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Ninth of Ten, and the Descent to Yesod

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Ninth of Ten, and the Descent to Yesod

Maimonides ranks the kerubim ninth of ten in the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 2:7, second from the bottom, and the Golden Dawn table assigns them to Yesod, the ninth sephirah, the foundation, immediately above the world of Malkuth. In the Dionysian hierarchy the Cherubim are second of nine, immediately below the Seraphim and near the very top.

That is a long distance for one name to cover, and it is not the only placement in circulation. Agrippa's table of the Hebrew orders, printed in 1533, puts the same name at Chokmah, the second sephirah, matching the Dionysian height rather than the Maimonidean one. Three arrangements therefore place the cherubim at three different levels, and a reader consulting three reference works can be handed a high rank, a middle rank and a low one without any of the three mentioning that the others exist.

The divergence is real transmission history rather than error. The Greek list and the Hebrew list were assembled separately from different materials, and the sephirotic table is a later pairing of one of them with a scheme of emanation that had its own ten-part structure long before either angelic list was mapped onto it. Nothing forces one name to occupy the same height in all three, and that it does not is the clearest single demonstration that no unified Western angelology stands behind the tables.

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