Tag Archives: Ezekiel
Fear Not: Cherubim vs. Seraphim
Why do sinful human beings think of angels as cute little bambini, lovable old bumbling frumps, androgynous pretty-boys and feathered friends? The Bible depicts them as terrifying messengers, who fill their startled beholders with panic and sickness unto dread. In Ezekiel, they are described as freaky frightening extraterrestrial beings with multiple faces (beast and human), as well as having myriad eyes covering their fiery bodies. Angels must first allay the fears of the humans they encounter before they are able to get their message across.
Who & what exactly are the messengers of Heaven ?
Happy Nation Live
Her gothic frau-frock… the flaming urns…
an exalted figure makes a strutting entry –
like a fascist rally of some sort…
It makes one wonder.
How beautiful was Lucifer when he used music to rally the angels to join his movement? What gimmicks did Nero use to produce a tyrannic spectacle? How powerful was the fervor of a Nazi rally? What drives people to lose their individuality in mass events like pop concerts or New-Age cult celebrations?
I am not saying that Ace of Base are sinister or evil—in fact I like this song for it’s message, and I love this band for their music. I especially enjoy the beauty of the singers. But if you step back and analyze the use of light, color, rhythm and media spectacle to enhance the crowd’s collective hysteria, you begin to appreciate these frightful words from the prophet Ezekiel:
You were the seal of perfection,
Full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden, the garden of God;
Every precious stone was your covering:
The sardius, topaz, and diamond,
Beryl, onyx, and jasper,
Sapphire, turquoise, and emerald with gold.
The workmanship of your timbrels and pipes
Was prepared for you on the day you were created.
You were the anointed cherub who covers;
I established you;
You were on the holy mountain of God;
You walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones.
You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created,
Till iniquity was found in you.
By the abundance of your trading
You became filled with violence within,
And you sinned;
Therefore I cast you as a profane thing
Out of the mountain of God;
And I destroyed you, O covering cherub,
From the midst of the fiery stones.
Ezekiel 28:12-16 KJV
Meanwhile impersonal forces over which we have almost no control seem to be pushing us all in the direction of the Brave New Worldian nightmare; and this impersonal pushing is being consciously accelerated by representatives of commercial and political organizations who have developed a number of new techniques for manipulating, in the interest of some minority, the thoughts and feelings of the masses. The techniques of manipulation will be discussed in later chapters. For the moment let us confine our attention to those impersonal forces which are now making the world so extremely unsafe for democracy, so very inhospitable to individual freedom. What are these forces?
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited
Wheels within Wheels
The histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy, and are the product of an unenlivened generalizing Understanding. In the Scriptures they are the living educts of the Imagination, that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the Reason in Images of the Sense, and organizing (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the conductors. These are the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld, when the hand of the Lord was upon him, and he saw visions of God as he sate among the captives by the river Chebar. Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels also. The truths and the symbols that represent them move in conjunction and form the living chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity. Hence, by a derivative, indeed, but not a divided, influence, and though in a secondary yet in more than a metaphorical sense, the Sacred Book is worthily intitled the WORD of GOD. Hence too, its contents present to us the stream of time continuous as Life and a symbol of Eternity, inasmuch as the Past and the Future are virtually contained in the Present.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Statesman’s Manual (1816)
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