Unveiling the Divine: Visions of Heavenly Mother
Whether she provided solace during a time of dark doubt, her assumed fate caused deep pain or her lack of presence cause a hurt that still radiates in the heart – the LDS concept of Heavenly Mother is a complicated, fraught and fascinating subject.
Meet the Artists
We are honored to feature the art of these talented individuals and the courage they embody to speak of truths that deeply personal and often painful.
Liz Lambson
King tut with a feminine body holds the snake (does she not also deserve a mother’s love?) and beckons to the user with the same apples that cost her her divinity in exchange for knowledge.
Hayley Labrum Morrison
Against the Skin (in Bondage) is an oil on panel painting depicting the typical Mormon woman’s back. White holy undergarments are to be worn against the skin at all times and underneath the bra, even while pregnant or breastfeeding and in extreme heat. The garment is, simply put, a constant reminder that one’s body is not their own.
Sage Turk
Often what felt comforting while in the Church feels like a threat after you leave. The promise of resurrection, with ‘not a hair of the head’ being lost now feels like an implicit misdirection. Your hair may not be lost – just everything else that makes you who you are.
River Romney
When I think about the Heavenly Mother, I can not picture her. She is invisible, penciled into the slim margins of the Book of Mormon by a man she’d never met, for a role she never wanted to be. She is suffocating to survive, threats behind closed doors: ex-communication, homelessness, divorce. She is delusion, like water, encompassing everyone around her. “You’re not drowning,” they tell her. She and the world are the crazy ones – not the other way around.
And yet. You see her now, don’t you? I chose to bring her into an image. To quote Lidia Yuknavitch:
“That image of Joan of Arc burning up in a fire burned inside me like a new religion. Her face skyward. Her faith muscled up like a holy war. And always the voice of a father in her head. Like me. Jesus. What is a thin man pinned to wood next to the image of a burning woman warrior ablaze? I took the image of a burning woman into my heart and left belief to the house of father forever.”
Shelby Shields
She is sacred, not secret. She is the divine feminine flowing through us all, connecting and binding us to the earth. She pleas we listen to our hearts, our intuition, our spirit guides on the other side of the veil. She is the moon pulling the tides as the sun warms the earth. She is the interconnected flow of love and empathy. She exists within all of us.
Melissa Angel
It was always unsettling for me how little I knew about Heavenly Mother. More so the gentle shoves away from her. When I first listened to my seminary teacher speak of her, he was hesitant. The way he explained how she was so sacred, she was basically unreachable, still left me with so many questions. When I did my own research (which was very limited) I understood that she was to be left alone so that she may continue her duties as she should. To have heavenly sex with the Father and be an eternal vessel for souls yet to come. Do not speak to her, do not look at her, only call on the Father for all of your needs. In many other religions, they acknowledge the very importance that feminine energy brings into life. In Hinduism, Kali is the goddess of death and rebirth. It is said that when she dances, Her dance causes the constant cycle of creation, life, and death of all things in the universe. This is something that Lord Shiva (Kali’s husband) cannot do by himself as he is an unchanging force. He admires her wild, empowering, and all loving energy that she carries within her. In Mormonism, this Heavenly Mother is destined to remain in the shadows and cries from the hole she has been placed in. Being the holiest of holies sounds like damnation.
Black Temple Art Collective
Bound eternally to her master, she is but one of the countless living wombs – their numbers dwarfing the very stars. Her purpose is singular, to be impregnated, pregnant and birthing spirit children in an endless cycle. She exists only to sire future broodmothers and future god kings. Her children are numberless and yet she cannot see them, cannot hear them, cannot know them. She cannot even speak her name – for she has none. She is both everything and nothing, a cycle perpetuated into infinity, collapsed into a singularity of pointless recursion. She is a deaf, dumb, and blind priestess of the most high God. And she is our mother.
Father Atum
O Lord, my God,
When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds our Mother made
And when I think that God,
His wife, not sharing,
Sent her to hide
Behind the veil and cage
Sage Turk
Brahma asks us to think about the concept in Heavenly Mother in ways that are perhaps unfamiliar. Named after the third member of the Hindu trinity, ironically enough Brahma is both a creator and cursed to not be directly worshipped due to her sins. She is represented in earthly form as a cow, an element of Hindu worship that beckons us to think of our own concepts of motherhood and how they must apply across the animal kingdom. I ask you: consider the love that seems to exist in practically every creature – the love of a mother to her child. What could be more divine than a love as universal as this?
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