In an earlier post, I discussed the idea that the fountain of living waters (in the Orphic tablets identified as the waters of the goddess Mnemosyne), from which the soul must drink in order to secure its salvation, was also to be considered equivalent to the white tree, the Tree of Life. This connection is made explicit in the vision of Nephi (1 Ne. 11:25), where he explains:

And it came to pass that I beheld that the rod of iron, which my father had seen, was the word of God, which led to the fountain of living waters, or to the tree of life; which waters are a representation of the love of God; and I also beheld that the tree of life was a representation of the love of God.

In Egypt, the Tree of Life was often depicted as a goddess, or having a goddess within it, that nursed or poured forth living waters (or perhaps milk) to individuals.

In Nephi’s vision, remarkably, we also see this connection between the Tree of Life and the virgin mother.  In 1 Ne. 11, Nephi is shown the exceedingly beautiful and white tree that his father had seen in his dream. When Nephi asks the Spirit for the interpretation of the tree, he is immediately shown a rather unusual (to us) image — he is shown a virgin as beautiful and white as the Tree of Life.  This virgin, who we know as Mary, is presented to Nephi as “the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh” (1 Ne. 11:18).  Mary had the baby Jesus in her arms, and although we aren’t given this detail, was conceivably nursing the Child.  In response to his inquiry about the tree, this is what Nephi is shown — and he understands these images to represent the love of God.  It is amazing how this Book of Mormon vision fits so perfectly the ancient conception of what the Tree of Life represented.

Old Testament scholar Margaret Barker, who is an expert in the religious culture of Jerusalem at the time Lehi and Nephi would have been there, noticed the amazing similarity of the Book of Mormon account to her understanding of how the ancient Israelites would have pictured the Tree of Life. In her speech at the Worlds of Joseph Smith conference held at the Library of Congress in 2005, Barker expounded:

The Tree of Life made one happy according to the Book of Proverbs, but for other detailed descriptions of the tree we have to rely on the non-canonical texts. Enoch described it as perfumed, with fruits like grapes. But a text discovered in Egypt in 1945 described the tree as beautiful, fiery, and with fruits like white grapes. I don’t know of any other source which describes the fruit as white grapes, so you can imagine my surprise when I read the account of Lehi’s vision of the tree whose white fruits made one happy; and the interpretation of the vision, that the virgin in Nazareth was the mother of the Son of God after the manner of the flesh.

This is the Heavenly Mother (represented by the Tree of Life), and then Mary and her son on the earth. This revelation to Joseph Smith was the exact ancient Wisdom symbolism, intact, and almost certainly as it was known in 600 BCE.

(To read Margaret Barker’s full speech, see here. Also see here her speech given at BYU that touches on similar topics.)

Another great resource on this topic is Daniel Peterson’s article entitled “Nephi and His Asherah.” After discussing the image of “the Mother of the Son of God” and the Tree of Life in 1 Nephi, Peterson goes into a very informative discussion of how modern scholars have found much evidence for the worship of a Mother Goddess in Ancient Israel.  We know of the existence of this goddess from the Bible itself, which mentions the occasional purging of the “Asherah” (usually translated as “grove”, see 2 Kgs. 23:4–15; Judg. 6:25–30; 2 Chr. 34:3–7; 2 Kgs. 17:10) from the worship practices of the Israelites.  The grove, or asherah in Hebrew, was apparently a wooden pole, or more likely, a stylized tree that was set up or “planted” in holy places, often next to an altar. Peterson notes that the rabbinic authors of the Jewish Mishna (second-third century AD) explain the asherah as a tree that was worshipped.

This religious symbol represented the Tree of Life and also the goddess named Asherah.  We learn from the Canaanite/Ugaritic texts that the goddess Asherah was the consort (wife) of the high god ‘El.  She was the Mother Goddess, the Queen of Heaven–but like her counterparts in other cultures, she was also called the Virgin.  She was often depicted as nursing her divine offspring.  The sacred tree was her symbol.

Many scholars now believe that Asherah was worshipped legitimately in Israel for centuries, despite the Bible’s description of her worship as foreign custom to be abhorred.  The Bible does tell us that Abraham “planted a grove” and called upon the name of the Lord (Gen. 21:33).  Some have calculated that an asherah stood in the Temple of Solomon (perhaps even in the Holy of Holies) for a full two-thirds of its existence.  We know that the asherah wasn’t permanently removed until the time of the Deuteronomistic/King Josiah’s reforms (see here and here), which we read about in 2 Kings 23.  Furthermore, archaeologists have found thousands of small clay figurines in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas that are believed to have represented Asherah, the Mother Goddess. These figurines often depict a woman nursing a child and generally have what appears to be a tree trunk for the lower half of the body.

(For more on the archaeological evidences for Asherah worship, see William G. Dever’s book Did God Have a Wife?: Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel)

Daniel Peterson concludes that “Belief in Asherah seems, in fact, to have been a conservative position in ancient Israel; criticism of it was innovative.”¹

Margaret Barker goes into this topic in many of her books. For her, the asherah tree in the Temple of Solomon was likely the true menorah (see, for example, her book Temple Theology: An Introduction, p. 78, 90-91). According to Barker, it had originally been located in the Holy of Holies next to the Cherubim Throne. In one ancient version of Psalm 96:10, it apparently read: “The LORD reigns from the tree” (Justin Martyr, Dial.Trypho 71). A number of ancient texts describe the Throne of God in the Garden of Eden as being next to the Tree of Life. The asherah/menorah in the Holy of Holies also represented Wisdom and had cups of olive oil with flames continually lit. The Zohar (Lev 34b) describes the relationship between Wisdom, the oil, and the Tree of Life:

Take Aaron and his sons with him, and the garments. Rabbi Hiya quoted here the verse: ‘For with thee is the fountain of life, and in thy light we see light’ (Ps. 36:9). The fountain of life, he said, is the supernal oil which flows continually and is stored in the midst of the most high Wisdom, from which it never separates.  It is the source which dispenses life to the supernal tree and kindles the lights. And that tree is called the Tree of Life because it is planted on account of that source of life.

The asherah in the Holy of Holies would have represented the Tree of Life, Wisdom, and the Mother Goddess. She was (at least originally) the Wife of El-Elyon, God Most High, and the Mother of the LORD, Yahweh.  From her flowed living waters, the fountain of life, the holy oil that gives eternal life. This is all very much in line with the beliefs of the Egyptians and Greek/Orphic traditions discussed earlier.

As Barker alludes to in her Library of Congress speech, the wickedness that Nephi refers to in the beginning of 1 Nephi, and which Lehi preached against, very well could have been King Josiah’s purge of the Temple, and the removal of its sacred objects, including the asherah. The Tree of Life was removed from its position alongside the Throne of God, and was smashed and burned. The Queen of Heaven had been rejected. The holy anointing oil, which was used to anoint both kings and high priests, was lost. Lehi and Nephi would likely have been against these reforms, desiring to preserve the more ancient traditions.

These traditions were preserved in many texts of the intertestamental period, including the Enochic literature and many apocalypses. The imagery was still alive in early Christianity. The book of Revelation, a vision which takes place in the heavenly Holy of Holies, sees the Tree of Life again placed beside the Throne of God (Rev. 1:12; 2:7; 22:1-2,14). Peterson mentions a Coptic version of the record called the Apocalypse of Paul, which relates a vision that, in this detail at least, strikingly resembles the vision of Nephi: “And he [the angel] showed me the Tree of Life,” Paul is reported to have said, “and by it was a revolving red-hot sword. And a Virgin appeared by the tree, and three angels who hymned her, and the angel told me that she was Mary, the Mother of Christ.”

The Catholic Church, of course, continued to emphasize the importance of this view of Mary as the Mother of the Son of God. In that tradition, Mary virtually becomes the Mother Goddess of ancient times. Not surprisingly, she is often depicted as nursing the divine child.

Peterson further explains:

But Nephi’s vision goes even further, identifying Mary with the tree. This additional element seems to derive from precisely the preexilic Palestinian culture into which, the Book of Mormon tells us, Nephi had been born.

Of course, Mary, the virgin girl of Nazareth seen by Nephi, was not literally Asherah. She was, as Nephi’s guide carefully stressed, simply “the mother of the Son of God, after the manner of the flesh.” But she was the perfect mortal typification of the mother of the Son of God.²

The recognition of a Mother Goddess was an integral part of most ancient religions. She was almost always connected to the Tree of Life and/or Waters of Life and was responsible for giving eternal life, immortality, and godhood.  In the Bible, although her symbol was repeatedly condemned and desecrated, largely due to late reform movements with rather dubious intentions, she was also remembered as Wisdom, God’s helper in the Creation.  She was seen as the Mother and Nurturer of the gods. While many tried to extinguish her status and importance, righteous people longed for the return of the Tree of Life to its rightful place beside God’s own throne.  While there is much, much more that could be said on this topic, I just wanted to share some thoughts which I hope are helpful.

1. Daniel C. Peterson, “Nephi and His Asherah,” in Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 9:2 (Provo, UT: Maxwell Institute, 2000) 16-25
2. Ibid.

As I have been promising for some time now, I would now like to introduce you to the Orphic Gold Tablets, a series of small gold tablets/plates that have been discovered in southern Europe buried with the dead and offering to the same instructions regarding what they should do and say when they reach the Afterlife.  I am drawing my information on these finds almost exclusively from a monograph by Alberto Bernabé and Ana Isabel Jiménez San Cristóbal entitled Instructions for the Netherworld: The Orphic Gold Tablets (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

As I’ve mentioned previously, I consider these discoveries significant for the LDS audience, as the inscriptions found are on thin plates of gold (similar to Joseph Smith’s description of the gold plates from which the Book of Mormon is derived) and give specific instructions for what the initiate is to do during their journey into the  Afterlife, including meeting a number of guardians and gods who will ask them questions and to whom they must give certain passwords.

Before I get into a more detailed description of the nature and content of these tablets, I would like to give a brief explanation of what “Orphic” refers to.  The label “Orphic” is here referring to the Orphic mystery cult/religion popular in the ancient Greek and Thracian world.  The mystery religions involved initiation into secret rites (including the performance of sacred dramas) that presented the initiate with hidden knowledge pertaining to the afterlife and the gods. Often there was a promise of immortality resulting from initiation into the cult. The mystery cults were very widespread, being found in various cultures and times. Although there were others, including the Eleusinian and Mithric, the Orphic cult followed the literature of the mythical poet Orpheus, who was believed to have gone down to the Underworld and then came back from the dead.  For a slightly more detailed treatment of the mystery religions, please see this post that I wrote on them a while back (also, Wikipedia actually has a decent description here.)

Orpheus

The authors of Instructions for the Netherworld deem these gold plates very important for our understanding of Greek religion (and, I would say, most any ancient religion), “since they give us direct access to the most ancient stages of Orphic religion and literature, and present a very significant panorama of the rituals and beliefs of this religous group, which exerted a powerful influence on other Greek authors and thinkers: some Pre-Socratic philosophers, lyric poets like Pindar, Plato, and then the Neoplatonists” (p. 1).

Description of the Tablets

The authors describe the artifacts as:

[A] series of gold tablets of very small dimension (they vary between 8 and 4 cm. wide and 3 to 1 cm. long).  The use of gold no doubt corresponds to the search for a material intended to be noble and long-lasting, useful for avoiding malign influences and a symbol of the durability of the life that the deceased hoped for… The writing that appears on them is minuscle in size…In addition, the gold surface, thin and shiny, has tended to curl up and form wrinkles, which are sometimes hard to distinguish from letters. All this makes their reading and interpretation extaordinarily difficult (p. 2).

On the manner and place of their finding, the authors explain:

They are found in graves, but the limited number of graves that have yielded documents of this type, compared to the thousands that have been excavated, indicates that the users of the tablets were a minority group, with a certain unity of beliefs, probably initiates, or followers of a religious movement which…we must now, without hesitation, call “Orphic”, and convinced that a special destiny was reserved for them in the beyond.

They have come to light only in a few places, and differ widely in date, with almost six hundred years between the oldest, …c. 400 B.C., and the most recent, …datable to 260 A.D. The majority of them, however, date from between the 4th and 3rd centuries B.C. (p. 2).

The distance in time between the oldest and the most recent discoveries (700 years) indicates that this tradition was very persistent, perpetuating a system of beliefs and traditions over a very long period of time.  Also, the geographic area covered by the findings is quite large, stretching from Macedonia to the Greek islands and up to Rome.  Oddly, none have appeared in Attica, a fact the authors try to explain as possibly due to the strong influence of the rival Eleusinian mysteries, which do not appear to have used this type of text (p. 4).

On a final note regarding the description of the tablets:

In some cases, the tablets appear in open form, in others folded. In the former case, they were placed in the hand of the deceased; in the latter, they could be placed on the deceased’s chest or in his mouth…

Either way, the inscriptions were buried with the person so that they could have access to these important instructions when their soul reached the Netherworld.

An Overview of Their Contents

The gold plates contain brief texts written mainly in verse, although some prose is present as well. The prose sections often involve “mystical formulas, passwords, or other phrases of a ritual character,” which the authors note are especially difficult to interpret, as they are symbolic and could have multiple meanings (this point made me think of some of the issues that arise in the interpretation of the Joseph Smith papyri) (p. 5).

As for their content, the authors give the following brief summary:

In general, they contain references to the other world: either indications about its “geography”, greetings to the infernal gods, wishes that the soul of the deceased may find happiness in the Beyond, or else suggestions for help in finding it. They often include elements of dialogue, and the people who used them quite clearly hoped to obtain a special position in the other world, not so much thanks to the tablets themselves (although a gold object always possessed a certain value as a talisman or as a marker of identity), but because through them they are reminded what to do or say (p. 5).

While the inscriptions vary (although some are very similar and even identical), they tend to follow certain themes that can be structured as a pattern. The rest of the authors’ book is set up following these themes. They note:

We will structure these groups following what we might call the soul’s transition toward the other world, since most of the tablets refer to various stages of its journey (p. 6).

The stages of this journey, as outlined in this work (pp. 6-7), are:

• The soul’s arrival in the world of the dead.
• What it must do to confront the trials which face it there, including the question of the guardians that watch over the fountain of Memory.
• The guardians’ questions and the answers that must be given.
• The “ritual of the dead”, including the soul being addressed by someone, congratulating him because his death is a new birth, and declaring that he will share the happy destiny of the other initiates.
• The soul being guided in its path by a series of instructions.
• Arriving to present itself before the goddess Persephone and, in its request to be received by her, referring to a large number of questions related to Orphic ritual and belief.
• Giving of the passwords necessary for reaching “the meadow of the blessed” and the declaring that soul is worthy because it has been initiated in the several mysteries.
• The greetings to certain gods and the initiate’s identification with them (indicating that the initiate “belongs” to the god).
• The soul’s ultimate destiny.

I know that this list leaves us wanting in terms of specific details, but those details will be provided, as far as they can be from the book, in future posts. For now, I hope this brief treatment of the Orphic Gold Tablets is sufficient to interest you in this topic and demonstrate how useful these discoveries can be, both to the student of ancient religions as well as to the participants in modern practices of a similar nature.  The discovery of these inscriptions gives us, of course, yet another fine example of the use of gold tablets/plates to preserve important religious texts in ancient times.

Gold Scroll found in Austria inscribed with the Shema in Greek

Demeter and Persephone, Eleusinian Mysteries Initiation Relief

The mystery religions, or cults, involved initiation into secret rites and the performance of sacred dramas that presented the initiate with hidden knowledge pertaining to the afterlife and the gods. Often there was a promise of immortality resulting from initiation into the cult. The Greek word “musterion” here means “secret rite or teaching,” and a “mystes” was one who had been initiated. Many times, these cults were not religions, per se, but were groups attached to more mainstream belief systems. The mystery cults were very widespread, being found in various cultures and times, the most famous being the Eleusinian, Orphic, Dionysian, Cybellic, and Mithric.

Although there are differences between them, most of the mysteries involved fertility rites and harvest celebrations. Often they entailed a dramatic representation of the fertility god’s death and journey to the underworld and subsequent resurrection and immortality. The initiate would usually re-enact or otherwise imitate the god’s journey, thus obtaining the same immortality as the god. The details of these rites were generally not written down and were to be kept secret, death being the penalty for revealing them. There is much in early Christianity, with its dying and rising God and secret apostolic traditions, that can be compared to these mysteries.

The Telesterion of Athens, portrayed in the model above, was the location where the main part of the Eleusinian initiation was performed, after initiates had undertaken a symbolic journey that led to this final destination.  Compare “telesterion” and “telestai” to “telestial” of LDS terminology.  Telestai is a Greek term meaning “initiates.” The telestai were initiated in the Telesterion.  While I have not seen any place where Joseph Smith explicitly defined Telestial as having to do with initiation, it makes sense that the telestial world, which is descriptive of the world we live in, is the place where initiation needs to take place before one can enter a celestial world.  For Latter-day Saints, the temple is our telesterion where we become telestai. 

In his Immortality of the Soul, Plutarch writes that “the soul at the moment of death, goes through the same experiences as those who are initiated into the great mysteries. The word and the act are similar: we say telentai (to die) and telestai (to be initiated).”  

A couple of months from now (after school is done), I hope to start a series of posts that comment on the translation of some gold plates that have been discovered buried with the bodies of initiates into the Orphic mysteries.  These small gold plates are inscribed with instructions that detail what the deceased person must do and say when he reaches the Netherworld.  This is fascinating material and I can’t wait to share it with you.