Thursday, 4/22/04 - 13:28
From the mid-sixties until the Castaways Casino was destroyed to make room for the Mirage, an almost full-size replica Jain temple sat in the Castaways lobby, billed as the Gateway to Luck. A casino brochure explained that the temple represented "hidden doctrines not entirely accessible to the Western mind," but I doubt that was a jab at non-violence or any other Jain doctrine.* The temple symbolized the exotic itself more than any particular religion.
The British government had commissioned the Jain temple for the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, the same fair where ice-cream cones and iced tea were popularized or possibly invented. The 1904 World's Fair also introduced the air-conditioning that would prove so vital to Las Vegas' success. In a typical fin de siecle paroxysm of exoticism, the replica temple stood inside a replica oriental bazaar with real Asians inside a replica mosque. Oh, but the building that the replica mosque replicated was a tomb, not a mosque. In particular, it was the tomb of Itmad-ud-daula (which is apparently a phrase meaning "pillar of the state"), a building which also served as a model for the Taj Mahal. The Jains were described as a "Hindoo sect." And the temple was copied from one of hundreds on a hill in Palitana, so I can't say much more about its source than that it's diffuse and blurry.
When the fair was over, the "Jewel of Palitana" was disassembled, packed into crates to be shipped back to Britain, and lost. Still crated, it passed through at least one more pair of hands, until eventually its owner died and Castaways purchased it at auction in the early 1960's. Modern commentators are consistently baffled that anyone would put such a temple in a casino, but really, how could a 35 foot high, 14 ton, intricately carved teakwood replica temple fail to be seen phantasmically, as either spectacularly lucky or cataclysmically unlucky?
When the Castaways casino was torn down in 1987, the temple was again boxed up, but this time it was donated to real living American Jains. Certainly it wasn't a complete rejection of exoticism; the Mirage's name invokes North African desert while the interior features Sinetic wooden bodhisattvas -- at least that's what they look like to me -- situated in the lush greenery surrounding its pathways. And of course there are many other copies of gods and temples elsewhere in Las Vegas.
* See the bibliographic note.
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