Satanic Symbols on Latter-day Saint Temples

Welcome to Keystone! On Keystone, our goal is to fortify Latter-day Saint faith and combat misinformation through good old-fashioned research. I’m your host, David Snell. Let’s jump right in!

Today, inverted stars or pentagrams are commonly associated with Satanism.

But if you take a closer look at some Latter-day Saint temples, you might spot some inverted stars in the architecture. What the heck is going on here? Why do we find Satanic symbols on Latter-day Saint temples?!

Here’s the deal: Symbols can mean different things to different people at different times and in different places. For example, before Christians associated the Jesus fish with Jesus, it was a pagan symbol of fertility. Before the Nazi swastika was associated with racism, it was a symbol of luck you could find on American postcards. For Buddhists and Hindus, the swastika held and continues to hold religious significance.

You can find upside-down stars (as far as I am aware) on only 3 Latter-day Saint temples: the Nauvoo, Logan, and Salt Lake City temples. But you can find this symbol in a variety of other places as well — religious and otherwise. There’s one on the Catholic cathedral in Amiens, France. There’s one belonging to the Church of England in Adderbury. There’s one on the highest military award in the United States, the Medal of Honor. There’s one on the Arkansas state flag, the Grammy Awards logo, the 1837 Great Star American Flag, the Victoria Australia police department badge, the logo of the Republican Party — you get the picture.

If you want to insist that Latter-day Saints are just Satanists hiding in plain sight, I can’t stop you. But I would hope that you’d have some evidence to back that claim up. I have not been able to find any evidence indicating that early Latter-day Saints associated these stars with Satan. But here’s what I have found:

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