Ancient Temples: The Saint George Temple and the Dragon

 Previously: A House for the Presidency

Welcome readers. Thanks for joining me for Part I of my new series: Ancient Temples, where we'll be examining the construction narratives of 8 LDS temples supposedly built between 1877 and 1945.

We'll begin with the St. George temple, said to have been constructed between 1871 and 1877. But first, a little background on the history of the name St. George is in order.

Have you ever wondered why the Latter-Day-Saints named this southern settlement Saint George? Sainting and sainthood is something we hear about often in Catholicism, but no so much in Mormonism. In the latter faith all members are considered "saints", so why single out one person in particular? 

As the story goes, St. George was named after George A. Smith, who, we are told, was an instrumental figure in the establishment of the city. But if you dig a little deeper, George A. had an 18-yr-old son named George A. Junior, who, when attempting to proselytize to some Navajo Indians in 1860, was said to have been brutally murdered by them. And when Brigham Young asked apostle George A. what to name the new settlement they were calling 309 individuals to move to in 1861, George responded, "We shall name it St. George." The speculation is that he named it after his martyred son. 

(George A. Jr. was shot three times with his own revolver according to the narrative, which is strangely reminiscent of Hiram Abiff, the great Masonic martyr, being struck three times by the three ruffians who conspired to murder him, more on this later.)

And that's the only background we get on the name for that city. 

According to Wikipedia, St. George may have been named after George A. Smith, but there is no hard evidence to support the theory. However, if you do just a quick Google search of the name St. George, you find that name associated with an early Christian martyr who was killed by the Romans. St. George, or George of Lydda, was a soldier in the Roman army, and later became a member of the Praetorian Guard under the Roman emperor Diocletian. As the story goes, he was executed by his Roman compatriots for refusing to recant his Christian faith on April 23, of 303 A.D.

Later, St. George became venerated by the Catholic Church and immortalized by various myths and legends, the most famous of which is the story of St. George and the Dragon. This classic fairytale is where virtually all stories featuring a princess, a dragon, and a knight in shining armor come from. 

According to legend, a quaint village was being extorted by a fire-breathing dragon, and when villagers ran out of livestock and "trinkets" to offer it as tribute, the beast began demanding human sacrifice. So once a year a villager would have to be sacrificed to the dragon to appease its appetites. But when it came time for the village princess to be chosen as its next victim, George wouldn't stand for it. Arming himself with shield and lancet, he mounted his horse and faced the beast head-on, stabbing it through the chest with his elongated weapon.  

However, the blow only wounded the beast, leaving it subdued and "tamed" by George (so tame in fact that the princess was able to lead it around by a leash). But it recovered, and soon began demanding sacrifice once again from the villagers, who begged George to finally dispatch of it. This he agreed to do only if they all converted to Christianity, which they immediately did. George finished the job by chopping off the head of the dragon with his sword. 

This story goes back much further than St. George. Renditions of it can be recognized in Greek mythology and even Thracian records. St. George is immortalized by Muslims as well as Christians alike, and countries like England, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Georgia (named after George of course), Ukraine, Malta, and Ethiopia have adopted George as their patron saint. 

But the most interesting of all the people who have idolized St. George are the Russians, beginning with the Muscovites who supposedly founded the city of Moscow. It is here that we find a connection between St. George, the Dragon, and Greater Tartary (found  ancient maps), or as some have come to call it, Tartaria.

Grand Tartary was an empire in Asia hundreds of years ago. The most popular theory posited by modern alternative researchers is that this empire spanned into North and South America, and even across the entire world. I'm not sure this is true, but even if their empire did not extend into America, their influence on architecture most certainly did. 

Utah is full of Old World buildings that many researchers would deem "Tartarian", but is there a deeper connection between Russia, Tartaria, Saint George, and the founding of the city of St. George in southern Utah?

Astoundingly, there is a connection. Read on to find out what it is. 

How to Train, I mean Kill, Your Dragon

In 2010, the first movie of the animated How to Train Your Dragon series came out. The film features a young Viking boy who befriends a dragon that his culture is telling him he needs to kill. But having found the dragon wounded and helpless, he nurses it back to health and adopts it as a pet. 

Interestingly, the dragon (whom the boy affectionately named "Toothless") is black and looks a little like the beast found on the crest above (see the thumbnail image of this post) of St. George slaying the dragon. This crest is actually found on the Russian imperial flag that was flown for hundreds of years by the Romanovs before the Bolsheviks took over in 1919. 

Why would the Russians display this symbol of St. George slaying the dragon on their flag?  

It is because the dragon is a symbol of Tartaria, found on its national flag. It looked something like this:

This creature is actually a chimera known as a black Zilant, a mixture of a lion, an eagle, and a wyvern. A wyvern is a mythical dragon will a curly tail and only two legs. Some researchers of Tartaria have also called this creature a griffin. Oddly enough, you can find stone depictions of these creatures on buildings all over the United States. Here are some griffins on a government building in Oshkosh, Wisconsin:

Below is an image of the Russian Imperial flag:

As you can see, they are displaying the double-headed eagle or phoenix that dates back to the Byzantine empire, along with that crest of St. George slaying the dragon smack dab in the middle. Here is a close up of it:

Interestingly, Vladimir Putin displayed this same flag in the interview that he had with Tucker Carlson earlier this year. You can see the flag, and St. George slaying the dragon in the background:

I highly recommend watching the interview, especially the first 30 minutes or so when Putin dives deep into Russian history dating back over 1000 years. 

Centuries ago the Russians labored under the yoke of the Mongols and the Tartars. These two civilizations stemmed from brothers dating back long before Genghis Khan, with their father's lineage possibly going all the way back to Japheth, son of Noah. Apparently, Japheth had a son named Tourk (left out of the Biblical account) and he is the ancestor of Mongol and Tatar, two brothers who fought over power and divided into separate kingdoms. Genghis Khan reunited these two kingdoms over 1000 years later and together they became the great Tartarian empire. 

In 1480, Ivan the III, also known as Ivan the Terrible, threw off the yoke of the Mongolian/Tartarian empire after amassing a sufficient army with assistance from the Papacy. Ivan made a pact with the Holy See, which resulted in a reuniting of the Eastern and Western Orthodox Churches, and the Tartarians, being mostly pagan and Muslim (elements of which can be seen in their architecture), became a target of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. After Ivan won independence for Russia, he subdued the Tartarians and forced them to pay tribute. However, they were allowed to keep their national identity and appointed leaders. This is why we see the nation of Greater Tartary in Mercator maps dating back to the 14th and 15th centuries. 

Fast forwarding to the early 20th century, the Bolsheviks took over Russia with help from American bankers. There is some speculation that Lenin and Stalin were both Catholic plants controlled by the Jesuits, and and I believe they were given the assignment of expunging the historical records of the Tartarians from Russian annals forever. In my opinion, Lenin was assigned the role of purging the Tartarian race through his genocide of the Kulaks and other groups. While Stalin, after deliberate mass starvation campaigns, exiled the remainder of the Tartarians to places like Siberia where they died from starvation and exposure.

With the Tartarians either dead or exiled out of Russia, the Communists began a mass propaganda campaign to rewrite Tartar history. Books were burned, records were falsified, and Tartarian buildings (many in Moscow) were renamed and claimed to have been constructed by the Russians. For instance, this photo of Kazansky Station in Moscow (said to have been built by the Russians in 1864) features the Tartarian Zilant made of pure gold on its spire, but google will not show a close up of it:

There is a declassified CIA document that confirms this campaign to falsify Tartar history, released to the public decades later. In this document we find proof that the winners of wars and revolutions do indeed rewrite history. Read it for yourself:

The fact is that the Communists condemn--and therefore prevent the publication of--all Muslim literary works except those few which extol the virtues of Russia and the Russians...

Or let us take the matter of history, which, along with religion, language and literature, constitute the core of a people's cultural heritage. Here again the Communists have interfered in a shameless manner. For example, on 9 August 1944, the Central Committee of the Communist Party, sitting in Moscow, issued a directive ordering the party's Tartar Provincial Committee "to proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character committed by individual writers and historians in dealing with Tartar history."

In other words, Tartar history was to be rewritten--let us be frank, was to be falsified--in order to eliminate references to Great Russian aggressions and to hide the facts of the real course of Tartar-Russian relations. (National Cultural Development Under Communism, June 1957, emphasis added)

Putin's display of the Russian imperial flag may well be a sign that Russia still aligns with the Papacy and is proud of the fact that they defeated the Tartarians and rewrote their history. In my opinion, this would mean that Russia is still very much one of the seven heads of the Beast described in the Book of Revelations, and will play a major role in the coming Beast system.

But for our purposes here, the symbol of St. George slaying the dragon is much more than an ancient fairytale. It's a symbol, hidden in plain sight, of the consolidation of the Eastern and Western Orthodox Churches under the head of the Holy Roman Catholic Empire (still alive today and ran by the Jesuits) and their directive to rewrite history and keep us, their corporate slaves, deceived. Remember what Orwell said, "He who controls the past controls the future".

Thus, St. George killing the dragon of Tartaria, may really be a symbol of the Papacy's power to erase (both physically and historically) entire civilizations from off the face of the earth. 

This should beg the question: what other civilizations have the parasitic controllers erased from history? 

For more information on Russian/Tartarian history and St. George and the Dragon, watch the video below:

And with that introduction we are now ready to dive into the history of Utah's St. George and the first temple "built" by LDS Pioneers in a barren southwestern wasteland.

300 Miles From Nowhere

According to official LDS history, Jacob Hamblin (I wonder if he is an ancestor of David Lee Hamblin?) and a small party of "missionaries" were the first Mormons to travel south of Cedar City to the Virgin River Basin to teach the Natives "the ways of civilization and Christianity." The year was 1854, and the city Hamblin founded was named Santa Clara (named after Saint Clare, a woman who lived in the 13th century and was also sainted by the Catholic Church), just six miles north of what would later become St. George.

As the story goes, a southern convert from Tennessee, intrigued by the warmer climate, gave Hamblin a quart of cotton seeds to plant on the arid land, and low and behold, they grew. In the spring of 1856 a crop of cotton was planted, and another southerner, Zadock K. Judd, rigged up a cotton gin, because you know, that's easy to throw together in the middle of a southwestern desert hundreds of miles away from civilization. And thus, the Dixie "cotton mission" was born.

By 1857, forty more families made the trek from northern Utah, directed by Brigham Young, to try their luck in the Virgin River Basin, traveling a little further south past Santa Clara. They named that settlement Washington. They soon discovered that the land was uninhabitable, as they battled scorching heat soaring above 115 degrees, formidable snakes, scorpions, sand-fleas and mosquitos, diseases like malaria, and a muddy river that washed out every irrigation dam they tried to build. By 1859, some had thrown in the towel and returned north. 

But the writers of this history insist that Brigham Young just knew there was something special about this southwestern wasteland, because in 1858, an 18-year-old boy by the name of Jacob Peart Jr. (who belonged to another group of settlers), was in the midst of exploration along the Virgin River, and after looking up to high cliff he saw "a large and remarkable likeness of Brigham Young's head in profile, carved by nature into the stone".

Brigham Young's head carved by nature into stone?? Dear readers, you literally can't make this stuff up! This is the history the Church wants all of us to believe. And we're just getting started. 

As the story goes, a year after many of the original settlers had given up and left, Peart's group, known as the Horne Company, had somehow stayed on and harvested by the end of 1858 some 575 pounds of cotton in the area now known as Bloomington. Brigham Young was so impressed and intrigued by the land that he made a trip down himself in the summer of 1859, and when his carriage arrived at the valley where St. George is located today, he supposedly uttered these prophetic words:

There will yet be built between these volcanic ridges, a city, with spires, towers, and steeples, with homes containing many inhabitants. (Quoted in All That Was Promised: The St. George Temple and the Unfolding of the Restoration, Kindle version, Loc 535)

Later, in 1863, Brigham retold the incident to an audience in St. George as follows:

Some have asked why this place should have been located [here]. I will tell you: it is the very place I intended the city of St. George to be built upon. When I was on my first visit to the Santa Clara and Tonaquint settlements, I saw in vision this place inhabited by a multitude of people, and large domes were towering up in every direction. I shall yet see this with my natural eyes. (Ibid, emphasis added)

It's interesting that Brigham Young lamented near the end of his life that he never saw the Lord and wasn't a visionary prophet like Joseph Smith or Daniel, but he called himself rather a "Yankee Guesser." Yet, it never fails that whenever there was a place to settle or a temple to be built, he always seemed to have seen it in vision first.

Or, was he just seeing, with his "natural eyes", what was already here? Spires, towers, steeples, and domes, the stuff of old world buildings, literally dot the land in every direction. This begs the question: what did Brigham know? What had Pierre de Smet told him or shown him in Jesuit maps and documents? Why would the Latter-Day Saints travel so far south (over 300 miles away from Salt Lake) at such an early time period to settle a barren wasteland if they did not know that something was already there?

Called to Starve... er, I mean Serve

As the story goes, in October of 1861 George A. Smith addressed the Latter-Day-Saints from the pulpit and called out 309 names of folks who had been selected to sacrifice their all and move to St. George. A month later, Brigham Young asked 29 Swiss families who had just shown up in Salt Lake City to forbear unpacking their handcarts and head straight to Santa Clara. Another 50 families in Sanpete Country were also asked to uproot and become part of the "southern mission."  As we are told, most of these trusting saints obeyed their leaders without a shred of resistance.

Five months later, in March of 1862, Washington County was incorporated and included "all the portions of the country south of Iron County". In the next seven years, we’re told the worker-bee-saints in St. George would begin construction on a tabernacle, a courthouse, a cotton mill, an opera house, and a temple - despite the fact that food and water became extremely difficult to obtain. During the first half of the 1860s, many of the pioneers were still living in tents and wagons because, we are told, all construction efforts went toward building dams and ditches across the Virgin River for irrigation purposes. In 1862 a newly built dam was washed away by heavy rains, and this struggle for water, combined with intense heat and extremely alkali soil, made raising any type of sustainable crop nearly impossible.

The predictable result was starvation, accompanied by a malaria outbreak spread by mosquitos. This period of disease and starvation wore on between 1861 and 1866, but out of this adversity, we are told that the foundations of a new city were laid. A pattern I've noticed as I've researched the four early temples in Utah - St. George, Logan, Manti, and Salt Lake City - is that the saints seem to be able to overcome insurmountable obstacles, extreme physical hardships, and unparalleled adversity before and during the construction of each temple. 

It really doesn't make a lot of sense that the LDS people, or any people for that matter, could produce such elaborate structures, constructing castellated gothic architecture to scale, with master masonry and stonework, in the middle of an uninhabitable desert with virtually no resources while endeavoring to establish simple homes and irrigation dams. It seems much more plausible that a civilization might be able to produce such complicated architecture many decades (50 to 100 years) after a settlement has been established, following a prolonged era of industrialization and prosperity. 

Yet in the LDS narrative, we get temples first, and prosperity later. In my opinion, an inversion of reality. 

According to the narrative, things were so bad in St. George that songs were written about those early years of the 1860s. One such song was composed by Charles L. Walker, entitled, St. George and the Dragon. Wait a minute, why would Walker choose that title? Did he know about the ancient legend of St. George and the Dragon? Or was this just a strange coincidence?

Or, are the official history writers giving us a clue here? Are they establishing a link between St. George, Utah, and St. George the patron saint of Russia and England? And is the mention of the dragon a subtle clue to the empire of Tartaria being snuffed out by the Russians, who were assisted by the Jesuits and the Papacy? Furthermore, did the Jesuits direct Brigham Young to the St. George area knowing full-well that he would find abandoned buildings there? Was the naming of St. George by George A. Smith and Brigham Young an outward sign of LDS complicity with the Jesuit Order and the Papacy? Was this part of the deal Brigham made with Pierre de Smet when he met him at Winter Quarter's in 1846?

Walker’s song is too long to repeat here on the blog, but the full text of it is found on page 20 of yet another master's thesis I discovered online that was written in the 1960s, History of the St. George Temple, by Kirk M. Curtis, and published by BYU in 1964. The song is about overcoming adversity through attempting to farm an impossible land, just as the legend of St. George and the Dragon is about overcoming adversity through slaying the dragon. In every story there is an antagonist (the dragon/southern Utah desert) and a protagonist (St. George/the Latter-Day-Saints).

The struggle against adversity has been a common theme in ancient stories, myths, legends, plays, and even modern movies. The human psyche gravitates towards stories that feature a hero, a villain, and some kind of epic struggle between the two. After the villain has been vanquished, the hero gets the girl, saves the city, establishes peace, etc. These themes have even been written into astrological signs (see this video for an in-depth explanation) and are so ingrained in our subconscious minds that we are attracted to them without even knowing it. I believe the history writers know this about human nature and exploit it to their advantage.

In the case of early LDS temples, the theme of overcoming impossible obstacles to build a holy edifice for endowments, sealings, and work for the dead, incorporates all the psychological ingredients that make great stories, myths, and legends. Yet in all the fervor of those who have written about these temples, never is it mentioned that the Latter-Day Saints were rejected as a Church, along with their dead, and were cursed and moved out of their place in Nauvoo.

Knowing that this is clearly outlined in the Doctrine and Covenants, does it really make sense that the Lord would command them to build such elaborate structures in Utah for the purposes of performing ordinances for the dead when He had already rejected them, and their work for the dead? 

It makes no sense at all. Unless of course the buildings were already there, and the stories were made up to make it appear as if the Lord had commanded them to do so and they had sacrificed their all to accomplish these ardent tasks.  

When Brigham came to visit St. George in 1862 and found the people struggling and starving, his solution was to call an additional 250 families to the settlement and issue an injunction to build a tabernacle that would hold 2,000 people. 

Because, you know, the "cure for starvation" has always been break-backing labor to construct beautiful, impracticable buildings. Nevertheless, we're told that work on the tabernacle commenced and the cornerstone had been laid by June of 1863, despite the fact that food harvests from 1863 to 1865 were not even sufficient to feed everyone.

As the story goes, the tabernacle was not completed until 1876, only one year before the St. George temple was finished. And as you can see, the building has the classic signs of a mud-flooded structure, impracticable stairs leading up to an awkward first floor and half-buried windows:

The other structure built in the 1860s (during the period when there was no food and the people were starving) was the St. George Hall, which later morphed into an opera house. Because, you know, nothing sooths the pangs of death by starvation like some good o'l opera:

And finally, we have the Washington City Hall, built in close proximity to the opera house and the tabernacle, constructed between 1866 and 1876, also showcasing the impracticable staircase going up to the "first floor":

Now that we have a little background on the founding of St. George, let's talk about the St. George Temple, built not on a solid foundation, but on a... marshy bog?

What? Really?

 

A Temple the Nephites couldn’t Build

In 1881, 4 years after the St. George Temple was completed, were told that John Taylor explained in a discourse the reasons why Utah's first temple had to be built 300 miles away from Salt Lake City. They are as follows: (1) the Salt Lake Temple would just take too long, (2) the people in St. George were far more worthy of a temple than those in Salt Lake City, and (3) that there needed to be a stronghold "somewhere here between the land south and the land north".

Brigham Young, according to the narrative, wanted to build another temple because he knew he would not live long enough to see the Salt Lake Temple completed, and that he needed a place to pass on the keys of the Priesthood to others. Apparently, the Endowment House in Salt Lake City, even though a dedicated building, was not a sufficient place to do so. Yet, as the story goes, when o'l Brigham supposedly got the keys from Joseph Smith, it was not in a temple, but in the red brick store in Nauvoo.

Now, I don't believe that Brigham Young ever received any keys from Joseph, and that true keys have more to do with unlocking knowledge than endowing someone with power over others. Nevertheless, I just want to show that the arguments put forth by the historians for the push to build a temple so far away from Salt lake (when another one was supposedly already being constructed) really make no sense at all.

As the contradictory story goes, even though Brigham Young sent men to search out a temple plot site, he already had seen in vision the place where the temple would rest -- in the midst of a marshy bog. Brigham, the man who said he didn't receive visions like Joseph or Daniel, was supposedly shown in a vision that the temple site in St. George was dedicated by Moroni, and that since the Nephites could not build it, the Latter-Day Saints would need to build it for them.

This Nephite dedication story was recounted by David Henry Cannon, Jr., who was merely a lad of eleven years old when he had heard Brigham Young speak about the vision. Cannon didn't write this down until 1942, well over 70 years after the fact (reminiscent of so many polygamy "testimonies"). Cannon attested that the spot was so boggy that after a rain a wagon would "sink way down", suggesting that digging out a foundation in such a place would be extremely questionable.

But as always, we are told that the Saints overcame all things, and obediently followed Brigham's injunction to build the temple on that very site, and thus the excavation began in a swampy slough. The dimensions of the building were 192 feet long by 94 feet wide, an area of nearly half an acre, dug down 12 feet below water table grade with picks and shovels. All mud, rock, and bog compost materials had to hauled off with horse-drawn wagons through the marshy bog areas, and we're told the entire excavation process took ten months. 

Now, I'm no geologist, but when a massive hole is dug in swampy ground, it seems like it would continuously fill with water, and one has to wonder how they got all that mud out of the excavation site, using only hand shovels. How did wagons withe wooden wheels, pulled by horses, transport tons of marshy mud out of the site? 

As the story goes, a windlass was used to extract bucket after bucket of this mud, and then massive drains were constructed to divert the water away from the excavation site. These drains, on the west, south, and east sides of the temple, converged in front of the tower, each consisting of a lava tube, and carried drain water safely away from the site to a wash below. (How in the world did they make drains out of lava tubes? We are not told.) 

There are conflicting accounts of the condition of the soil that had to be extracted for the temple foundation. In one account the ground was so soft a 12-foot pole could be pressed all the way down with ease, before there were such inventions of hydraulic pile drivers, and in another, the top 4 or 5 feet was hard and dry. Regardless, when the material had finally been excavated, the concern was that the soft limestone and gypsum found at the bottom would not be strong enough to support such a massive building, so phase two of the foundation preparation was initiated: filling the hole with lava rock. 

Seems like a good plan...

Over the next 14 months, 7500 tons of lava rock was gathered and dumped into the hole. We're told that everyone - men, women, and children, pitched in by collecting small rocks and tossing them into the great pit whenever they walked by. But most of the rock came from a quarry west of St. George, discovered by Brigham Young, which featured a "long, black ridge of volcanic rock", available of course in all sizes, ranging from "small pieces to boulders weighing several tons".

These massive boulders were hauled on wagons by teams of oxen, and a road was constructed from the quarry to the temple site. A derrick was set up at the quarry so that boulders could be loaded onto wagons, and as the giant hole began to be filled with lava rock, a new problem arose: how to compact the loose rock into a form solid enough to support the temple foundation.

The solution to this problem was to convert an old cannon into a pile driver. But not just any cannon, a cannon that was used by Napoleon to invade Moscow in 1812.

Are you kidding me?

As the story goes, the cannon was abandoned in Moscow when Napoleon retreated from the city, and then taken to Siberia, to Alaska, and then to Fort Ross in California, close to San Francisco. In 1846, a few men from the Mormon Battalion were employed at the fort, and instead of money, they received two brass cannons for payment, which were taken via horse and wagon to Salt Lake City. From there one went to Parowan and the other to St. George. 

The St. Georgians, realizing they had a brass cannon, filled it full of lead and fashioned it into a pile driver. 

Once filled with lead, the cannon weighed between 800 and 1000 pounds, and having constructed a movable derrick out of thick timbers, workers used ropes and pulleys, driven by mules, to hoist the cannon up to over 30 feet in the air, to be dropped over and over again, thousands upon thousands of times, for weeks, in order to drive the lava rock deep into the muddy pit, until finally, a solid footing was formed. Brigham Young told the workers that the foundation would be ready when the cannon, "when dropped, bounced three times before coming to rest".

And there you have it, before modern excavators with compactor attachments were even invented, we had...well, cannons. Is this not the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard?

While the bedrock was being pounded into submission with Napoleon's cannon, we're told that quarrymen had been simultaneously cutting stones for the foundation. These were also made of lava rock, and weighed between two and four tons per stone. This rock was as hard as granite, and the only way to cut it into blocks back then was to manually drill through it using an iron mallet and slips and wedges. The task was so difficult that once the blocks were dislodged from the quarry, their shaped changed little. And thus, we're told that masons were obliged to use mortar to make up for the "irregularities" in the stones.

Can you imagine chiseling out just one of these blocks from a solid piece of lava rock? 

Now I'm no builder, but wouldn't you want perfectly shaped, square stones to lay a foundation for a massive temple?

We are told that the next ardent task was to hoist these massive, multi-ton foundation stones up and load them onto wagons to make the three-mile trek to the temple site. We're told that a sheer-legs lifting apparatus was built to lift the stones off the ground, but because they were too heavy to load on top of the wagons, they were secured to the wagon's undercarriage using ropes and chains. According to Edward Lloyd Parry, "master mason" on the temple project, it took 1800 wagon trips to deliver all the foundation rock. How was it possible that those wooden wheels held up on muddy roads, 1,800 times, with such massively weighted loads.

Once delivered to the jobsite, the first stones were lowered into the pit and formed into a 12-foot wide foundation base. Slowly, the lava rock walls began to to tapered and rose up to ground level and eventually up to 12 feet above grade, where they were still nearly 4 feet thick. Another sheer-legs was built to hoist the multi-ton blocks up that high, which begs the question: if they weren't able to hoist the stones even high enough to place them on the top of a wagon for hauling, then how in the world did they raise them up 12 feet in the air?

No matter I suppose. Let's not think too hard about this discrepancy and just get back to the story.

The next task the Saints faced was making home-made mortar. We are told that they mixed sand from the Virgin River with lime extracted from limestone. 

The extraction process required burning the limestone at high temperatures in a kiln. And wouldn't you know it, a lime kiln had been built close to St. George by Samuel Judd and his sons during the 1860s. Blaine Yorgason, author of the book, All That Was Promised: The St. George Temple and the Unfolding of the Restoration, claims that remains of the kiln were not discovered until much later by Stanford S. McConkie, and even offers the Google Earth coordinates in a footnote. Click here to see the area (although there isn't much to see).

The location of the old kiln is a few miles north of the St. George temple in the present day St. George Tortoise Reserve, and apparently one can reach the site after a strenuous 1-mile hike. 

An interesting fact about old kilns in Utah, is that they always seem to be up in the mountains or in places that are difficult to reach, needing some way to transport heavy loads of rock "uphill" instead of logically just building the kilns on a level valley floor. YouTuber Jon Levi has visited some of these sites and offers a different perspective on who may have actually built them and what they might've been used for:

An interesting tidbit about the old lime kiln in St. George is that after the courthouse, the tabernacle, and the temple were completed, the limestone supply was exhausted and the kiln was shut down. Apparently, after these structures were built, only impure limestone could be found, mixed with other minerals, that it was impossible to make unadulterated lime pure enough to make mortar. Strange indeed (and convenient for the narrative) that a vast desert land could only produce enough lime to supply mortar for just three buildings.

By March of 1874, the foundation was finally completed, and the remaining exterior walls could be built of red sandstone (taken from a different quarry just north of the city) while the interior was framed with heavy timbers -- timbers that would have to be hauled from over 70 miles away.

“Master Builders", Leaning Walls, and Strange Ceremonies

The men that Brigham Young placed in charge of the temple construction were Miles Romney and Edward L. Parry. Romney, a "master builder", was named as construction superintendent, while Parry, a "master mason", was named "head stonecutter and mason". Truman O. Angell was the architect who supposedly drew up the plans. The architectural classification of the St. George temple is "Castellated Gothic", a designation that differs very little from "Georgian Gothic", named of course for St. George, which again, is an interesting connection.

Miles Romney is an ancestor of politician Mitt Romney, and as we all know, the Romney family is a powerful name within the LDS Church. But did you also know that 7 men in the Romney line were members of the University of Utah chapter of Skull and Bones? Miles Romney's son,  Miles A. Romney, Jr., along with Ottinger Romney, were inducted into the Order in 1913; Miles Alonzo Romney, 1914; E. Lowell Romney, 1918; Wilford W. Romney, 1920; Milton Romney, 1921; and Vernon Romney, 1948.

Is it a coincidence that the first Romney in Utah was named as superintendent of the St. George temple when so many Romneys after him were members of the Jesuit-controlled Skull and Bones? An organization that also has a hidden-hand in the rewriting of history?

Miles Romney emigrated from England after he was converted and baptized into the LDS Church in 1837. Interestingly, both his father and grandfather were named George. "Master mason" Edward Parry was also from England, from a small town in North Wales called, wait for it, St. George. Is this just a strange coincidence, or some kind of clue linking St. George, Utah with St. George, England? 

As the story goes, as the sandstone walls began to rise the masons built buttresses to support them, totaling 9 on each side. These tapered buttresses were made of mortar and stone, were 38" wide at the base, and tapered up to 24" as they reached the parapets (the castle-like barrier at the top of the building). In the photo below, we can see the buttresses as they taper up to the top, although they do not look like they are supporting anything. The photo also shows an already-built structure with scaffolding around it, typical of the type of images we get from this period:

The buttresses on this random building below are more characteristic of a load-bearing support:

As the story goes, the "master builders" doing the masonry work on the exterior walls of the temple built them so hastily that the walls began to lean because of the lack of interior support. According to the narrative, the buttresses pushed the masonry walls inward because the interior timber-framed walls and floors had not yet been built. 

What? Is this how buildings are constructed? 

Here is an excerpt from Blaine Yorgason's book where he quotes yet another "George”:

As the heavy stone walls continued upward without sufficient inner support, they began to lean inward. George Kirkham confirmed this when he recorded: "I was told that the walls were leaning in for the want of timber inside... [a]s the buttresses on the outside would press the walls in." It was obvious to both Church architect William Folsom and Miles Romney that the simultaneous building out of the interior, using beams, joists, flooring, and studding for each successive floor, would counter the leaning of the walls and keep them straight and erect. (All That Was Promised, Loc 2726)

There are a few different ways to construct stone buildings, some types of exterior walls need interior framing support and some do not. These "master builders" would have known what they were doing before they began this construction project, and to have massive leaning walls on a structure this large seems highly improbable in this story. A building constructed so hastily and incorrectly would not last a decade, let alone 150 years. Conveniently, there are no photos of the leaning walls to be found online. We only get photos like this that show a magnificent finished structure:

The type of stone walls described in Yorgason's book are known as "framed one-side stone walls", which means that the exterior walls are supported by a strong interior frame, and in the case of the St. George temple, we're told that this frame was made of timbers from Arizona. Building the exterior walls before a proper frame was constructed would be putting the proverbial cart before the horse, and if done in a real-life setting, would have disastrous consequences. "Master builders" do not build this way, yet this narrative is insisting that they did so. 

The excuse we are given is that the lumber had to hauled (with horse-drawn wagons of course) from Trumbull, Arizona, which was over 70 miles away, and that's why the stone walls were built first. But if the narrative is true, then how in the world did workers push the leaning exterior walls out far enough to straighten them to 90 degrees, and simultaneously frame the interior walls and floors once the lumber had arrived? They had no heavy equipment like excavators or cranes to assist them, just nothing but good o'l man power. How many men (or horses) were attempting to straighten a single wall (perhaps using ropes and pulleys?) while other men were inside constructing wooden frames? 

In my opinion, what they are describing is physically impossible, and consequently, the narrative falls completely apart here. The narrators have inverted the story, asserting that workers built this massive structure in reverse order. Inversion, or mirror-imaging, is a trademark of the Jesuit controllers, it is their modus operandi.   

All we have to do is look at this story with a little common sense to see that it's a complete fraud. 

Ask yourself: how many buildings do you see being constructed today that have leaning walls? Zero, because even in our day of brutalist square boxes, load-bearing walls and frames are always built first. 

The St. George temple is a structural masterpiece, and in my opinion, there is zero chance it was constructed like the story says it was. Take another look at the building and ask yourself how they "straightened" those massive, 80-foot-tall walls leaning inward, while at the same time working inside to frame it with wooden supports:

Also in this image you can clearly see the out-of-place stairs going up to what looks like a second floor, as well as the mud-flooded windows below.

It is very clear to me that Brigham was told where this building was (if you read this post, you'll find that Jesuit explorers were the first to scout out Utah after the latest reset, and would've found these building first), and when his people found it, they built the makeshift stairs so that they could actually use the abandoned castle (built in the Georgian style), which they subsequently repurposed into a temple. 

Just look at the makeshift fence and annex building next to the temple. They look out of place, as if they were added later by a less-advanced people.

Before we move on to the baptismal font (which an entire post could be written about), there are two ceremonies we need to consider which offer even more clues that this story has been rewritten by imposters: the groundbreaking and the cornerstone ceremonies. These ceremonies are hallmarks of Freemasonic craft, ritual, and lore.

Remember, the Masons want credit for building all of these Old World structures, calling themselves "Master Builders" and "Master Masons", another inversion of reality. "Master Builders" who apparently build buildings in reverse order, after the fact. 

On November 9th of 1871, the groundbreaking ceremony took place. We're told that Brigham Young led the ritual, and as he removed the first scoop of earth with his primitive shovel, he explained to the people the proper order of laying cornerstones--which he claimed to have learned from Joseph Smith. (Really Brigham?)

Cornerstones, he attested, always had to be laid in the southeast corner, because that is where "the first light of the day shines upon it when the sun rises in the east." Later, when he was said to have conducted the Manti temple cornerstone ceremony, he said that the first stone is to "be laid at the southeast corner, the point of greatest light, and at high noon there is the most sunlight." 

Clearly, this is symbolic language, steeped in Masonic lore and ancient sun worship. At the groundbreaking in St. George, Brigham went on to describe yet another protocol of Freemasonic cornerstone ceremonies, the depositing of "sacred records" inside the future cornerstone. This, we are told, happened on April 1 (April Fool's day) of 1874. On that day a large crowd gathered as Church leaders conducted the ceremony, accompanied by temple workmen. A box was prepared with "lock and key" (another Masonic phrase) and filled with records, publications, scriptures, transcripts of sermons, newspapers, and even an "Abstract of the History of Southern Utah," written by historian James G. Bleak (I wish I could get my hands on that document). 

We're told that Brigham inserted this box into a hollowed-out block of lava rock in the southeast corner of the temple foundation, at high noon (another symbolic number representing the sun). After the box was deposited, a dedicatory prayer was offered.  

Now, you can compare this ceremony to the official Masonic protocols of a cornerstone ceremony found in Webb's 1865 Freemason's Monitor, which you can read here, under the heading, "Ceremony of Laying the Foundation of Public Structures". If you research the Old World structures I have been blogging about in Utah, you will find many elements of these Masonic rituals described in the cornerstone ceremonies, the 1917 Church Administration Building (the subject of my last post) is one of the most blatant examples.

An interesting observation I have made is that many Old World buildings in Utah, including the first three temples (St. George, Logan, and Manti) had their cornerstones laid in the southeast corner. One of the only buildings I can find that was said to have had its cornerstone laid in the northeast corner is the Salt Lake temple.

According to Masonic lore and tradition, cornerstones were always supposed to be laid in the northeast corner, for astronomical reasons. When the sun is in Leo during the summer solstice, it rises directly over the northeast corner of a building that is facing east (ancient temples always faced east towards the rising sun). Northeast is also symbolic of both darkness and light, and represents the Masonic degree of Entered Apprentice. According to author Robert Hewitt Brown who wrote Stellar Theology and Masonic Astronomy, laying the cornerstone in the southeast corner was considered "sacrilegious":

As the temples always face the east, so as to catch the first rays of the rising sun, it is almost certain that the cornerstone also, for like religious reasons, would be laid in a line with the rising sun. The sun, as he arose on the longest day of the year, rejoicing in his pride and strength, would thus be a type of the new temple about to rise majestically from its foundations. On the contrary, to lay the cornerstone of the new solar temple in the southeastern line of the sun's decline and fall, at the winter solstice, or toward the north, the point of darkness, or yet toward Amenti, the western region of gloom death, would, according to the teachings of astrology, be most unpropitious, it not sacrilegious. (p. 169)

The St. George temple, like all LDS temples, faces east, which begs the question: why does the narrative have Brigham Young conducting a cornerstone ceremony that is considered sacrilegious to the Masons? In Morgan's Freemasonry, the reason why cornerstones are placed in the northeast corner is explained:

The first stone in every Masonic edifice is, or ought to be, placed at the North-East corner, that being the place where an Entered Apprentice Mason receives his first instructions to build his future Masonic edifice upon. (p.25)

What are we to make of this strange anomaly? I'm not sure, but there is definitely something strange going on with cornerstones on Old World buildings. It may be that the true builders of these structures did indeed insert relics and keepsakes into the cornerstones of the buildings to preserve for future generations, and after the reset when the buildings were repurposed, the Freemasons went in and destroyed those relics and placed new ones in their stead. This is what might have actually been transpiring when we read accounts of LDS cornerstone laying ceremonies. 

The video below goes deeper into this theory on a building in Portland, Maine:

 

Of course, there may still some surviving relics of the past civilization hidden away in hollowed-out-stone in some of these buildings, hidden in places that our civilization has yet to find. In the case of our national capitol building in Washington, D.C., the official story is that the cornerstone was "lost" and they still have not found it to this very day. Strange indeed.

And speaking of strange things, the narrative surrounding the baptismal font of the St. George temple, said to have been the first LDS baptismal font to have been forged out of molten metal, is full of logistical anomalies and subtle parallels to yet more Masonic symbolism.

Brigham Young & the "Molten Sea"

As the story goes, Brigham Young wanted a baptismal font cast out of iron to be installed in the basement of the temple for the purpose of performing baptisms for the dead. This font would be modeled after the "molten sea" described in the book of Kings that was built for Solomon's ancient temple. This molten sea, ten cubits in diameter, thirty cubits in circumference, and 5 cubits high:

...stood upon twelve oxen: three looking toward the north, and three looking toward the west, and three looking toward the south, and three looking toward the east. And the sea was set above them, and all their hindquarters were inward. (1 Kings 2:44, RE)

We're told that in February of 1873, while the foundation of the temple was being finished in a marshy bog, Brigham Young met with Bishop Nathan Davis, who just happened to own an iron foundry in Salt Lake City. Brigham hired Davis to make the baptismal font, but despite the fact that he owned a foundry shop the man didn't have any experience in foundry. But, of course, there was a young man in Davis' ward who did have experience, one Amos Howe, who only agreed to help if he was made a partner.

It just so happened that Howe, in addition to being a foundry man, was a skilled artist who made foundry molds by carving them out of wood. Upon learning this, Brigham first assigned to Howe the task of carving the perfect ox out of wood for the casting. 

(Do we even realize how hard this would've been? The original wood carving should be in museum, but apparently we don't have it.). 

After Brigham rejected Howe's first model, a search was made throughout all of Idaho and Utah for the "perfect ox", which was brought to the foundry and corralled there to be used as a live model for weeks.

At length, we are told that Howe was able to carve an anatomically perfect wooden model that far exceeded Young's expectations, and thus preparations were made to melt down the pig iron that would become twelve oxen holding up a baptismal font. In June of 1875 we're told that the Deseret News reported on Howe's work, describing the oxen as looking genuine and being life-size, and cast without hooves, which would seem to disappear into the temple floor. Each ox would be secured with a long bolt, somehow drilled into the lava rock floor below. 

The poor-quality image above is the oldest photo I could find of the St. George font, and as you can see, it's massive. According to the Deseret News, the font was "oval in shape", and "13 feet by 9 feet at the top." The font alone weighed 18,000 pounds, an astounding 9 tons. 

As the story goes, Howe finished the font by July of 1875, the oxen and font had been cast in movable pieces, and were ready to be shipped to St. George in the intense heat. The pieces made their way by train from Salt Lake to as far south as the Santaquin Hill in northern Juab County. But this is where the railroad ended, and the remaining 200-plus-mile journey would have to be made with wagons pulled by teams of oxen. 

The massive load, weighing close to 30,000 pounds, would be split up into three wagon loads (10K pounds each), each one being bolted down and secured for the journey. One teamster said he had "three yoke of oxen and a 3-1/4 size wagon to draw" his load, whatever that means (during this time period we're told that wagon loads maxed out at a weighted-load between 4-5 thousand pounds). 

As they journeyed south, the weather turned hotter, and soon the oxen were trudging along through 115-degree weather. With limited access to water, teamsters kept their oxen cool with "plenty of good Dixie wine", which they apparently were hauling with them. (If this is true, and of course I do not believe it is, alcohol would only exacerbate the dehydration of the oxen.)

As the teamsters drew closer to St. George, they were bombarded by spectators wanting to see the contents of the load, but as the story goes, only bishops were allowed to see the font. And as soon as they arrived in St. George, a large crowd had gathered, and workers wasted no time in unloading the wagons and hauling the massive pieces down into the temple basement. Each oxen, weighing 600 pounds, was moved into place by "sailor-type block-and-tackle swung under heavy tripods", and then welded together and bolted down to the lava rock floor.

A major detail that is left out of this story is how workers maneuvered those iron pieces around the exterior walls and into the basement. According to Yorgason's book, the temple walls had risen to 18 feet above the ground by April of 1874, and 35 feet by December of that same year. And then we have this photo in Yorgason's book, showing the walls 80 feet tall by sometime in 1874:

As you can clearly see, not only are the walls 80 feet high, they are NOT leaning inward, which contradicts the narrative. And do you see any openings large enough to get the pieces of the massive baptismal font through? According to the design of the temple, there were supposed to be two sets of spiral staircases descending from the third floor to the basement. Were these completed by 1875, and if so then how did workers carry 600 pound oxen and other large pieces of the font down these stairways? Of course these logistical details are left out. 

As the story goes, the pieces of the massive font were welded together inside the temple basement, and then hoisted up and set in place on top of the oxen by only four men. These four men, using "the proper combination of ropes and pulleys", lifted the 18,000 pound font into place in only one try. The trick was merely for the leader of the four men who had been sailors from Britain, a man named George Jarvis (yet another George in this story of St. George), to yell at the boisterous crowd to keep quiet so each man could focus on his 4,500 pound load. Here is how it went down:

The manipulation of the ropes was under Jarvis's direction, but because the spectators were also shouting instructions the sailors had difficulty at first hearing his commands. George endured it for several minutes; but seeing it was causing confusion, he finally yelled: "you landlubbers... keep perfectly quiet until we have the font in place!" Silence reigned as everyone watched intently. George Jarvis snapped a few nautical orders and the nine ton font rose slowly and was swung into its place on the oxen without a hitch [and not even a sixteenth of an inch off dead center]. (All That was Promised, loc 4150)

What a sight this would've been, four men of herculean strength able to lift 4,500 pounds each, and in only one try no less, swinging the nine ton font exactly into place, within 1/16 of an inch. What is not to believe here?

It kind of reminds me of this scene from The Lego Movie:

Absolutely ridiculous right? 

I suppose that it's possible that the LDS people really could've built this early font, and somehow wrangled it into place in the temple basement. Perhaps a better question to ask here is why Brigham Young would want a "molten sea" to perform baptisms in when the one in Solomon's temple was never used for that purpose?

Indeed, let us consider an even deeper question: what is the significance of the molten sea as it relates to the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff? 

According to Masonic lore, Hiram Abiff was the "master builder" of Solomon's temple. But as you dig deeper into the esoteric meaning of the story, you find that the building of this temple by Hiram is not a literal account, but rather a parable for the remaking of mankind. The temple represents the human race, and Hiram's "workmanship" represents the constant molding and shaping of that race through the subtle control of governments and laws. If you study the works of Manly P. Hall and Albert Pike, you will find constant references to the idea of the temple of mankind.

But what I have recently discovered will make your head spin even more, because, in my opinion, the molten sea is also a metaphor for human resets.

As the legend goes, when it was time for Hiram to cast the molten sea he did so alchemically using 7 precious metals, with bronze being the final layer. The number 7 is a symbol for ascension, which we see in the Christian concept of Jacob's Ladder. As Hiram is attempting to cast this molten sea, the three ruffians, representing the Church (superstition), the State (fear), and the Mob (ignorance), plot to murder him and destroy his masterpiece (being of course human society).

As these three ruffians, or apprentices, are in the act of destroying the molten sea Hiram suddenly hears a voice of his ancestor Tubal-Cain, beckoning him to dive into the sea which is now a raging inferno (symbolic of the descent into hell?). After obeying the voice Hiram finds himself in the center of the earth where he meets Tubal-Cain and Cain himself, who shines with the luster of his master, Lucifer, the true god of Freemasonry. They give Hiram a hammer (Thor's hammer?) which he uses to complete the molten sea after returning to the earth's surface. This hammer may be a metaphor for using brute force (the power of the State) to shape and mold humanity, represented by the molten sea (remember, Nephi also uses water imagery to describe masses of people).

After completing this task Hiram is then murdered by the three ruffians, but not before he writes the "lost word of Freemasonry" on something called the "golden triangle". He is then buried with an acacia twig on his grave, a tree which also appears in the Egyptian myth of Osiris. 

The story of Hiram is a mirror image of the tale of Osiris. These legends are the same stories, told over and over again throughout the centuries, manifesting with different names in many different cultures. This, dear readers, is Lucifer's doctrine hidden in plain sight: the destruction of free agency.

According to Rudolph Steiner, a prominent Freemason who wrote during the early 19th century, the molten sea "is a symbol of the Great Work of Art for which the entire mineral kingdom must be re-cast [which is] the task of our Manvantara" (See Steiner, The Temple Legend, Kindle Version, p. 234).

What Steiner may be implying here is that the mineral kingdom, aka humanity, must be re-cast, or reset, throughout various times in history.  The word Manvantara is a Hindu concept describing a cyclic period, or age of a Manu, the progenitor of mankind. At each Manvantara a deified king and his sons are created and then subsequently perish. This is the pattern, also seen in the Book of Mormon, of the rise and fall of nations. This is the pattern of resets.   

According to Steiner, we are in, or close to "the sixth post-Atlantean epoch", whatever that means. Steiner asserts that "out of the Mystery of the Brotherhood of the Rose Cross will arise the Christianity of the sixth cultural epoch, which will recognize the significance of the Molten Sea and the golden triangle". Whatever Steiner is describing here, sounds terrifying and awful, and in my opinion, is a future reset.

The St. George temple is not the first edifice where this molten sea of Solomon's temple has been seen. We're told that the baptismal font in the Nauvoo temple also had twelve oxen under a font, but was built out of wood, and then recast in limestone in 1845. Yet, as I've pointed out before, the Lord rejected the Church and its baptisms for the dead before the Brighamites began performing ordinances in that temple, and since they had already begun re-writing the history as soon as Joseph and Hyrum were dead, then how are we to believe that such a font existed in the Nauvoo temple, especially since it was destroyed in a fire in 1848, and then finished off by a tornado?

Nevertheless, there is a chapel in Liege, Belgium that contains another "molten sea" sitting upon twelve oxen said to have been fashioned by a goldsmith named Renier de Huy in the 12the century. Check it out:

If such a model of the “molten sea” existed so long ago, is it really that unreasonable to surmise that the one in the St. George temple may also be ancient? In my opinion, the group that actually built this temple and font may have been the Knights Templars themselves (before being infiltrated by the Rosicrucians), or later groups who possessed the secrets of building passed down by the Templars. Or, the St. George temple may have even been built by the Nephites, who would have used the font, like the priests in Solomon’s temple, for washing after animal sacrifices.

Repeating Names, a Fire Narrative, and Constitutional Necromancy

Those who do research on the Old World will notice some repeating patterns, one of which is that names in narratives are repeated endlessly. Some researchers have concluded that this repetition is because these narratives are written by artificial intelligence, which is a technology that has possibly been around for much longer than we might assume. 

In the story of the St. George temple, the name George pops up over and over again. Here is an exhaustive list:

• St. George being named by George A. Smith, after his martyred son, George A. Jr.
• Miles Romney, the "master builder" appointed by Brigham Young, whose father and grandfather back in England were both named George.
• "Master mason" Edward L. Parry, a Englishman whose home town in Wales was called St. George.
• George Faucett, a man who drove one of the first teams into St. George in 1861.
• George Staheli, a starving worker who walked 10 miles a day (there and back) to work on the temple.
• George Jarvis, the sailor from England who was in charge of hoisting up and placing the 9-ton baptismal font atop the oxen base.
• George Hick's, the author of various poems and songs written about the settlement of St. George.
• George Luab, a carpenter who worked on the interior of the temple who was adopted by George Weydler, and then apprenticed under George Bailey, and named one of his sons George Weydler Luab.
• George Kirkham Jr., "master carpenter" and known to historians as the official "journal keeper" on the construction of the temple. His father was also named George, and of course he named one of his sons George. 
• George Miles, a patriarch who tells a story of his older brother having a fist fight on the temple walls. 
• George Lang, a teamster who fell from a wagon and had his ear torn off while hauling lava rock. 
• General George Washington, posthumously baptized in the St. George temple along with many other founding fathers. 

Man, that's a lot of Georges. 

I also discovered after looking through Blaine Yorgason's footnotes that many authors and sources he quoted also have the name George. And lets not forget the most blatant example: St. George, Utah, being named after the real St. George, the patron saint of England and a host of other countries.

Can all of this really be a coincidence or is our history being written by AI with repetition built into the program?

Another pattern we often see in the narratives of Old World buildings is of course the fire narrative, and with the St. George temple, we read of two fires: one in 1878 that destroyed the tower and one in 1928 that destroyed the annex building. 

On August 16 of 1878, just one year after dedication, lightening struck the tower and a fire raged, we're told, but only the tower was destroyed. As the story goes, it was the angry spirit of Brigham Young, who had been dead since August of 1877, who'd had a hand in destroying the tower. Supposedly he had commented before his death that the tower wasn't large enough for the temple.

A new tower twice as large as the former, we're told, was designed by architects William H. Folsom and Truman Angell, and was built between 1882 and 1883. This "new tower" consisted of a cupola with a small dome and weather vane, a common design in Gothic Georgian architecture. Here it is today:

If you ask me, I'd say there never was a lightning strike nor a fire, and this beauty had been there all along (if you scroll back up to the construction photos you'll see that the tower looks the same as the old one). If you google "Georgian" architecture, you'll see many buildings in Europe that are castellated and have octagonal domes like this. There are myriads of Old World buildings like this scattered across the earth, many of them said to have been built in honor of the legendary Saint George.

Finally, we come to one of the most incredible stories we hear about the St. George temple: the visit of the Founding Fathers to President Wilford Woodruff. He related this story in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on September 16 of 1877, only a month after the St. George temple was dedicated:

I will here say, before closing, that two weeks before I left St. George, the spirits of the dead gathered around me, wanting to know why we did not redeem them. Said they: "You have had the use of the Endowment House for a number of years and yet nothing has ever been done for us. We laid the foundation of the government you now enjoy, and we never apostatized from it, but we remained true to it and were faithful to God." These were the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and they waited on me for two days and two nights. I thought it very singular that notwithstanding so much work had been done, and yet nothing had been done for them. The thought never entered my heart, from the fact, I suppose, that heretofore our minds were reaching after our more immediate friends and relatives. I straightway went into the baptismal font and called upon Brother McAllister to baptize me for the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and fifty other eminent men, making one hundred in all, including John Wesley, Columbus, and others; I then baptized him for every President of the United States except three; and when their cause is just, somebody will do the work for them. (Journal of Discourses, XIX, 229)

If this story is true then why didn't the Founding Fathers come earlier to the Endowment House to request baptism? Obviously, from what Wilford is saying here that house was clearly being used for baptisms for the dead. Why then did this "vision" happen only after the St. George temple was finished? It really doesn't make any sense. Also, most of the Founding Fathers were deists, so why would they suddenly want to become Mormons in the after life? (The Book of Mormon tells us that the same spirit we die with possesses us in the next world). 

In my opinion, this story is merely a faith-promoting rumor designed to bolster institutional authority. I do not believe it ever happened, but was written by pseudo-history writers after the fact to legitimize and immortalize LDS authority for baptism for the dead. Remember, God rejected this Church and its baptisms for the dead, so why would He authorize this necromancy between Woodruff and the dead signers of the Declaration of Independence? It really doesn't make any sense at all.

Join me next time as we explore the history of the Logan temple, completed in 1884. In the meantime, here is a photo gallery of the St. George temple.

Here is how the temple looks today. As the story goes, the red sandstone exterior was covered up with plaster and made white to contrast against the reddish-orange desert:

Supposed photo of the oxen team that hauled the baptismal font:

Photos of the interior showing the five-pointed star and quatrefoils:

Quatrefoils are basically four-leaf clovers. They have been used in both Christian and Muslim architecture (the Tartars were primarily Muslim). Here is an Old World building with quatrefoil designs on the exterior stone:

A more modern photo of the baptismal font:

Here is a photo taken in the 1930s of the temple next to an incredible... wooden shed. The blatant contrast between this shack and the temple show how our architectural abilities actually declined in the 60 years following the temple "construction":

Here is the finished structure taken in the 1870s, I don't remember seeing that strange castle top protruding out of the ground in the bottom right in other construction photos. Where did it come from? Does the temple foundation go down much deeper than they are telling us?: 

We're told that this one was taken sometime between 1872-74. The men look disproportionately large in contrast to the building, as if the temple is only about 30 feet tall rather than 80 feet. The image appears to have been photoshopped:

And this one is a supposed photo of the foundation taken sometime between 1872-74, and it looks more like a cartoon drawing than an actual photograph:

Thanks for sticking with me thus far, I know my posts can be long. If this topic interests you, and you're open to the possibility that the LDS pioneers did not build these temples, here is a small piece of what's coming in future posts:

There are patterns that can be pieced together by reading each temple narrative. The patterns reveal small bits of the truth, but more importantly, they reveal the involvement of the Freemasons in changing the narrative. For instance, in each narrative a "master builder" or superintendent is named. In the St. George temple narrative, the first temple built in Utah, we learn that this man was Miles Romney, the progenitor of a host of future Romney Skull and Bones members. This, in my opinion, is a signature of who is writing this history. 

In the second temple narrative transpiring in Logan, the superintendent was Charles Ora Card, the man who would eventually leave Logan and found the city of Cardston in Alberta, Canada, where the 6th LDS temple would be built in 1913, an art deco masterpiece that I believe was already here. 

In the temple narratives of St. George, Logan, and Manti, each of the "master masons" had the last name of Parry. Curiously, the narratives never mention if these Parry men were related to each other, but this is a typical example of how the AI uses name repetition in these stories.

Stay tuned for more patterns as we explore Logan and Manti (even in the name Manti there is a massive clue to the Old World) in the buildup to the Salt Lake Temple narrative. 

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this excerpt from the modern English version of the Book of Mormon, recently published as the Covenant of Christ. This passage is from 3rd Nephi when Jesus was personally ministering to the Nephites at Bountiful. He promises (and ominously warns) us Gentiles that when the work of the Father finally commences, the lies and the fraud of our false religious leaders will be exposed - in such a way that everyone will know it. 

Will this also include the false history they tell us?:

Your cities will fall and I'll break open your guarded borders. Your sciences and learning will turn into foolishness, and your false beliefs will cause your failure. I'll expose the fraud of those in authority, and your trusted institutions will lose everyone's loyalty. False prophets and false ministers will be brought to shame and humiliation. (Covenant of Christ, 3 Nephi 9:XII, emphasis added)