Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

One Name in Two Systems

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
One Name in Two Systems

Seraphim is the only name the Hebrew list of ten ranks and the Greek list of nine choirs share, and the two are not the same rank. In the Dionysian hierarchy the Seraphim are the first choir, closest to God, at the head of the first triad. In the list Maimonides gives in the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 2:7, the seraphim are fifth of ten, in the middle of the sequence, and the Golden Dawn table assigns them to Geburah, the sephirah of severity and of restrained force.

That is why this collection carries two Seraphim rows rather than one. Merging them would produce a single entity that is simultaneously first and fifth, which is not a nuance but a contradiction, and it would conceal the fact that the two lists were assembled independently, from different materials, for different purposes. The same treatment is applied elsewhere in the atlas wherever one name is genuinely doing two jobs in two systems.

The Geburah placement repays attention. Severity, judgement and the restraint of force are what the fifth sephirah stands for on the Tree of Life, and a rank whose name means burning sits there without any strain at all. The first place in the Dionysian scheme, by contrast, is about nearness rather than about fire, and the burning is read there as the heat of love for God. The same word is being explained by two different logics, and each explanation is coherent inside its own system and unavailable to the other.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.