Crown

Heavens: Above All Things

The crown encompasses all the branches, blossoms, leaves, and fruit of the tree. Just as does the trunk, grown sturdy as it draws strength from the roots, the branches and stems play the role of structural support for the tree’s leaves, fruits, and flowers. Branches are the vessels that carry water from the soil to the leaves, and food from the leaves to the rest of the tree. Leaves transform light into sugar, releasing oxygen into the air. They also filter dust and protect the soil below from excessive erosion from rainfall.

The tree puts an incredible amount of resources and energy into seed production; it is a design used by trees for millennia to ensure the next generation exists. A seed, a ripened ovule, houses an embryo, the new plant, and nourishes and protects it. Inside each seed are all the resources needed to survive independently until it reaches a safe place to grow. It contains all the information necessary to produce a new plant.

Usually, a tree grows its branches until the crown encounters neighboring trees of the same height. Its branches stop growing instead of entering the others’ space, creating separation lines and boundaries in the sky. Rather than encroach, the tree finds greater benefit from coexistence.¹ Trees have a sophisticated system for measuring light and telling time. They can tell whether light is coming from the sun or being reflected off leaves. When they discern that light is being reflected off leaves, they know there’s another plant nearby and that they need to slow down growth in that direction. It’s also a way for trees to optimize light exposure for everything under the canopy.

Above all things, our Mother Tree is love expanding outside of time. Her reach is endless. Her branches extend out into the world, responsive to seasonal changes, elemental shifts, and to all of Her children. She knows how they need to grow. In the crown of the tree, we begin to see as our Mother sees (D&C 76:7–10; 1 Cor. 13:12); we walk in the way of discernment (Prov. 9:6). In all the regions of the Mother Tree, we are taught how to distinguish truth from falsehoods, reality from delusions, and to embrace that which binds through love.

We heed the Mother’s voice in our hearts that says we are one.

As we learn to trust Her more, we in turn open ourselves to greater visions of what is real and lasting. “Farther up is further in.” We descend lower and lower and ascend higher and higher to continue to discover both ourselves and Her. In this process of remaking ourselves time and time again, we sink deeper into our own humanity and ascend higher into our divinity—the one embracing the other. We learn the holy power of the interconnectedness of all things past, present, and future. As we’ve seen, Her wisdom moves us to consider life at macro and cosmic levels.

The Center

The tree of life not only reflects the endless regeneration of the cosmos and thereby its design of efflorescence, but it also offers a sacred lens through which we can apprehend our relation to time. The tree is our key to divine time. It is the undying center of the cosmos where we are rooted to the past, the present, and the future. The tree is our key to divine subjectivity too. It is the outward manifestation of the inner world of God, “for, just as the seed contains the tree, and the tree the seed, so the hidden world of God contains all Creation, and Creation is, in turn, a revelation of the hidden world of God.”

This more mystical approach to understanding God may seem foreign, yet we have been taught countless times to approach God through our own mystic tradition. We are taught to ponder and meditate in order to commune with God. By mysticism I mean our belief that a direct connection can be made with God through inner stillness—cultivated by sitting and thinking—through opening ourselves to questions and the Spirit. Often understood in Christian tradition as coming to union with God, mysticism is the belief that some form of contact with the divine or transcendent is possible. Medieval and early modern Jewish literature reveal the tree of life as an expression of the mystical, rooted in the otherworldly, and knowable only through revelation that moves individuals into a place of communion with the infinite. Our own tree of life vision in the Book of Mormon maps the same journey to our spiritual center and connecting point with deity at the tree. The emphasis in Lehi’s dream was on the glowing fruit of the tree’s crown, the apex of our desire for God and of God’s desire for us. The Book of Mormon begins with pointing us back to the sacred tree that existed from all eternity and shows the embodied love of God as the endpoint of our spiritual journey.

The tree of life is the mystic center, the point of absolute beginning, and it is the point to which we seek to return. As such, it is the ultimate source of reality, the one cosmic point from which we can orient correctly. Like those on the path in Lehi’s vision, we move toward Her. She is the magnetic point of our attention, toward whom we are either repelled or compelled. Her central, cosmic form reveals our hearts to ourselves.

Philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade, one of the world’s foremost interpreters of religious symbolism and myth, gives us insight:

The center . . . is pre-eminently the zone of the sacred, the zone of absolute reality. Similarly, all the other symbols of absolute reality (trees of life and immortality, Fountain of Youth, etc.) are also situated at the center. . . . The road [leading to the center] is arduous, fraught with perils, because it is, in fact, a rite of the passage from the profane to the sacred, from the ephemeral and illusory to reality and eternity, from death to life, from [human] to the divinity. Attaining the center is equivalent to a consecration, and initiation; yesterday’s profane and illusory existence gives place to a new, to a life that is real, enduring, and effective.

Gazing upward into Her brilliant boughs, we realize that our willingness to see things as they really are (Jacob 4:13) is our gateway to greater wisdom. She endows us with eyes that can see and ears that can hear, for “she is glimpsed at the very edge of our perception and heard among familiar words which seem to tell a different tale. Wisdom is only discerned by those who have Wisdom, because her first gift is the gift of herself.” We seek our Mother, Lady Wisdom, and desire that She would rule over us (Mosiah 8:20). Like our Mother—She who knows everything that lives by name—we’re ready to expand our understanding into the creative mysteries.

As we’ve seen, in ancient Israel’s wisdom tradition, the tree of life appears as a personification or symbolic representation of wisdom. Barker offers this insight: “Wisdom, by means of the images used to depict her, addresses such questions as the relationship between the human and the divine, the means of apotheosis, the stewardship of knowledge, and the power which knowledge gives to transform or to destroy.” The Book of Wisdom (also known as The Wisdom of Solomon) is an exhortation to pursue Wisdom as the guide to the kingdom of God. It is one of the seven Sapiential, or wisdom, books in the Septuagint, the others being Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs (Song of Solomon), Job, and Sirach. It is included in the deuterocanonical books of the Catholic Church and the anagignoskomena of the Eastern Orthodox Church, while most Protestants consider it part of the Apocrypha. The Book of Wisdom reveals Wisdom’s true nature:

Wisdom is radiant and unfading,
and she is easily discerned by those who love her, 
and is found by those who seek her.
She hastens to make herself known to those who desire her. 
One who rises early to seek her will have no difficulty,
 for she will be found sitting at the gate.
To fix one’s thought on her is perfect understanding, 
and one who is vigilant on her account will soon be free from care,
because she goes about seeking those worthy of her, 
and she graciously appears to them in their paths, 
and meets them in every thought.
The beginning of Wisdom is the most sincere desire for instruction,
and concern for instruction is love of her, 
and love of her is the keeping of her laws,
and giving heed to her laws is assurance of immortality, 
and immortality brings one near to God;
so the desire for Wisdom leads to a kingdom.

These verses remind me of James 1:5: “If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you” (James 1:5, NIV). Lady Wisdom, as is true of Jesus and the Father, is only as far from us as we make Her. If we seek Her, She will be found in the center of our hearts and the center of heaven. If we sincerely desire Her divine instruction, She will give it. If we love Wisdom—the way of becoming—She will make Herself known.²

Oil of Wisdom

In the temple and tabernacle spaces of the Old Testament, the mystic center of worship and ritual, finding the Mother there was literally a sacred consecration. The high priest was anointed by an oil that made him the child of Wisdom and the son of God. Wisdom is described as the oil itself: a sweet perfume of myrrh, cinnamon, and olive oil.³ It is also described in Exodus in the instructions for the tabernacle (Ex. 30:23–25). As Barker describes, “The perfumed anointing oil was kept in the holy of holies, and when the royal high priest was anointed, he received the gift of Wisdom herself: resurrection, life, vision, knowledge and true wealth. The high priest was anointed on his head and between his eyelids . . . which must have symbolised the opening of his eyes.”

When the temple oil was hidden in the time of Josiah’s purges, to keep it safe from abuse, Enoch described the priests losing their vision. The idea of wisdom being gifted in fragrant oil appears in various texts from the early Christian period. In the Clementine Recognitions, Clement ascribes to Peter this elucidation of the word Christ: “The Son of God, the Beginning of all things, became Man. He was the first whom God anointed with oil taken from the wood of the tree of life.”⁴ Peter said Jesus the Christ would anoint those who entered the kingdom. According to this record, the original anointing oil came from the tree of life in the Garden. Peter considered all other oils used in ritual anointings to be copies, as they were not from the tree of life, whose oil was considered most powerful. Peter continues, “Aaron the first high priest was anointed with a composition of chrism which was made after the pattern of the spiritual ointment,” and if this earthly copy was so powerful, how much greater was the oil from a branch of the tree of life?⁵ In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes to the Corinthians about “the fragrance of the knowledge of Christ . . . a fragrance from life to life” (2 Cor. 2:14, 16)—a fragrance from the tree of life that leads to life eternal.

Aromas and fragrances evoke visceral responses to associated memories and feelings. It’s incredibly tender to me that our Mother would speak to us of the visions of the eternal realm through Her very sensuous presence, ultimately transforming us into Her children, children of Lady Wisdom. In Her very lifeblood is a remembering of who we really are and where we really come from. Her sacred oil sparks vision.

Discussion Question:

“Theophany” is often used to describe ascension events. In some instances, the person sees God on a mountain top (symbolically the Holy of Holies). In many instances, the individual experiences God in a throne room in a heavenly temple (the Holy of Holies again). While called “ascensions,” the experience can also include the Divine descending to the person, such as Joseph Smith seeing the hosts of heaven in his First Vision. How does The Mother Tree function as an ascension text? How does the symbol of the Tree of Life function as a diagram of the ascent of the soul?

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Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the Poetry Editor for Wayfare and the author of The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother and The Tree at the Center.

Art by Hilma af Klint.

1. Crown shyness is a phenomenon that occurs in some tree species when spaces appear in the canopy to prevent branches from touching, forming channel-like gaps. See Katherine J. Wu, “Some Trees May ‘Social Distance’ to Avoid Disease,” National Geographic, July 6, 2020.

2. “Gaze on the raz nihyeh (the mystery of becoming) and know the paths of everything that lives.” Qumran Texts, 4Q418 fr. 43.

3. Ben Sira 24:15.

4. Clement’s Recognitions 1.45–6.

5. Clement’s Recognitions 1.46–47.