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Second of Ten, and the Sphere of Chokmah

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Second of Ten, and the Sphere of Chokmah

Maimonides ranks the ophanim second of ten in the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 2:7, immediately below the holy living creatures they accompany in the vision. The Golden Dawn table, which pairs each of the ten ranks with a sephirah, assigns them to Chokmah, the second sephirah, so the two systems agree on their height even though they were built for different purposes and centuries apart.

The complication comes from the other direction. Later Western sources routinely identify the Thrones of the Dionysian nine-choir scheme with the ophanim, and the emblem this collection gives the Thrones is the wheel of Ezekiel for that reason. A different line of sources identifies the same Thrones with the erelim instead, the rank the Kabbalistic lists place at Binah. Both identifications circulate, often in the same reference works, and neither is a claim either original list makes about itself.

A reader moving between the two schemes therefore meets the wheels twice, once under a Greek name in third place and once under a Hebrew name in second, and can easily conclude that the two are one system in translation. They are not. The atlas keeps both entries for that reason, so that the divergence stays visible instead of being smoothed away into a single merged entry that would have to hold two positions at once.

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