Angel Moroni

The reason a golden herald appears on so many Latter-day Saint temple spires traces back to a specific claim in the church's founding story. Joseph Smith recounted that beginning on the night of September 21, 1823, a glowing figure calling himself Moroni appeared in his room and told him of a set of ancient gold plates, buried in a nearby hill, containing a record of an earlier people; Smith said the same messenger returned that same night two more times repeating the message, then again the next day, and continued to meet him yearly at the same hill for four years before finally allowing him to take the plates in 1827. In the Latter-day Saint account, Moroni is not a spirit invented for the occasion but the same person who, more than a millennium earlier, is described as the last writer and editor of that record, a soldier and prophet who buried it as his people's civilization came to an end.

That closing act gives the statue its gesture. Within the text Moroni is himself credited with leaving an invitation rather than only a warning, telling any future reader who studies the record and then asks God in sincere prayer that they will receive a personal confirmation of its truth, a passage members commonly call Moroni's Promise. A herald with a trumpet, standing above the temple entrance, is meant to read as exactly that: a messenger still calling people toward the same book and the same invitation, centuries after the burial the story describes.

The specific image members now recognize did not exist from the church's earliest years; it developed gradually as temple building resumed after the pioneers reached Utah. The Salt Lake Temple, completed after forty years of construction, was the first to carry the figure when it was dedicated in 1893, its statue sculpted by Cyrus Dallin, an artist who was not himself a Latter-day Saint and who researched the commission largely from written descriptions rather than any established church iconography, since none yet existed. Dallin's original design set the template later sculptors would keep returning to: a standing robed figure, one arm raised, a long trumpet lifted to the lips as though about to sound.

Later twentieth-century temples mostly used newer versions cast for mass production in fiberglass and later gold leaf over metal rather than carved individually, which let the church place a version of the same figure atop dozens of temples built during its fastest period of expansion from the 1980s onward. Some regional variations exist, including temples where the statue faces a specific direction for local symbolic reasons, but the basic silhouette, an upright herald with a raised trumpet, has stayed close to Dallin's original reading of the story for well over a century.