Note: today?s post deals with temple ordinances, which can be a sensitive topic. Please tread considerately.

Today?s image, ?Scenes in the Endowment Ceremonies,? allegedly depicts portions of the Mormon ordinance of temple endowment. So far as I can tell, ?Scenes? first appeared in John H Beadle?s Life in Utah: or, The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (1870), which—if the title didn?t give it away—takes a dim view of Mormonism. Beadle reused the image in 1882 and again in 1904. [1] 

(Click to enlarge.) The key reads:

1. Preparation—Washing and Anointing. 2. Eloheim Cursing Adam and Eve—Satan Driven out. 3. Trial of Faith—The ?Searching Hand.? 4. Oath to Avenge the Death of Joseph Smith. 5. The ?Blood Atonement.?

A name, ?Hugo Sebald SC,? is on the image (bottom right). ?SC? in this context indicates that Sebald engraved the image for printing (?sculpsit? is Latin for (I think) ?[he] engraves [it]?). Sebald might be illustrator and engraver or just engraver. On the left side of the podium in the bottom left image there are script letters, ?EB,? which might be the illustrator?s signature.

Without taking a position on the reliability of these images as a record of the endowment as practiced in the 1860s or purporting to do any detailed analysis, a few things draw my idiosyncratic attention. First, Satan has what looks like a pickelhaube—a spiked helmet.

The fellow in the center image has hair draped as if it were horns. I have not noticed any evidence to say whether the hair horns were or were not intentional.

And, finally, the thing that prompted this post in the first place: I?ve written about hooded and masked vigilante Mormons before, but I had not noticed the background figure in the bottom right image.

I?m still going back and forth on whether there is actually a Danite in the background or just a funny looking rock. And then there are the three dark spots to the left of the Danite—and the two to the right. Are we supposed to think there are eyes watching everywhere? Maybe Sebald/EB was a time-traveling Foucauldian making a performative comment on the paranoia and suspicion created by a(n alleged) surveillance state.

For good measure and in case you missed the Mormons-are-violent motif, note the weapons intertwined in the picture borders. I think it could be fun if the border plants could be identified and it turned out to be something poisonous; looking casually—and innocent of any botanic competence—I don’t recognize belladonna, hemlock, upas, ignatia, foxglove, or nux vomica.

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[1] The version of ?Scenes in the Endowment Ceremonies? I used came from 1904: John H Beadle, Polygamy: or, The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism, revised edition (Philadelphia: World Bible House, 1904), 395. I briefly compared the image to the version in the other two books but did not notice any differences; I didn?t make a production of it, though, so it?s quite possible I missed something. John H Beadle, Life in Utah: or, The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co, 1870), after p 486. John H Beadle, Polygamy: or, The Mysteries and Crimes of Mormonism (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co, 1882), 395.