Replying to Deb-Aurah Araznu’s (link at bottom of page) status update on Facebook I decided that my reply needed some expanding. The poster was describing her experience of spiritual expansion and she spoke about the Garden of Eden. Having been brought up as a Catholic in a convent we were taught the story of Adam and Eve and the tree in the Garden of Eden. Needless to say, when I was 6 years old I didn’t question the wisdom of the nuns. After all, they were closer to God than I.
Eve in the Tree. John Coates.
Or maybe not! As I developed as a healer and worked more and more on the meaning of myth, often I would awaken from sleep with ‘realisations’. One morning I awoke with the image of a naked Eve standing on the roots of a large tree, with an apple in her hand, and she had a serpent entwined around her body. But this was not the Christian Eve. This was the Mother Goddess, a far more ancient version than the Christian vision. The ‘knowing’ that went with this picture was this: Eve represented the Mother of Creation, nature, that which fed us and sustained our physical bodies. The apple that she was offering to mankind/Adam, was her wisdom and knowledge of the Divine Feminine; The path of the Mother. Divine Love. The serpent was the energy which flowed through the earth, it brought fertility to the land, and fed the people and all that lived upon it. The tree was the Tree of Life. Not in the way which the Jewish people understood it but as the vehicle through which the apples might be brought to humanity. The tree was life. It is only through living a physical life, experiencing the whole range of emotions and life events that we can truly grow.
Eve: the Primordial Mother. Adam: humanity.
We do not grow by forever being out of our bodies and in our minds; that growth is limited. The wisdom of the Mother therefore is the Mystery of Life, birth, death and everything in between. Our sacredness is experienced through our bodies. It is in the experience of living that we face our greatest challenges and experience our greatest joys. Through the realm of emotion we learn to overcome fear and to rise into our soul awareness, instilling in ourselves the flow of Divine Providence. The Mother is Abundance.
Isis as a tree giving food and water to to a man and his wife.
In Ancient Egypt the Mother Goddess Isis was represented by the Sycamore Tree which fed the Pharaoh and his family. But Isis, and Osiris, are said to have been born of Lusaaset, (The Great One who comes forth). She was the Grandmother of the Deities, and she too was an Acacia tree. She was the Goddess of Creation.
But why trees? Apart from the obvious link to the fact that they do provide life to humans in the form of food, syrup, water, and wood? Well, the answer to this also came in the shape of a ‘morning realisation’. I awoke, on another morning, with an image of the Kabbalah, the Jewish Tree of life superimposed on Egypt!
The Tree of Life.
While I was walking to work later that morning I had another image. The central ‘trunk’ of this tree was the Nile River, feeding the entire tree. The Branch containing the three spheres Hod, Gevurah and Binah were the Goddess Isis, the Divine Feminine. The opposite three, on the other branch was Osiris, the Divine Masculine. The Tree of life, in the Jewish tradition represented creation and the Divine Balance between the feminine and the masculine. But that wasn’t all. Each sphere represented a sacred place on the map of Egypt. The Isis spheres representing sites which were predominantly female and the Osiris spheres representing sites which were masculine in their nature. The spheres along the central trunk were sites where the energies were ‘balanced’ between male and female.
Map of Egypt.
The tree was not purely an esoteric idea but a real, workable map of energy sites where, when all these sites are functioning correctly, brings balance and abundance to the country. The lines on the tree show the connections between each site as all sites are connected via a matrix of energy lines which feed the landscape and its atmosphere with the energies of the site. It functions a little like a Mother board in a computer. Remembering that the Hebrews came from Egypt with Moses, who was a priest, it is easy to see how the sacred knowledge went with them. But somewhere along the line the information was lost and it became a purely esoteric method of connecting to the Divine. The Mother aspect having been relinquished somehow.
Apples of the Goddess.
This brings us back to the garden of Eden! The Garden is the Realm of the Mother in Balance with the Father. For the tree cannot exist without the life-giving sun and rain. But the Hebrews who brought the knowledge of the Tree of Life and the Garden of Eden decided that they no longer needed the Mother. They could do it all themselves, even though to begin with they obviously brought the belief in Hathor, in the form of the Golden cow, with them, along with the story of Isis and the tree. But the story of Divine Harmony and Balance was distorted so that now the Divine Feminine was reduced to being a tempting harlot, weak and ignorant, bringing shame to mankind and forcing their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Somehow the Hebrew God became the fearful, avenging and angry God who hated the Mother and all women of the Earth.
So what part of ‘Honour thy Father AND thy Mother’ did they not understand?
If you want to read Deb-Aurah Araznu’s blog here is the link:
The Gaia Method Earthways 