Ezekiel, a priest of Jerusalem carried into Babylonia in the deportation of 597 BCE (Chapter 4), condemned the worship of the Sun and gave his own God the Sun's fire, the Sun's chariot and the Sun's four quarters. He was shown men in the inner court of the Temple bowing to the sunrise and he named this an abomination, and the same priest saw the Glory of his God seated in fire above four living creatures and wheels full of eyes. We read this throne as the Sun's own court given a person. Ezekiel kept its blaze, its vehicle, its quarters and its rising in the east, and he gave all of it the personality and sovereignty of the God he served. A worship that a reforming king could burn out of the Temple gate stood again in the sight of the prophet who opposed it, because the form of that worship was the form of the sky, and a priest who wished to say how high his God sat had no higher form to use.
We also hold this vision to be the root of the Western ascent, the rising of a living person in vision through the heavens to the seat of God. The Hebrew name for the throne is the merkavah, the chariot, and the seekers of Judaism and Christianity who later rose in vision toward a throne took Ezekiel's first chapter as their text (Chapter 7). For our School this vision stands as revelation, for it returns the mysteries that grew up around Ezekiel to the primacy of the Sun.
5.1 A Priest Among the Learned of Babylonia
Ezekiel was a priest of the Temple before he was a prophet of the exile, and this is why the Sun at the Temple gate and the sky over Babylonia could meet in one man. Moshe Greenberg of the Hebrew University, who wrote the Anchor Bible commentary on this book, begins from the same two facts: "Two determinants of the prophet's outlook stand out in his prophecies: his priesthood and his exile" (Encyclopedia of Religion, "Ezekiel"). He names himself "Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar" (Ezekiel 1:3), and he dates his first vision to the fifth year of the captivity of King Jehoiachin, about 593 BCE. He lived among the deportees at Tel-abib (Ezekiel 3:15), on a canal that Babylonian tablets of the following Persian age call Nār Kabari, and the elders of Judah came to his house to sit before him (Ezekiel 8:1). A man raised for service at the altar knew the courts, gates and measures of the Temple as a priest knows them, and he brought that knowledge with him to a Babylonian canal.
This priest's learning went far beyond the Temple, and we place him, with the scholars of the cuneiform record, among the educated of the land. Pearce states that "his allusions to masterpieces of cuneiform literature (such as the Gilgamesh Epic), and his understanding of Babylonian cosmology all attest to his rather complete integration into the cultural milieu of Babylon." Abraham Winitzer places him among the Babylonian literati in a study of 2014, and David Vanderhooft and Jonathan Stökl have examined how a Judean priest could have gained such access. Akkadian words stand in his Hebrew, among them the word for the plan of the Temple in Ezekiel 43:11, taken from Akkadian uṣurtu, "plan, blueprint, design". God tells him to take a tile, in Hebrew a brick, and to "pourtray upon it the city, even Jerusalem" (Ezekiel 4:1), and a man drawing a city on clay was doing what the scribes of the land around him did.
Ezekiel knew the Babylonian rite of asking well enough to report it step by step. He tells us that "the king of Babylon stood at the parting of the way, at the head of the two ways, to use divination: he made his arrows bright, he consulted with images, he looked in the liver" (Ezekiel 21:21). Nebuchadnezzar is deciding whether to march on Rabbah or on Jerusalem, and Ezekiel goes on, "At his right hand was the divination for Jerusalem" (Ezekiel 21:22). The prophet of YHVH reports a Babylonian rite, and he reports that it gave a true answer, since it sent the army to the city his God had sentenced. He accepts both the art and its result and sets them under the God of Israel, and he handles the sky of Babylon in the same way. This is what we call the henotheism of these years (Chapter 4), in which a priest of YHVH could take the powers of his neighbors seriously and borrow freely from them, because his quarrel with them concerned who rules.
Ezekiel's own acts belong to this same world. He lay on his side for 390 days, he ate a written roll, and he shaved his head and divided the hair for burning, for the blade and for the wind (Ezekiel 3:3, 4:5, 5:1-2). Commentators call these sign-acts, and some compare them with the ecstatic maḫḫû who spoke for Ištar in the Assyrian oracles that Parpola edited in 1997. Jung answers those who have called the prophet diseased: "From a strictly clinical standpoint Ezekiel's visions are of an archetypal nature and are not morbidly distorted in any way" (Answer to Job, in Collected Works 11, §665). We call him a priest-prophet of the exile, a man who held the Temple's office and took up the prophet's seizure, and who used ecstasy, the performed rite and the knowledge of Babylonian omen in the service of YHVH.
5.2 The Horses and Chariots of the Sun
The Sun had a place at the Temple of Jerusalem long before Ezekiel condemned it, and the kings of Judah had given it that place. The Second Book of Kings reports the reform of King Josiah, about 622 BCE, in which "he took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun, at the entering in of the house of the LORD, by the chamber of Nathanmelech the chamberlain, which was in the suburbs, and burned the chariots of the sun with fire" (2 Kings 23:11). These horses stood at the entrance of YHVH's own house, and a named court officer had his chamber beside them. The Hebrew for "the chariots of the sun" is markevot ha-shemesh, and the first word is the plural of merkavah. This is the only passage in the Bible that gives the Sun a chariot, and it places that chariot at the Temple about thirty years before the first vision of Ezekiel.
This solar service was, as we read it, one part of a wider service of the sky carried on by royal appointment. In the same reform Josiah put down the priests whom "the kings of Judah had ordained", among them "them also that burned incense unto Baal, to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven" (2 Kings 23:5). The Hebrew word behind "planets" is mazzalot, which in later Hebrew names the signs of the zodiac. Deuteronomy forbids anyone to worship "either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven, which I have not commanded" (Deuteronomy 17:3), and a law of this kind is written against something people do. Job in his oath of innocence denies that he beheld the Sun shining and that "my mouth hath kissed my hand" (Job 31:26-27), the gesture of homage to the two lights, and Jeremiah's protest belongs to this same age (Chapter 4).
We find the Sun's name and image in the land as well as in the books. Israel's own map carried Beth-shemesh, the House of the Sun, and En-shemesh, the Spring of the Sun (Joshua 15:10, 15:7), and the Hebrew name of Samson, Shimshon, is built on shemesh. The royal jar handles of Judah stamped lmlk, "for the king", in the late eighth century carry a winged sun disk or a four-winged scarab, as Othmar Keel and Christoph Uehlinger document in Gods, Goddesses, and Images of God in Ancient Israel (1998), so that the kings of Judah marked their own stores with the Sun. The clay cult stand of Taanach, of the tenth century BCE, has on its top tier a young animal with a sun disk above its back, which J. Glen Taylor reads as a horse. Uehlinger, in a study of 2005, finds that seals of the period move from images of star and moon to names alone under Josiah, which he takes as a sign of an enforced monotheism.
Scholars divide over how old this service was and whom it served, and their division bears on our argument. Mordechai Cogan in 1974 and Hermann Spieckermann in 1982 hold that the astral cult of the seventh century came in under Assyrian rule. Taylor, in Yahweh and the Sun (1993), holds that in ancient Israel the worship of the Sun and the worship of YHVH overlapped considerably and that the Sun could serve as an image of him, and he reads the Taanach stand as an early image of YHVH. Richard Hess, reviewing the book, grants the Sun as a symbol of Israel's God and adds that the authors of Deuteronomy through Kings counted even that veneration as unacceptable. Taylor is right on this point, because horses given by the kings of Judah at the entrance of the house of YHVH were given in the worship of YHVH, as those kings understood it.
The God of this house had come from the south as a god of storm and battle, and the language of light gathered to him early. An inscription of about 800 BCE from Kuntillet Ajrud in the Sinai names "Yahweh of Teman", the southland (inscription 3.6 in the edition of Ze'ev Meshel, 2012). The Song of Deborah sings of the march from the south in the words, "LORD, when thou wentest out of Seir, when thou marchedst out of the field of Edom, the earth trembled, and the heavens dropped, the clouds also dropped water" (Judges 5:4). The Blessing of Moses gives the same road in the verbs of dawn, "The LORD came from Sinai, and rose up from Seir unto them; he shined forth from mount Paran" (Deuteronomy 33:2), where "rose up" is the Hebrew zaraḥ, the verb for the rising of the Sun. Habakkuk says in his prayer that "God came from Teman, and the Holy One from mount Paran [...] And his brightness was as the light; he had horns coming out of his hand" (Habakkuk 3:3-4). YHVH came into the Temple as the storm of the southern mountains, and his priests and poets at Jerusalem spoke of him in the language of sunrise.
The poets of Israel gave the Sun's titles to YHVH before Ezekiel and after him, and we take the older of these songs as evidence of the language he inherited, and the later as evidence of how his Glory was received. Psalm 84, a song of pilgrims to the house of YHVH, calls the LORD a sun and a shield (Psalm 84:11), with the Hebrew shemesh, the common word for the Sun, although the Targum and some translators render it "bulwark". In Psalm 19 the heavens declare the glory of God, and God sets "a tabernacle for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race" (Psalm 19:4-5). The Sun in this hymn has a tent and a course from God, "and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof" (Psalm 19:6).
Psalm 104 carries the wording of the hymn of a Sun-worshiping king of Egypt, Akhenaten. This psalm clothes God in the Sun's own substance, addressing him as the one "Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain" (Psalm 104:2). Wilson, translating the Hymn to the Aton for Ancient Near Eastern Texts, states, "A similarity of spirit and wording to the 104th Psalm has often been noted, and a direct relation between the two has been argued." Wilson marks the lines of the Egyptian hymn with their parallels in the psalm, the lions that go forth by night, the ships on the sea and the creatures that wait for their food.
5.3 The Men in the Inner Court
Ezekiel's condemnation of the Sun stands in a dated vision of about 592 BCE, in which the spirit carries him from his house in Babylonia to the Temple. He tells us that "the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem" (Ezekiel 8:3). His guide is "a likeness as the appearance of fire: from the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the colour of amber" (Ezekiel 8:2), which are the words he used fourteen months earlier for the figure on the throne. We take the fire on the throne and the fire that shows him the Temple's worship to be one figure. This guide leads him through four scenes in rising order, each followed by the promise of something worse.
The first three scenes show the Temple open to the gods of its neighbors. At the north gate stands the image of jealousy, and in a chamber behind a hole in the wall seventy elders stand with censers before figures drawn on the wall. At the north entrance of the gate "there sat women weeping for Tammuz" (Ezekiel 8:14), the god of the fourth month (Chapter 4). Ezekiel, an exile living in the very land of this god, sees his mourners in the house of YHVH, and he is told that one sight remains that is greater than these.
The last and greatest of the abominations is the worship of the Sun. Ezekiel says, "And he brought me into the inner court of the LORD's house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the LORD, between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their backs toward the temple of the LORD, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east" (Ezekiel 8:16). He calls them men, and Joel places the priests in this very spot, "between the porch and the altar" (Joel 2:17), and so we take them for priests. The sanctuary faced east, so that anyone who worshiped toward the house looked west. Baruch Levine, the scholar of the Temple cult, writes, "What is unusual about Solomon's Temple is its east-west orientation", and he reports that some have read this by the Sun itself, "to allow the sun, at certain times of the year, to shine through two successive doorways into the shrine itself" (Encyclopedia of Religion, "Biblical Temple"). These men stood at the holiest place open to them and turned around, with the house of their God behind them and the sunrise before them.
Ezekiel names the Sun only twice in his book, here and in an oracle against Egypt where the Lord will "cover the sun with a cloud" (Ezekiel 32:7), and his throne vision does not name it at all. A priest who counted the worship of the Sun the greatest of the abominations would not write the word on his God's throne, and we read this silence as part of the polemic. A polemic is an argument against a rival, and Ezekiel's rival was the object of those men's devotion.
5.4 The Order of the Throne
The vision by the Chebar is built in levels from the earth to the throne, and its levels answer to the sky as the learned of Babylonia described it. It opens on the storm of the old southern God, for "a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber" (Ezekiel 1:4). Out of the fire come four living creatures, each with four faces and four wings, and "their appearance was like burning coals of fire, and like the appearance of lamps" (Ezekiel 1:13). Beside each creature stands a wheel, whose "rings were full of eyes round about them four" (Ezekiel 1:18). Over their heads spreads a firmament "as the colour of the terrible crystal", and "above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone" (Ezekiel 1:22, 1:26).
On the throne sits "the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it", fire and amber from the loins up and from the loins down. Ezekiel is a priest who weighs each word, and he qualifies everything he sees. In the twenty-eight verses of the first chapter of the King James text "likeness" occurs ten times, "appearance" fifteen times and "colour" five times, and the last verse gives the longest chain of all, "This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD" (Ezekiel 1:28). The Hebrew for this glory is kavod, a word for weight and splendor, and in Ezekiel it names the visible radiance of God. This care marks a form given for what has no form, and the form he was given is a person on a throne of fire.
The sky had this same order in the Mesopotamian scholarship of Ezekiel's world. A tablet in Neo-Assyrian script from Assur, KAR 307, lists three heavens, each with a floor of stone, the highest of them belonging to Anu, the god of the sky, and Wayne Horowitz, in Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (1998), says that the list in its present form may be as old as the Kassite period. Of the second heaven, where it names the Igigi, the gods of heaven, and Bel, Marduk under his title, it says, "The middle heaven of saggilmud stone is of the Igigi gods. Bel sits there in a high temple on a dais of lapis lazuli and has made a lamp of electrum shine there." Of the third it says, "The lower heaven of jasper is of the stars. He drew the constellations of the gods on it." (KAR 307, obverse 31 to 33, in the translation of Alasdair Livingstone, Court Poetry and Literary Miscellanea, SAA 3, no. 39). Horowitz shows that saggilmud is a blue stone of the color of lapis, and he sets Exodus 24:10, with its "sapphire" floor under the God of Israel, and Ezekiel's throne beside these floors, noting that the Hebrew word for sapphire has often been identified with lapis lazuli.
A priest who stood among scholars who knew where Bel sat in the sky saw, in our reading, his God in that seat, and the two orders agree in three places. The tablet places the stars and constellations on the lowest floor, and Ezekiel places his wheels full of eyes under the firmament. The tablet seats the lord of Babylon in a high temple on a dais of lapis, and Ezekiel seats the likeness of a man on a throne of sapphire. In the tablet Bel makes a lamp of elmešu, in Livingstone's rendering electrum, shine within the temple, and Horowitz, giving an oracle in which Ištar lights such a lamp in heaven, notes Ezekiel 1:26-27 as the Hebrew parallel. The amber of Ezekiel is the Hebrew ḥašmal, and the Greek translators of the Bible gave it as ēlektron. Gershom Scholem, the founder of the modern study of Jewish mysticism, gives the warning the rabbis attached to this one word: "A child who was reading at his teacher's home the Book of Ezekiel and he apprehended what ḥashmal was [...] whereupon a fire went forth from ḥashmal and consumed him" (a baraita in Hagigah 13a, in Scholem's English, Encyclopaedia Judaica, "Merkabah Mysticism").
Peter Kingsley set this Babylonian tablet beside Ezekiel in 1992 (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1992, p. 342), and Amar Annus, who cites the tablet by its museum number, VAT 8917, adds that the section just before the throne of Marduk describes the chariot of the god Ninurta, and so "the chariot of God and his throne in the middle heaven appear in Ezekiel's vision in the same order" (Studia Orientalia 106, 2009, p. 316). He also reports that the colophon of the tablet "explicitly says that the information on it is considered to be esoteric". We set this colophon beside the ruling of the rabbis on the Chariot (Chapter 7), because the scholars of Babylonia and the teachers of Judaism both kept this knowledge of the throne for the qualified.
5.5 The Fire of the Throne
Fire is the substance of Ezekiel's throne, and its nearest model in the land of his exile is the melammu, the Akkadian name for the awesome splendor that clothes gods, temples and kings, which Elena Cassin studied in La splendeur divine (1968). A god of Sumer or Babylon wore this light as a garment, and Krzysztof Ulanowski reports a line in which Šamaš covers the heavens and all lands with his melammu. Ezekiel saw fire within and around the figure on the throne, with "brightness round about" (Ezekiel 1:27), so that his God wears the splendor of the gods of the land he lived in, in the form of fire. Peter Schäfer of Princeton, the editor of the manuscripts of the palace literature (Chapter 7), reads the figure as a body of human shape whose substance is fire (The Origins of Jewish Mysticism, Introduction). Šamaš of Sippar sat in this splendor as the Sun, and the earliest writer to reuse Ezekiel's throne gave it wheels that shone as the Sun (§5.7).
Babylonia kept an image of the Sun on his throne in the generation before the exile, and we set it beside the throne of Ezekiel. The Sun-God Tablet of King Nabû-apla-iddina, a stone of the ninth century BCE from the temple of Šamaš at Sippar, now in the British Museum (BM 91000), shows the god seated in his shrine with a horned crown, the rod and ring in his hand, and a great sun disk before him on an altar, held from above by two figures. Its label reads, "Image of Shamash, the great Lord, who dwells in Ebabbara, which is in Sippar" (L. W. King, Babylonian Boundary-Stones, 1912, No. XXXVI, p. 121). Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled from 625 to 605 BCE, made an earthenware coffer for this stone, laid two clay impressions of its relief beside it and left it in the temple, and King judges that he did so to let a later king restore the scene if the stone were broken.
The fire of the throne acts on what comes near it, as we hold, and Ezekiel made this fire move through the world of the rite. Burning coals go up and down among the creatures, "and the fire was bright, and out of the fire went forth lightning" (Ezekiel 1:13). In the tenth chapter a man clothed in linen, the dress of the priest, is sent to go in between the wheels, take coals from between the cherubim and scatter them over the city (Ezekiel 10:2). The fire that lights the throne is the fire that judges Jerusalem, and an officer of the Temple carries it out himself.
In our School the Sun is a living god and this fire is his (Chapter 22), and we hold that a person who stands in the presence of the Sun can describe nothing else. The writers after Ezekiel made this fire a stream, as Daniel says of the throne of the Ancient of Days, "A fiery stream issued and came forth from before him" (Daniel 7:10), and the Book of the Watchers, one of the oldest parts of 1 Enoch, written by the third century BCE, says that "from underneath the throne came streams of flaming fire" (1 Enoch 14:19). The radiance that clothes the gods in Akkadian has become in Hebrew and Aramaic a river running from the seat of God.
We set Ezekiel and Akhenaten together because the same step was taken twice in the history of the Sun, from the disk to the light that comes from it. Akhenaten, who reigned from about 1353 to 1336 BCE, set the worship of the Aten, the disk of the Sun, above the older gods, and the reliefs of his city show that disk with rays ending in hands. His god reaches the world as light, and the rays are how the god touches a person. Among those who followed Ezekiel the object of devotion became the radiance of the throne, the kavod, and light became the shining of a God who could be met, addressed and approached.
The figure on this throne took its light from the Sun, as we hold, and the last detail of the vision comes from the Sun directly. Ezekiel says of the throne, "As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about" (Ezekiel 1:28). A bow in the cloud is made of sunlight and rain, and it appears only where the Sun is shining. Ezekiel has given us storm, cloud and lightning, which belong to the old God of the south, and at the top of the vision he compares the brightness around the throne to the one thing in a storm that the Sun alone can make.
5.6 The Four Faces
Four living creatures hold up the firmament and the throne, each with the face of a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle (Ezekiel 1:10). We read the four creatures as the four fixed signs of the zodiac, the lion as Leo, the ox as Taurus, the man as Aquarius, the water-bearer, and the eagle as Scorpio. A sign's modality is its place within its season, cardinal at the beginning, fixed at the center and mutable at the end. In our astrology a fixed sign holds, and our rite gives these four signs the Fixed gesture (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 48, §48.7.1). These four signs stand in the middle of the four seasons, ninety degrees apart, and together they form the fixed cross (Central Doctrine, Ch. 27, §27.6). The seasons are the Sun's own course through the year, and so these four quarters are the Sun's. Jung, reading the same order from the side of the psyche, says, "The first great vision is made up of two well-ordered compound quaternities, that is, conceptions of totality" (Collected Works 11, §665).
Modern scholars of Babylon reached the sky from the tablets, beginning with the four as constellations of the seasons. Heinrich Zimmern held in 1903 that the four cherubim of Ezekiel go back to Babylonian ideas of the sky, and R. H. Charles, in his commentary on Revelation of 1920, reports his view that they "are to be traced to the four chief constellations in the zodiac", the Ox, the Lion, the Scorpion and Aquarius, which mark in space the four quarters of the heavens and in time the four seasons. Gunkel accepted this as an assured result. Franz Boll, the historian of ancient astrology, reading the same four in Revelation, says in Aus der Offenbarung Johannis (1914) that these creatures had long been explained as four Babylonian constellations of the seasons, and he adds that because they lie about ninety degrees apart they span the whole sky, which makes the throne of God the sky itself.
Later scholars differ over the man and the eagle. Tim Hegedus, in Early Christianity and Ancient Astrology (2007), states, "In both Ezekiel and Revelation the four living creatures clearly correspond to four heavenly constellations." We read the four as Austin Farrer read them in Revelation in 1964, as the middle signs of the four quarters, "Lion (summer), Bull (spring), Man, the Waterer (winter) and Eagle, for Scorpion (autumn)", with Aquila standing in for Scorpio, and in our School the eagle stands as the image of that sign in its exalted form (Central Doctrine, Ch. 27, §27.6). Hegedus judges Farrer's identification more plausible than the others. Farrer and Hegedus both give the reason for the eagle, that Scorpio had an evil name and a scorpion would have been out of place beside the throne of God.
The sky of the exile had the four that our reading requires. Rochberg, in Babylonian Horoscopes (1998), gives the Babylonian names of the signs, the Bull of Heaven for Taurus, the Lion for Leo, the Scorpion for Scorpius and the Great One for Aquarius, and we know these as constellations from long before the equal signs of the zodiac were drawn (Chapter 2). The Roman astrologer Firmicus Maternus set these four apart in the fourth century CE, stating that all the signs hold "bright stars shining with awesome majesty" and that there are "regal ones in four", which he names as Leo, Scorpio, Aquarius and Taurus (Mathesis VI.2, in the translation of Bram). Boll printed that sentence beside the four creatures, and we set it here for the same reason. These four hold the regal stars of Firmicus, and in our reading they stand under the throne of Israel's God.
Ezekiel changed the four once, for in his tenth chapter he describes the same creatures again and gives "the first face" as "the face of a cherub", followed by a man, a lion and an eagle (Ezekiel 10:14), so that a cherub takes the ox's place. R. H. Charles, with Bertholet, excises this verse as an interpolation, since the Greek translators omit it. Ezekiel then says, "I knew that they were the cherubims" (Ezekiel 10:20), and in this way he joined the bearers of the throne to the winged figures over the Ark. The ox and the cherub are for us one bearer, for the colossal winged oxen that stood at the entrances of Assyrian temples and palaces are among the guardians set beside Ezekiel's bearers (Central Doctrine, Ch. 27, §27.6), and Zimmern's own case rested on them.
We take the oxen of the Temple's bronze basin as the twelve months in the four quarters of the sky, set under the water of the priests. This basin held the water in which the priests washed (2 Chronicles 4:6). It stood upon twelve oxen, three to each quarter, "three looking toward the north, and three looking toward the west, and three looking toward the south, and three looking toward the east" (1 Kings 7:25).
This four carries into the valley of dry bones, where Ezekiel is told to call, "Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live" (Ezekiel 37:9). Our doctrine reads the prophet at the center of the valley as the image of the theurgist at the center of the temple (Central Doctrine, Ch. 27, §27.6). In every rite of our School four daemons are called to the quarters, and we call them the cardinal guardians (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 31, §31.2). Our calling is the same act with a different four, for these guardians are drawn from the Cardinal signs, which mark the turning points of the year, and Ezekiel's creatures are the Fixed cross.
A God enthroned over the world is carried by the four quarters of the world, and we hold that only the sky can give a people those quarters. Irenaeus, about 180 CE, gave the four to the Gospels (Chapter 13). Isaiah had said, "The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool" (Isaiah 66:1), and Charles concludes from this and from Ezekiel that the throne of God was originally the heaven itself. Schäfer reads the message of Ezekiel's vision, given on the eve of the Temple's fall, in the same direction, as a teaching that the whole cosmos is God's Temple, as it was in the time of the patriarchs (The Origins of Jewish Mysticism, Introduction).
5.7 The Wheels Full of Eyes
Ezekiel sees the work of the wheels beside the creatures "as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel" (Ezekiel 1:16), and we read rings inside rings, studded with lights, as the sky turning and the eyes on them as its stars. Their rings "were so high that they were dreadful", and they were "full of eyes round about them four" (Ezekiel 1:18). In the tenth chapter the eyes spread to the whole body of the creatures, "and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels" (Ezekiel 10:12), and a voice calls out to the wheels, "O wheel" (Ezekiel 10:13). The Hebrew word in the first chapter is ofan, and the Parables of 1 Enoch count the Ophannin among the ranks of heaven beside the Cherubin and Seraphin (1 Enoch 61:10).
The eye was an old name for a star, and we have two sources that bring this close to Ezekiel. Boll says that the eyes mark Ezekiel's creatures clearly as constellations, and that hardly anyone would ask for proof that stars were called eyes, and he cites Wilhelm Gundel's collection of the Roman names of the stars. Zechariah, who prophesied at Jerusalem about 520 BCE, was shown a lampstand of seven lamps and told of "those seven; they are the eyes of the LORD, which run to and fro through the whole earth" (Zechariah 4:10). R. H. Charles takes these eyes for the seven planets, and so do we. He reads Ezekiel's lamps among the creatures as stars and the eyes on the wheels as "bodies of stars or constellations", and in this way of speaking the lights of heaven are the sight of God.
The earliest readers of the wheels saw the Sun in them. In the Book of the Watchers Enoch comes to a house of fire and sees "a lofty throne: its appearance was as crystal, and the wheels thereof as the shining sun, and there was the vision of cherubim" (1 Enoch 14:18, in the translation of R. H. Charles). Within about three centuries of Ezekiel his crystal, his throne, his wheels and his cherubim stand together in one verse, and this writer names the Sun, which Ezekiel left unnamed.
The wheels are Ezekiel's largest concession to the sky, for a priest who served a jealous God gave it a living spirit and set it in the service of the Glory. The spirit of the creatures is in the wheels, so the turning of the sky and the going of the throne are one motion, and Ezekiel says of creatures and wheels together, "When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood" (Ezekiel 1:21).
5.8 The Name of the Chariot
Ezekiel never calls his vision a chariot in the first, tenth or forty-third chapters, and the name came from those who read him, and we learn from it what they took the vision to be. The Chronicler, writing after the exile, says that David gave "gold for the pattern of the chariot of the cherubims, that spread out their wings, and covered the ark of the covenant of the LORD" (1 Chronicles 28:18). Jesus ben Sira, a scribe of Jerusalem writing about 180 BCE, sums up the prophet in one line in the Hebrew of his book, "And Ezekiel saw a vision, and described the kinds of chariot" (Ben Sira 49:8, in our English). The word in both places is merkavah. About four centuries after Ezekiel the whole of his vision could be named by this one word, and it is the word that the Second Book of Kings uses for what Josiah burned at the gate.
We find the chariot of fire in Israel's memory as a vehicle of ascent. When Elijah left the earth, "there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven" (2 Kings 2:11). The same things stand at the opening of Ezekiel, the whirlwind, the fire and the movement upward, with the throne of God in the place of the prophet. The Greek word ochēma also means a vehicle or chariot, and it became our School's word for the vehicle of the soul (Chapter 10). Habakkuk asks whether the LORD was displeased against the rivers when he rode "upon thine horses and thy chariots of salvation" (Habakkuk 3:8). The priests and poets of Judah pictured their God in a vehicle, and they also knew that their kings had set up a vehicle for the Sun.
We trace the older picture of God on a moving seat to the storm. Psalm 18 says that "he rode upon a cherub, and did fly: yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind" (Psalm 18:10), Psalm 104 says that he "maketh the clouds his chariot" (Psalm 104:3), and Isaiah says that "the LORD rideth upon a swift cloud" (Isaiah 19:1). The tablets of Ugarit give Baal the title "Rider of the Clouds", and the Hebrew of Psalm 68:4 is widely read as the same title, given to YHVH. This is the method by which the writers of Israel worked, taking a rival's title and giving it to their own God, so that the vehicle stayed and its driver changed. Tryggve Mettinger, in The Dethronement of Sabaoth (1982), and Othmar Keel, in Jahwe-Visionen und Siegelkunst (1977), set the cherub throne of the Ark beside the cherub thrones of the Canaanite and Phoenician kings.
Ezekiel's throne travels, and in this it parts from the older throne, which stayed in the Temple, as Isaiah saw it when he saw "the LORD sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up" (Isaiah 6:1). Ezekiel's throne rises from the earth, appears on a Babylonian canal and leaves Jerusalem by the east, and "the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels" (Ezekiel 1:20). A God who could leave his house and appear in the land of Bel and Šamaš needed a vehicle that belonged to the whole sky. Beside the storm-vehicles of its God, Judah's memory held one vehicle of the sky given by its kings, and we hold that a throne ringed with fire, turning with the lights of heaven and leaving by the east takes its form from that vehicle, the chariot of the Sun at the Temple gate.
5.9 The Road of the East
The road of Ezekiel's Glory is one line through the whole of his book, and we hold that this line runs toward the sunrise. In the tenth chapter the Glory rises from the threshold, and the cherubim "mounted up from the earth in my sight [...] and every one stood at the door of the east gate of the LORD's house; and the glory of the God of Israel was over them above" (Ezekiel 10:19). In the eleventh chapter it leaves the city, for "the glory of the LORD went up from the midst of the city, and stood upon the mountain which is on the east side of the city" (Ezekiel 11:23). The Glory leaves the Temple along the line of sight of the men in the inner court, and it goes away from the city in the direction of the rising Sun.
Ezekiel saw this Glory come back the same way, about twenty years later, in the vision of the restored Temple. He says, "And, behold, the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east: and his voice was like a noise of many waters: and the earth shined with his glory" (Ezekiel 43:2). It enters "by the way of the gate whose prospect is toward the east" (Ezekiel 43:4), and it fills the house. We read a light that comes from the east at the gate of the Temple and lights the whole earth as a sunrise by every mark but the name, and Ezekiel gives it the name of his God. In his last vision this rising comes to the house and goes inside, and the throne has its place there, "the place of my throne, and the place of the soles of my feet" (Ezekiel 43:7).
This road is the plainest form of Ezekiel's polemic, for it keeps the direction, the gate and the light of the cult he condemned, and he organizes the sanctuary of the future around the Sun's quarter of the sky. The gate closes on what has passed through it: "This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it; because the LORD, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it" (Ezekiel 44:2). The water of the new Temple runs out "from under the threshold of the house eastward" (Ezekiel 47:1).
The Glory rises in the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah, written after the return, in the words, "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee" (Isaiah 60:1), and "is risen" is zaraḥ, the verb of the sunrise, with the Glory as its subject. Later the same chapter promises that "The sun shall be no more thy light by day; neither for brightness shall the moon give light unto thee: but the LORD shall be unto thee an everlasting light, and thy God thy glory" (Isaiah 60:19). In this prophecy the Sun's whole office, its rising and its daily light, is taken up by the God of Israel.
These writers confessed a God above the Sun. Other psalms make the Sun a creature who is told to praise, "Praise ye him, sun and moon: praise him, all ye stars of light" (Psalm 148:3), and a work of God's hands, "thou hast prepared the light and the sun" (Psalm 74:16). Ezekiel counted the men of the inner court guilty of giving a creature what belonged to its maker, and we honor that faith. He held this of the Sun and saw the whole majesty of his God in the Sun's forms.
The priests of the Second Temple kept the memory of the men of Ezekiel 8 in a rite of their own. The Mishnah records that on the feast of Tabernacles, at the drawing of the water at dawn, they went to the gate that leads out to the east, and there they turned from east to west, toward the sanctuary. They said, "Our ancestors who were in this place" stood with their backs to the Sanctuary and worshiped the Sun toward the east, reciting Ezekiel's verse, "and we, our eyes are to God" (Mishnah Sukkah 5:4, William Davidson English).
5.10 The Priest Lifted Up
A vision of the throne needs a person who can stand before it, and we have in Ezekiel the fullest account in the Hebrew Bible of a priest taken up toward the seat of God. Moses and the elders saw the sapphire floor from the mountain, Isaiah saw the throne in the Temple, and Elijah went up and did not return to tell. Ezekiel goes and comes back, again and again, and writes down what happened. He says, "So the spirit lifted me up, and took me away, and I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit" (Ezekiel 3:14). The spirit lifts him "between the earth and the heaven" to Jerusalem (Ezekiel 8:3), brings him "unto the east gate" (Ezekiel 11:1), carries him back to Chaldea (Ezekiel 11:24) and brings him into the inner court of the new Temple (Ezekiel 43:5). Between these passages he goes from a Babylonian canal to the place of God and back again.
The priests of Qumran sang of the throne (Chapter 6), the descenders to the chariot sought it through seven palaces (Central Doctrine, Ch. 45, §45.10, and Chapter 7), and the throne of Revelation stands in its line (Central Doctrine, Ch. 52, §52.5, and Chapter 13). Annus calls Ezekiel's first chapter "the cornerstone of Jewish Merkabah mysticism" (p. 316). We count every one of them an heir of a throne whose fire, bearers, wheels and direction Ezekiel had taken from the sky. We hold that a seeker who climbs toward this throne is climbing through the sky under another name. The Bible records no initiation of Ezekiel, and no method and no grades of his.
Every rite of our School opens with the Grand Invocation, eight Names sounded in order (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 20, §20.7.1), and in our work the vehicle of the soul is a throne (Chapter 24). We teach of theurgy that the agency is divine and the person's part is surrender (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 4, §4.1.1). The priest of the Chebar fell on his face before the fire, and he heard a voice say, "Son of man, stand upon thy feet, and I will speak unto thee." His next words are, "And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me" (Ezekiel 2:1-2). He could not do even this for himself, and in his account of how a person comes to stand before the throne every lifting belongs to the spirit.