Cherubim

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 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.