Seeing Is Believing
This isn’t just about prophecy. It’s about understanding the entire Restored Gospel. Prophecy is just a narrow part.
In its totality, this study is about:
- the imagery used by the prophets in all their teachings and visions
- the symbolism of the scriptures and perhaps most importantly it’s about
- the imagery in our temples and in our endowment — the icons that adorn modern and ancient temples, the rituals practiced within and the lessons we are meant to take away from them.
If you truly wish to fully understand your scriptures, if you care to learn the implicit message in the endowment, you must learn the origin and meaning of metaphorical imagery in the language of the prophets.
To unravel the mystery that is prophecy, to comprehend the language of revelation, scriptural and temple metaphor, you must first learn the symbolism of antiquity (the common denominator of all religions) and the cosmological images from which it sprang — prodigious, heaven-spanning displays of awe-inspiring plasma phenomena generated in a neighboring conjunction of planets in antiquity.
This dramatic, heavenly phantasmagoria (see the Egyptian glyph on the right) dominated Earth’s skies in the earliest epoch of history and indelibly impressed itself on the mind and spirit of all early cultures.
These astral events gave rise to the cryptic icons that adorn the walls of ancient monuments, temples and tombs — virtual snapshots in many cases of things seen in those ancient skies. Appropriately, they also decorate modern temples — a testament in stone to the restoration of truth in these latter days.
The metaphorical language of the prophets also arose from those cosmological events. The rhetorical counterparts of those enigmatic symbols fill the revelations of both ancient and modern prophets. Those metaphors and that imagery are the keys to virtually all scriptural symbolism and all temple ritual.
If you ever hope to fully understand the scriptures, the visions of the prophets, the parables of the Savior and the message embedded in the modern temple endowment, you must first master this metaphorical language and its symbolic counterparts. It’s that important.
Contact author and researcher, Anthony E Larson, here.