Welcome
To be honest, I'm still in the process of updating this site, so it still needs some tweaking, but feel free to browse around anyway.
On January 18th 2005 I received an email from a gentleman that received reports from someone that had been through the temple earlier that day, that some revisions had been made in the washings and anointing done in the temple just prior to the endowment. There was a wording change, but the change that seems to be the most important is in the actual touching that goes on during the anointing. The garment or shield worn during the anointing used to have slits in the side where the one performing the anointing could reach in and touch certain body parts as he or she pronounced an anointing (including breasts and loins). It appears these slits are gone, and the endowee is just briefly touched on the shield in the appropriate spot now.
Back in 1990, the Five points of Fellowship were removed from the endowment. It is rumored that many women felt like they were being groped or felt up during this part of the ceremony. I've actually been told such by one mormon woman who has been through the endowment. Many of us critics suspect the same is at the root of this most recent change. The anointings are done by men for the men, and women for women. I cant speak for women, but as a man, I don't relish the though of being touched in the loins by another man, and I'm pretty sure most other men don't, and the few who do I suspect are not very welcome in the LDS temples.
For the older account of the annointings, see Preparatory Ordinances. For information on the recent changes see http://www.josephlied.com/.
Welcome to the LDS Temple Endowment site.
This site is a collection of various accounts of the LDS endowment from differerent points in history
There are a number of important differences between the various accounts. The first endowment in the temple at Kirkland, Ohio was very simple, involving little more than the Lord's Supper and ceremonial washing. A few years later it became rather involved, including signs and tokens being taught, with penalties assigned to the tokens. Originally the penalties assigned to the tokens were very gruesome. Over the years they were toned down, particularly sometime between the 1920s and the 1980s. One researcher who contacted me tells me that he believes that the actual verbal description of the penalties were removed sometime about 1925-30 or so during the presidency of Heber J Grant. (See http://www.ldsendowment.org for more info on this.) For example, at one point one of the penalties involved saying something like "I would rather have my throat slit rather than reveal the tokens" while drawing your thumb across your throat. Later it involved just making the motion of drawing your thumb across your throat.
- Early Kirkland Endowment
- 1845 & 1846 accounts of the endowment as performed in the Nauvoo Temple.
- 1879 Version - An account published in the Daily Tribune in 1879 of the ritual as done in the Salt Lake CIty Endowment house
- 1931 version - From "TEMPLE MORMONISM - its evolution and meaning" by A. J. Montgomery. This version shows that at one point the penalties were much more graphic than later.
- 1984 version - from a tape made by Larry Cozad, JR. at the Provo Utah temple - includes the death penalties and other things which were later removed. The penalties in this version are toned down quite a bit. From what one pro-mormon researcher (http://www.ldsendowment.org/) has told me, a major revision occurred in 1927 in which the graphic penalties were toned down. I, and other people, have thought that the revisions had occurred in the 1960s, but it appears they may have occurred just before Montgomery's book was published.
- 1990 version - The current version of the Endowment - with death penalties and other things removed.
- Comparison between '84 and '90 transcripts, with all changes clearly marked
- Preparatory ordinances and Sealing ceremonies
- Creation order comparison between Endowment and Book of Moses
An Historical Sidenote
Thanks to Google Groups, an archive of the original post I made of these transcripts is available. Back in the summer of '93 I typed the documents on this site in by hand. Well, just the 1984 version. To get the '90 version, about the only thing I needed to do was chop out he appropriate parts, and and a few words here and there.A friend helped me with the 1931 version and with proofreading the other two. He scanned in part of the 1931 version for me, and proofread and corrected all three documents for me. I originally posted them to a couple usenet newsgroups at the end of June 1993 while I was in college. The reaction of Mormons who saw this post was rather unpleasant. Several of them wrote the president of the college I was attending, and outright lied about the copyright status of the endowment, misrepresented themselves as authorized to speak for the church, and tried to get me kicked out of school. All the transcripts I've seen on the web, except for the Kirtland and Nauvoo versions, and one noted below, are all based on my transcripts as far as I can tell. Please feel free to contact me if you feel I haven't given someone proper credit for work they've done. The following documents contain transcripts of the secret LDS endowment ceremony. The first one was compiled in 1931 by a researcher who interviewed several Mormons and ex-mormons about their experiences in the temple. The other two were transcribed from tape recordings made by temple patrons during an actual endowment ceremony, and later published by Jerald and Sandra Tanner of Utah Lighthouse Ministries. I made the comparison transcript back in late 1996 or early 1997 to have a readily readable comparison between the two.