Our Origin Story
Underworld: Below All Things, Part 2
To help us examine some of the oldest beliefs we hold about our relationships to each other, we begin at the beginning. Our creation story as recorded in Genesis is mythic in its portent and power over the Judeo-Christian mind. It imbues all creation with purpose and meaning. Some of these meanings are derived from our human frailty and limitations. If we look closely, we find the story fraught with misconceptions and troubling words—beguiled, rule over, rib—imperfect translations with missing pieces. Shifts in perception and values, specifically about gender equality, color the lens through which we interpret and internalize Eve’s discerning and her understanding of her choices. Our relationship to each other and all of creation, how we reach for the divine in the wilderness of mortality, hinges on that internalization.
To open the fabric of the narrative, I share a portion of our creation story from my vantage point as a woman. It is a glimpse into how I have come to read the story, a suggestion of what it may have been like to see as Eve—humanity’s female archetype—and to see the Mother in the Garden of Eden, how She influenced the choices made there. I anchor my interpretation in various scriptural accounts, from which I call on my intuition and my spiritual guides to work as a compass inside me. Creating a retelling of the creation story is an exercise in engagement with scripture as living writ. These sacred tellings are resources for our interaction and growth, but we bring meaning to them; their meanings are not fixed in time.
The creation story is so familiar that sometimes we are not able to hear it. With this retelling, notice the questions that arise in you, and ponder how your faith journey meets the creation story and how we might make room together for more truth.
When the world is formed, it is empty and desolate (Abr. 4:2). Chaos prevails, and the Gods move over the waters, listening. Listening blooms power so that when They speak, the words in Their mouths are full of love. Purpose finds its way to Their tongues, and the words become song: “Let there be” becomes light. And because the Gods comprehend the light, They can name it and shape it. And discern it from the dark. All its properties and purposes. And this is how day becomes a companion to night and everything They speak comes into being.
They sing, and the firmament divides from the waters. And within the moving light of heaven, morning is born and the evening and the night numbered; time is born. They organize the lights in the expanse of heaven for signs. Sun, moon, and stars—maps and reminders to creation of Their love—revolving light bodies cycling seasons, days, and years. And the Gods watch as every atom to which They sing and pray awakes and yields to the great melody of joy. And because of this joy, all creation listens.
The Gods sing the land dry and sing the great waters together. In the great divisions, a way is opened to abundance, to creatures in the firmament, the land, and the sea. And the Gods bless every part and portion, every whale and every blade of grass.
‘Adam—human beings—are imagined (Abr. 3) by the Gods.1 From this oneness, also, the Gods see purpose in division. Unity is formed first from the red clay of Earth. Housed in the garden temple of Eden, this being is told of the power of the tree of knowledge of good and evil before the feminine is housed in flesh. Before the feminine and the masculine divide. Unity is told not to partake of this power, not to eat its fruit.
A deep sleep moves through ‘adam. This being sees in vision the foretold separation, the feminine organized, transposed into woman.2 As They sang the land from the water, and the day from the night, the Gods sing the female and male apart and shape them.3
They emerge as distinct forms. Eve, one half of a whole, a fashioned, differentiated soul. Adam forgets what it was to be whole and senses a profound longing within his new body, his mind, and heart that he can’t articulate but feels fulfilled in the presence of Eve. She becomes his balancing, centering life force. She becomes his axis mundi, his tree of life.
Eve, who was not instructed not to eat the fruit, is free to express her innate knowing, the newfound wisdom of her embodiment—mind, heart, flesh—incapable of denying the powers of creation inside her cells, singing for expansion. Adam, separate from the creative ordinances of Eve, waits.
Midmost in the Garden, planted above the four cardinal rivers, the tree of life sings.4 Veiled behind the tree of knowledge, She whispers, rustles Her leaves as Eve opens her heart and listens: What is eternal life without discernment? What is knowledge without wisdom? Eve comes to the branches encircling the tree of life. There, the serpent twines on the hedge. She sees the tree of life through the veil: Her ancient girth and canopy spread greater than any ever seen. Grooved deeply with the slow expansion of eons, She is home to colonies of lichen and carpets of moss draping Her long limbs. Owls and ravens sleep in Her most shadowed boughs. There is recognition, resonance pulsing between the spirit of the tree and the spirit of Eve. See the tree and see the Mother, sovereign and consequential, ruling and reigning in the eternities.
In that realm of awakening enters the serpent. Satan’s mimetic form in the Garden intends to derail the purpose of the Gods but comes before Eve disguised as a symbol of salvation, an image of the Christ.5 Symbol of fertility and creative life force. Of rebirth, transformation, immortality, and healing.6 A symbol that speaks to Eve of her generative powers. Eve stares at the scene, recognizing the mirror placed, the path forward as her own body, opened, the mysteries of creation her birthright: she is looking at herself. Her eyes open before the tree and the serpent. Her vision of herself unfolds.
Eve, a veil. Eve, a tree of life. Eve, the embodied way to mortal life and death. She sees the tree and sees the Mother and Son and sees herself and sees the serpent and sees the Mother and Son and sees herself. Endless circle. She steps toward the veiling hedge, desiring to reach her Mother.
Created in the image of the Mother, Eve embodies the feminine aspects of human consciousness, a honed sensitivity to the interconnectedness of all things. She knows that seeds (of plants, of the womb) must bear fruit, that some fruits fall to the earth without flowering, that some seeds emerge as trees that hold up the world. In this green new garden, she senses the need for good and evil, interconnection and separation, for paradox, for opposition, for all things being a compound in one (2 Ne. 2:11). From this place, she chooses the path, puts together the mental and emotional puzzle, the if/then of salvation and survival. She comprehends the paradox: to become as the Gods, we must leave Them. To bind up our hearts and wills to Them, we must move out from under Their care. To be one with Them and all of creation—one with ourselves finally—we have to live for a space in a state of woundedness. She sinks her teeth into the fruit.
As we see in various scripture stories, visionary states are induced by divine figures to reveal divine purposes. I imagine the deep sleep instructing Adam on the necessity of being sundered in order for life to truly begin, for the work of mortality to commence. For the womb to have its reign. For the feminine creative powers to be accepted or rejected by humankind as the necessary first step toward agency. Each human soul who would follow would choose to heal or further divide this first separation of the feminine and masculine.
In Genesis, Moses, and the Book of Abraham, the man Adam, spirit and element, receives instruction from the Gods not to partake of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil before Eve is created and housed in flesh. I believe that this element is underemphasized and exposes a crucial theological gap, which is that Eve is an independent source of agency and discernment in the Garden. If it is true that God did not instruct Eve not to partake of the fruit, then the instruction would have come through Adam, and God would have made that choice for a reason. God knew what would unfold, and God knew that Eve was capable of using her knowledge of the plan of salvation, her bodily intuition and spiritual gifts, to determine a path forward for the children she would bring into the world. Her creative desires and wisdom have long been denigrated by Christian theologians, which has created suspicion about women’s role in the Church that is completely unwarranted. With the tree of life planted in the Garden, Eve would have felt the influence of the Mother, a guide on the path to mortality and Eve’s role as Mother of All Living.
While we know from Genesis 3:2 and Moses 4:9 that she is aware of the command and its source, the order of events from these accounts asks us to consider Adam separate from the authority of Eve and from the creative ordinances of women. The ordinances of women include ordinances of embodiment. As Valerie Hudson puts it so beautifully, “The word ordinance means a physical act with deep spiritual meaning. So certainly pregnancy, childbirth, [and] lactation are all ordinances of the gospel. They cannot be otherwise. They are clearly the priestesshood ordinances presided over by women.” Surely Eve, as Mother of All Living, presided over the ordinances of embodiment and had knowledge from the Mother to make her decision.
Was it possible, then, for the Gods to ask Eve to go against herself and the very purpose of her creation?
As many scholars have described, the structure of the ancient Israelite temples mirrors the layout of the Garden of Eden. Michael A. Fishbane, American scholar of Judaism and rabbinic literature, describes the Garden as “an axis mundi. From it radiate primal streams to the four quarters. . . . It is the navel or omphalos,” and the tree of life is situated at “the center of this center.” Jeffrey M. Bradshaw explains how Ezekiel 28:13 locates Eden on the mountain of God. As a cosmic mountain, Eden is an archetype for the earthly temple. Isaiah describes the Jerusalem temple as “the mountain of the Lord’s house” (Isa. 2:2). It is, therefore, identified, like Eden, as a symbol of the center.
The Zohar, the chief text of the Jewish Kabbalah, describes the tree of life in the exact middle of the Garden. It goes on to say that the tree of knowledge of good and evil was not exactly in the middle. Bradshaw explains that “an interesting Jewish tradition about the placement of the two trees is the idea that the foliage of the tree of knowledge hid the tree of life from direct view” and that “God did not specifically prohibit eating from the tree of life because the tree of knowledge formed a hedge around it; only after one had partaken of the latter and cleared a path for herself could one come close to the treeof life.” Bradshaw continues:
Consistent with this Jewish tradition about the placement of the trees and the scholarship that sees the Garden of Eden as a temple prototype, Ephrem the Syrian, a fourth-century Christian, called the tree of knowledge “the veil of the sanctuary.” He pictured Paradise as a great mountain, with the tree of knowledge providing a permeable boundary partway up the slopes. The tree of knowledge, Ephrem concluded, “acts as a sanctuary curtain [i.e., veil] hiding the Holy of Holies, which is the Tree of Life higher up.” In addition to this inner boundary, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sources sometimes speak of a “wall” surrounding the whole of the garden, separating it from the “outer court” of our mortal world.
It is possible to see Eve as not fully awake to the divine. She comes to the grove of trees and then sees the tree of life, the Mother Tree through that veil. The veil implies some obscuring of vision. Perhaps she doesn’t have a perfect understanding, but she does know the way forward. She trusts herself. She understands the power of her agency in the tapestry of her own transformation. As Jewish teacher and spiritual leader Yiskah Rosenfeld notes, Eve “undertakes the most radical and subversive act of all: changing herself.”7
The serpent is rich in complicated polarities. Scholars show that “the image of the snake or serpent in the ancient world was a dual symbol representing deity, creativity, and healing on the one hand, but evil, harm, and destruction on the other.”8 Through the scriptures, we also find the serpent symbolizing both harm and healing, as demonstrated in the story of Moses and the children of Israel (Num. 21:4–9). When they sin in the wilderness, and are bitten by fiery serpents, Moses makes a brass image of a serpent for the people to look at. Those who look are healed. This healing image points us to Jehovah, the Savior, who is the salvation from death. John 3:14–15 gives us the interpretation: “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” We see that “according to Jesus, the serpent was intended to be the supernal symbol of Himself and His atonement.”
Eve recognizes both salvation and danger in the serpent’s presence. While Satan came with ulterior motives, the message he communicated to Eve rang true: that the path to godhood was a path of reconciliation. That Eve, Mother of All Living, would act as a savior to all the souls of humanity by becoming the vessel through which life began (and thus also death), birthing us into the mortal world, which would allow us to enter into the way of transformation. While Satan has no power to offer what he did—“Ye shall not surely die; . . . ye shall be as gods”(Moses 4:7, 10–11)—Eve recognizes not only the Savior and His role in salvation in the duality of the serpent symbol, but she also sees herself, her fertility, her creative powers in commencing the workings of life and death intrinsic to salvation. She offers embodied life that would lead to death but that would then lead to life everlasting in Christ. Life-death-life. Eternal, like Ouroboros.9 I believe Eve recognized partnership with Adam in bringing souls to Earth and partnership with Christ in saving them.
How does it change our feelings and perspective of women to consider them as saviors in the world, touching heaven as they touch Earth, sacred veils bringing souls into mortality who otherwise could not progress?
I offer this reading in the hope that it may contrast with some of the more prevalent interpretations and narratives that weave through our inherited roots, ones that biblical language allows, such as the following: Because of Eve, we are sinful and fallen. Foolishly, she listened to the serpent, and because of that wrong choice, the world suffers. Many members of the Church believe that Eve’s choice in Eden to partake of the fruit was a good choice. Yet, the narrative that she wrongfully instigated humanity’s fall through disobedience (whether as a mythical character or literal woman) lies at the heart of the larger Judeo-Christian interpretation and is used to excuse the subjugation of women: to justify the belief that women are fundamentally inadequate in their decision-making powers, dependent on men to guide and teach them, and quite literally not made to be sovereign agents. Of the forty times tsela is used in the Bible, it is only translated as “rib” in the story of Eve’s creation.10 How quickly this image of woman as rib is misconstrued to mean women are appendages of men—a part, a portion, made solely for the purpose of supporting a man in his journey—rather than fully formed, independent, autonomous beings.
Addressing the confusion and collective root rot regarding the feminine and the masculine begins with an examination of the ways in which Eve and Adam are depicted. For me, questioning why and how certain attributes have been assigned to Eve has been a good starting point. This requires going back to the origins of how this story was recorded and disseminated and acknowledging the layers of interpretation through which this story in particular has passed, as well-intentioned as translators could have been.11 Those who wrote down the earliest renditions of the creation story and translated them were men.12 Those who decided which stories should constitute the Bible were men. Those who codified and largely interpreted the creation story for our Latter-day Saint doctrine and theology were men. Our views are limited to the masculine lens because of this disproportionate influence. The absence of women’s voices and experiences in our canon reflects the limitations we have placed on the voice and presence of women in our language and in our religious framing of what is sacred and real.
Discussion Question:
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In The Mother Tree, the Divine Feminine is seen as central to humanity’s spiritual growth. How does reframing restoration theology with the Mother at the center—of Eden, the cosmos, and our spiritual ascension path (the tree from which Christ the fruit is born)—affect how you see the role of the feminine in our salvation? How would this understanding of restoration theology position the feminine in the movement from separation to unity, in the work of atoning?
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.
“The term ‘adam . . . is a generic term for human beings, not a proper noun. It also does not automatically suggest maleness, especially not without the prefix ben, ‘son of,’ and so the traditional rendering ‘man’ is misleading, and an exclusively male ‘adam would make nonsense of the last clause of verse 27.” Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (W. W. Norton, 2004), 19.
My personal feeling is that Eve and Adam represent ends of a continuum between what we term feminine and masculine. In addition to being real people, they are representatives of the feminine and masculine components of the personal psyche of each reader.
Tsela: Hebrew for “side” as well as “rib,” as in one of two sides or one of two halves. “And the Lord God . . . took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man” (Gen. 2:21–22).
The tree of life is synonymous with the Mother Tree here. The tree of life in the Garden of Eden is the same tree that Lehi and Nephi saw, known as the love of God. See 1 Nephi 11:22.
“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:14–15).
Andrew C. Skinner, “Serpent Symbols and Salvation in the Ancient Near East and the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 10, no. 2 (2001): 44.
Yiskah Rosenfeld, “You Take Lilith, I’ll Take Eve: A Closer Look at the World’s Second Feminist,” in Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (Seal Press, 2001).
W. S. McCullough, “Serpent,” in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Abingdon, 1962), 4:290. See also the succeeding article in the same volume: L. Hicks, “Serpent, Bronze,” 291.
Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake or a dragon consuming its own tail. It represents eternal, cyclical renewal to some and a cycle of life, death, and rebirth to others.
The English translation of tsela as “rib” instead of one of Adam’s two “sides,” or one of the two “halves” of the bilateral first human, was standardized by Wycliffe in the King James Version of the Bible and has become entrenched in most English Bibles (Genesis 2:21–22). See John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve (InterVarsity Press, 2015), 78.
There are multiple layers of interpretation through which biblical texts, and specifically the creation story from Genesis, pass before they reach our ears. Our job is to feel out—with the help of the Spirit, our intuition, and hearts—what settles with our understanding of the nature of our divine parents and what does not. This is a journey of a lifetime; our views will continue to shift, our powers of discernment will become refined, and our wisdom will increase. A fluidity toward how we read the text, then, would best serve us.
There is significant evidence that the creation story in Genesis comes from three different texts, referred to as the “J,” “E,” and “P” texts by scholars.