Ezekiel's wheels, basis of Qabbalah and Merkabhah

venicebard

Just so you know my sources, I stumbled on the meaning of Ezekiel's vision from combining what I learned from H. W. Percival's THINKING AND DESTINY with the stipulations of Sefer Yetzirah. (And I could write a commentary on Ezekiel’s English version alone, with its number-and-direction symbolism, but I won’t here.)

WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS

Centered atop the head of standing Adam Qadmon (primordial upright being prior to division into male and female, our archetype or source), the first wheel encompasseth all, the Adamic form being the downward instance of its perpetual, instantaneously whirling radius that takes all in (bear with me).

Adam becoming seated on the ground ushers forth the ‘Throne’ world, the wheel now become half the height it was, a 2nd wheel, resting in the 1st’s lower half. Resting in the 2nd’s lower half is a 3rd, the zodiac of the seated torso, which means the 2nd, that wherein it rests, corresponds to the surroundings. And in the lower half of the zodiac of the seated torso rests the round of the womb, the 4th wheel, which is dark. It corresponds to the stellar spaces, which revolve in a forward sense around the zodiac due to equinoctial precession and the fact that the zodiac is the signs themselves, relative to which the constellations revolve, though the physical mechanism is probably gyroscopic precession. This revolution is not motion occurring in the physical world, but the physical environment itself revolving as one.

There are three mothers, that is, wheels with other wheels in their bellies. Taking intermediate mem at its calendar position libra to stand for the fourth wheel in a sense, alef represents the 3rd wheel, shin the 2nd, and mem-sofit (final form) the 1st: by shape, mem-sofit is the ark, mem the worshiper kneeling before it.

Now, how can the 1st wheel possibly encompass all. The 2nd, the surroundings, encompasseth all you or I are ever likely to encounter, for consider: forward on that wheel is the horizon before, behind us the horizon behind, yet looking at the ‘horizon behind’, it becomes ‘horizon before’, so ‘horizon before’ means horizon without or towards other, ‘horizon behind’ the horizon within, back towards self – direction of responsibility (buck stops here and all that). So this wheel goes from Up to Out (all 360 degrees) to Down to In (all 360 degrees) to Up.

All that is manifest to us of the 2nd wheel is its bottom half, indeed the mere prototype in thought thereof, since the physical world isn’t till the 4th wheel. This half, from horizon without to horizon within, is styled a Cauldron in Keltic myth (and elsewhere) and represents ‘division of the firmament’, the sky below us obscured by ground. The 3rd wheel, then, constitutes the druidic serpent’s egg or Orphic world egg. All its signs are present in the body: they are the twelve simples (in encoded, jumbled order in the alef-bet).

The seven manifested signs of the Cauldron are the seven doubles: originally B and P were inner and outer horizon respectively, D and T below these, G and K below these, and guttural R between G and K at libra. This points the mouth upward and defines it as the Cauldron, which defines the Egg as the tongue. In the bardic tree-calendar F fearn the alder or corn spirit signifies aries or up, meaning that which sprouts beyond the tongue or seed, but in Hebrew it is samekh, confined to the tip of the tongue, followed by tzaddi, whose inner counterpart (pisces) is nun, and chet, whose inner counterpart (aquarius) is lamedh: Egg’s upper half thus has the continuous consonants L, N, S, Ts, and Ch (bardic and western-Greek H), while the stops are on the (discontinuous) Cauldron, guttural R being a repeated stop. All this is based closely on tree-calendar order, though P and D were later reversed (for reasons having to do with changes in the psyche of man).

This leaves the Hebrew equivalents of six bardic vowels plus Q or qof: they go in the order U-O-Q-AA-E-I-II, which obviously originated from U-O-A-AA-E-I-II. Hardening of A into Q (at virgo the womb) and A’s receding to the middle of the 3rd wheel (to represent it in its entirety) signifies change from the immortal type, Adam Qadmon, to the mortal (us), with a ‘stop’over in the womb as we go around each time. The 3rd wheel, then, ends up: samekh-tzaddi-chet-vav-ayin-qof-tet-heh-zayin-yod-lamedh-nun.

Sefirot are simply the ten signs we have traversed so far (in the big picture) to end up in the tenth sign, a self, the Shekhinah or Presence of the One. The four worlds are the four wheels. And surely it can now be seen from this point of view that the balance the universe seeks is between inner and outer horizon, not between ‘matter and antimatter’, which would be rather difficult if there WERE no inner horizon, that is, at that point, there would be no outer either.

I will not explain every relation of the elements to this model nor today go into how the astrological attributions evolved from it. But the elements on the Cauldron are worth briefly laying out here.

The horizon before is ascertained through sight-photons-light, that is, ‘fire’. Thirty degrees down from it is that which approaches within earshot, hearing-sound being vibrations in air. Thirty degrees further (thirty degrees out from straight down) is that which is within reach and can thus be tasted of, taste requiring solution in water. And straight down is contact with earth: contact is touch, generally, which in the olefactory nerves gets sensitive enough to sense the shapes of surfaces of individual molecules.

Each level (except earth) has its inner counterpart, which would be the active ‘aligning so as to be seen’, and so on. But another way of looking at it is this.

Plato says there is that which abides, that which abides and abides not, and that which abides not, and that of that which abides one can have knowledge, of what abides and abides not one can hold an opinion, but of what abides not one remains ever ignorant (it vanisheth ere it can be considered). This indicates a self consisting of a knower, thinker, and doer. To act responsibly in the present instant, the doer must have the guidance of thinker and knower. The human, mortal state results from following, instead, the senses and losing sight of the inner horizon. For the true inner counterpart (active aspect) of tasting is the doer, that of hearing the thinker, and that of seeing, the direction straight back towards self, the knower. Gnosis is self-knowledge, knowledge of one’s connection to the Monad.

That’s all for now,

G. K. Spain
 

venicebard

Addenda

I forgot to mention that in addition to D and P being reversed in position, the case of R is a special one. As guttural R, it is between G and K at the throat or bottom of the Cauldron. But as the R rolled on tip of tongue, it rises to a position as the last of THIRTEEN months, the approach to capricorn (winter solstice), which in the conversion to twelve signs loses its position on the rim (since it encompasseth no sign, signs being points), banished temporarily to Cauldron's center until or unless it resume its proper station libra, as guttural R. This is why R is a ‘double’, the rest of the stops being so in that they can be hard or soft, ostensibly. R stands for the senses or body-mind, which rule in most but serve the wise.

Look, use guise, I know the rabbis haven’t figured this stuff out yet, but that’s because their cultural insularity (bless their hearts) blinds them to the key, Keltic tradition, Judaism’s close cousin. Doesn't mean I'm wrong.
 

Rosanne

VeniceBard, I cannot say with honesty that I understand, but I have printed this out to re read and get a grasp of it. Please bear with me and my plain question. Is Ezekiels Wheels a pictorial Almanac, a type of diagram that teaches our Human roots, our spirituality and the science of Humans etc?(hehe I realise this ETC has huge meaning) Two things come to mind The film 'Encounters of a Third Kind' when Music was used as the common ground of understanding between Aliens and us; secondly the plaque put on the outside of the Space probe to show other life forms Who and Where Humans came from should they intercept the probe. Do yoe see this diagram as a text book for us sent from the past? Thats about as clear as I can get my Question.~Rosanne
 

venicebard

All I can tell you is that it is the basis of what appears to be (nay is) a more developed understanding of things (less unduly complicated, containing less errors, and showing the relationship of the VARIOUS disciplines, physics to psychology to chemistry to ethics and so on) than what moderns possess. I take it as handed down from the last civilization’s peak, whenever that was, across the intervening millennia. Its preservation over that length of time could only have come about through involvement of Intelligences (next stage of a unit after ‘conscious self’), who are involved in everything anyway, since it is by their Light that we are aware in the first place (light by which one sees the INNER horizon).

The body in which it was preserved was bardic tradition: British Keltic, Greek Orphic, Hebrew 'prophetic' (Merkabhah), and so on. Each of these branches decayed over time, but at propitious moments (such as 12th-century Languedoc) two or more are overlaid to fill in the holes and reconstruct the original form, thus preserving it.