Origin 480 to 530 CE
The Cherubim are the second choir of angels in the Dionysian hierarchy. Guardians of the divine glory and of wisdom and knowledge, they are the many-eyed, winged beings who bear up the Throne of God and who were set to guard the way to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3). They belong to the first triad, the choirs of pure contemplation. In the Kabbalistic correspondence used here they are aligned with Chokmah, the sphere of primal Wisdom. The same name is carried separately by an order of the Kabbalistic angelic hosts, transliterated Kerubim, which the Golden Dawn table places at Yesod, so one name stands for two different things in two different systems.
Facts
Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryA standard analytic category in the study of religion 2 What is superseded is the authorship, not the scheme Debunked
Attributed Author / CompilerRenaissance scholars established that the ascription could not be genuine: the place of origin recorded elsewhere on this page places the work's actual composition in Greek, in Syria, around the year 500, some four centuries after Dionysius the Areopagite would have lived. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) treats the ascription's rejection as settled since the Renaissance. 2 Attributed Author / CompilerThe Celestial Hierarchy, which sets out the ninefold order of angels including this choir, circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Paul named at Acts 17:34. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) traces how this ascription gave the work the standing of a companion of the apostles. 2 Attributed Author / CompilerThe true author's identity has never been recovered. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) is among the scholarship that refers to him only as Pseudo-Dionysius, a name that records the unmasking of the Areopagite ascription rather than identifying who he actually was. 2 Origins
Origin Period480 to 530 CE 1Tradition: Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy Origin Period Origin PeriodNamed in Genesis 3:24 and Ezekiel 10 centuries before Dionysius, organized into the second rank of the first triad in The Celestial Hierarchy, dated by modern scholarship to the late fifth or early sixth century CE and traditionally, but wrongly, attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (hence Pseudo-Dionysius). 1 Place of OriginWritten in Greek, most probably in Syria, around the year 500. 2 Origin of the NameHebrew kerubim, the guardian figures set at the gate of Eden 3 Origin of the NameIn Ezekiel, beneath the divine chariot 3 Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting SourceDenotes their knowledge and their vision of God 1Tradition: Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy Meaning in the Attesting SourceSignifies a fulness of knowledge, or a stream of wisdom 1Tradition: Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy Attributions
SephirahChokmah, in the table of the ten orders in Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy 4Tradition: Agrippa Sourced to the subject's own accountAgrippa's table of the ten orders was collated directly for this entry. It runs Kether to the Seraphim, Chokmah to the Cherubim, Binah to the Thrones, Chesed to the Dominions, Geburah to the Powers, Tiphereth to the Virtues, Netzach to the Principalities, Hod to the Archangels and Yesod to the Angels, and gives Malkuth not to a choir but to the blessed souls. The arrangement this collection carries elsewhere in its own structure runs one place lower, from Chokmah down to Malkuth, and matches neither Agrippa nor the Golden Dawn table. Whose arrangement that is has never been recorded, which is what the open question below asks. Rival Systems
A Rival System's AttributionSourced to the subject's own accountAgrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy: Cherubim is the order of Chokmah, not of Binah. The order Agrippa assigns to Binah is Thrones, whose Hebrew name he gives as Aralim. 4Tradition: Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy A Rival System's AttributionSourced to the subject's own accountHermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: the choir of Binah is Aralim. The order's ten choirs are the Hebrew orders throughout, and Cherubim does not appear among them. 5Tradition: Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn A Rival System's AttributionThe name predates Dionysius by centuries (Genesis, Ezekiel). Gregory the Great's independent ninefold scheme (Homiliae in Evangelia 34) keeps Cherubim in the first triad alongside Seraphim and Thrones, agreeing with Dionysius here even though the two schemes diverge lower down. 1 Learn More
A Choir of the Celestial Hierarchy
Cherubim in the Hebrew Bible are considerably stranger and more formidable than the plump winged infants later art calls by the same name. Genesis places a cherub with a flaming, turning sword at the gate of Eden after the expulsion of Adam and Eve, guarding the way back to the tree of life. Exodus has two golden cherubim, wings outstretched, facing each other atop the Ark of the Covenant's mercy seat, marking the place where God's presence was said to meet Israel. Ezekiel's famous vision goes furthest: four living creatures, each with four faces, human, lion, ox and eagle, and wheels within wheels, bear up the throne-chariot, the merkabah, of God itself, a vision later Jewish mysticism took as the founding text of an entire tradition of chariot mysticism.
None of this early material resembles the chubby-faced winged child of Renaissance and Baroque religious art, an image that developed centuries later from classical putti and largely displaced the older, far more alien biblical cherub in popular imagination. The gap between Ezekiel's composite guardian-beasts bearing up the divine throne and the decorative infant face on a modern greeting card is one of the largest distances between an original scriptural image and its later popular reception anywhere in Western religious art.
The Kabbalistic Correspondence
The Golden Dawn's ten-choir table is not simply a Hebrew relabeling of the nine Dionysian choirs; it replaces Cherubim, along with most of the other Greek and Latin choir names, with an entirely separate set of Hebrew angelic-order names drawn from Jewish sources independent of Pseudo-Dionysius, among them Chaioth ha-Qadesh, Auphanim, Aralim, Chashmalim, Seraphim, kept as the sole shared name, Malachim, Elohim, Beni Elohim, Kerubim and Ishim. Cherubim itself, under that scheme's own transliteration Kerubim, is assigned to Yesod rather than to Binah, a considerably lower position than either this collection's Binah placement or Agrippa's Chokmah placement gives it.
Three systems, then, put Cherubim in three different positions on the Tree of Life, at Chokmah, at Binah and at Yesod depending on which table is consulted, a divergence that again reflects genuinely separate lines of transmission rather than any single scheme all Western esoteric sources actually share, whatever the appearance of a unified Kabbalistic angelology that popular occult reference works sometimes present. Students who move between these reference works without noticing the divergence often assume a single settled Kabbalistic angelology exists behind all of them, an assumption none of the primary sources actually support.
Connections
Commonly Conflated with (See Note)
Source Mishneh TorahMoses Maimonides
Corresponds To
Source The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie
Originates in Language
Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)Anonymous (multiple authors)
Source The Celestial HierarchyPseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Sources
1. The Celestial Hierarchy
2. The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century
Bernard McGinn, Crossroad, 1991on the reception of the Dionysian corpus in Latin theology
3. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)
4. Three Books of Occult Philosophy
5. The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th edition
Israel Regardie, Llewellyn, 1989Second Knowledge Lecture: the sephiroth with their divine names, archangels and choirs of angelsView the Source A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels
Essays About This Entity (3 essays)
Angelology on the Kabbalistic Tree
The Nine Angelic Choirs Do Not Carry Nine Disputes. They Carry One
All Nine Angelic Choirs Share One Debunked Claim About Who Wrote Their Source Text
Cherubim, one of nine choirs carrying the identical debunked authorship note word for word
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