t0WTzwIqTA&sig=Y-K5XO9yBgzA-cQJ0JH2Mx5-o7k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MV_ZVLWFEsmuyASR7oLwBQ&ved=0CEIQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=Eugene%20Young%2C%20of%20Salt%20Lake%20City&f=false
I’ve never been to a live session, but one time a deaf person was in the session I attended and they played the films with subtitles. The subtitles show when there are voices speaking, not just when something visual is playing, and also, when you can’t see who’s speaking, it says the name of the person that is speaking as well. So it tells you whether it’s Jehovah or Elohim speaking, rather than just saying “the Lord.” I thought that was pretty interesting. I always thought that the one you talk to at the veil would be Jehovah, since he’s the advocate with the Father and everything is kind of through Him, but according to the subtitles, it’s Elohim.
I’ve only been once, but what struck me were the architectural details. In the first room, the wall corners were rounded, but the ceiling corners were not. In the next room, someone decided it would look better to have the mural continuous through the ceiling, and rounded all the corners.
Makes me wonder if someone had the good idea partway through, and no one wanted to go back and do the creation room again.
The last time I went to the SL Temple, I did wonder why men and women were sitting on the “wrong” side in the creation room, so I looked at the murals on the walls. The women were facing a garden teeming with life. The men were looking at the ocean which generally represents “chaos”. Then after changing sides in the garden room the women are facing a very large representation of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the men are looking at The Tree of Life putting me in mind of Valerie Hudson’s Two Trees Theory.