“I had learned to call thee Father thru thy Spirit from on high,” Latter-day Saint poet Eliza R. Snow wrote in November 1845. “But until the key of knowledge was restored, I knew not why. In the heavens are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare! Truth is reason; truth eternal, tells me I’ve a mother there.” In another verse, Snow wrote “When I leave this frail existence, when I lay this mortal by, Father, Mother, may I meet you in your royal courts on high?”¹³⁸ The portions of these verses––contained in Snow’s poem and later in the beloved Latter-day Saint hymn “O My Father”––capture the beauty, wonder, and hope that Latter-day Saints hold in their heart for the doctrine and knowledge of a Mother in Heaven. 

Many have been concerned about how little we know about Heavenly Mother from the scriptures and teachings of leaders of the Church. This teaching is indeed not one that is strongly emphasized by leaders of the Church, but it has been discussed often in both official and unofficial capacities. In a 2011 article for BYU Studies, scholars David L. Paulsen and Martin Pullido discussed all of these teachings. These teachings indicate Heavenly Mother’s role as a co-framer of the plan of salvation, as involved in the Creation of the earth, as a heavenly wife and parent, a divine person, and as involved in the individual lives of Her mortal children.¹³⁹ Many Latter-day Saints believe that we cannot talk about Heavenly Mother to protect her name from being sullied like God’s has been by many. One of the most important contributions of this article was its discovery that there has never been any teaching from any leader of the Church that we must maintain a “holy hush” about Heavenly Mother. 

Much less is known about Heavenly Mother from the canon of scripture. Some have found some reassurance in the biblical teaching about Asherah, consort of Jehovah.¹⁴⁰ Scholar Daniel C. Peterson has documented how Nephi likely refers to Asherah in his vision of Lehi’s dream.¹⁴¹ Beyond that, there is not much else. One can take a couple of different, reasonable viewpoints on the paucity of references to Heavenly Mother in scripture. One can infer from the attributes and activities of Heavenly Father to the attributes and activities of Heavenly Mother, thus concluding that we actually know a lot about Heavenly Mother from scripture. If the Father is a god and the Mother is a goddess, why would They not share the same general set of attributes and activities in relation to Their children’s salvation and exaltation? Church leaders who have spoken about Her seem to have taken this approach in their teachings regarding our Mother in Heaven. On the other hand, one can infer that the paucity means that we actually know little about Heavenly Mother from the canon of scripture. It is indeed wise to not speculate beyond the explicit statements of scripture––filling in with reason what should be understood by revelation. This may explain why there aren’t even more teachings from Church leaders about this subject: they may have felt that we should not speculate.

The most authoritative and explicit doctrinal statement we currently have on Mother in Heaven is found in The Family: A Proclamation to the World issued by the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in September 1995. There, we read that “[all] human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny.” Many Church leaders have referred to that document as revelation, revelatory, revealed, inspired, and so forth.¹⁴² Second to the family proclamation, a 1909 statement by the First Presidency reads: “All men and women are in the similitude of the universal Father and Mother and are literally the sons and daughters of Deity.”¹⁴³

While it may be frustrating to nail down exactly what we do and do not know about Heavenly Mother, knowledge that She exists is sufficient to inspire hope and wonder in the hearts of Latter-day Saints and especially Latter-day Saint women as we all strive to emulate the character of our Eternal Father and Mother and thus eventually achieve exaltation.