Architectural Safeguards

God has established several safeguards to protect His temples, ancient and modern; these protections discourage unqualified persons from approaching sacred areas or from seeing things that are beyond their authority or spiritual circumstances. He uses angels, sentinels, cherubim (with the flaming, revolving sword), temple recommend procedures, and more. Furthermore, He established various architectural safeguards to protect the holiness of His temples, including boundaries, thresholds, horizontal zones, vertical features, and walls, gates, doors, and veils.

Walls around the tabernacle demarcate secular space from holy space.

For example, walls are basic but vital architectural components in sacred dwellings. Each wall creates a frame around a designated spot, a pronounced border that all can see and that no one can misapprehend. Walls define horizontal spaces and serve to demarcate between zones of holiness and secular areas. Walls also present border configurations between different gradations of holiness, such as the tabernacle courtyard, holy place, and Holy of Holies; so, too, walls divide various rooms in present-day temples. In the end, the same walls that retain the sacred atmosphere inside the temple also bar the secular world on the outside.

Just as walls serve to arrest the approach of unclean individuals and to halt their movement, an opening in the wall exists that allows secular space to be transcended, or sacred space to be entered; such openings were generally represented by temple doors, gates, and veils, each of which allowed ingress and egress from profane to holy space, then to holier, and finally to the holiest space in the Lord’s house. Not only did doors have a utilitarian function; many of them were decorated beautifully. The door leading from the holy place to the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s temple had “carvings of cherubims and palm trees and open flowers” and the doors were “overlaid . . . with gold” (1 Kgs. 6:31–32).

Notwithstanding various safeguards, temple architecture provides secure passage for ritually qualified individuals (i.e., those who participate in the gestures of approach). The ancient high priest, for example, traversed through three chief horizontal zones—the courtyard(s), the holy place, and the Holy of Holies—and their respective walls and openings. And in modern temples, worthy women and men traverse various sacred areas of the temple, from its threshold to the celestial room.

East doors of the Salt Lake Temple.

Nibley summarizes the role of boundaries and openings: “All temples are marked by boundaries, stations, levels, doors, stairs, passages, gates, veils, etc.—they all denote rites of passage going from one condition or state to another, from lower to higher, from dark to light, a complete transition from one world, telestial or terrestrial, to another, ultimately the celestial. At certain crucial passages one must identify oneself by an exchange of names and tokens and show oneself qualified by an exchange of words. This was characteristic of all ancient temples.”23