may go down and gaze on the wonderful loftiness and strange lordship, loftiness of exaltation and lordship of splendor, which come to pass before the throne of His glory three times each day, on high from the day when the world was created and until now, for praise, with which Totrakiel the Lord doth conduct himself on high.
Said Rabbi Ishmael: When my ears heard this warning my strength grew feeble. I said to Rabbi Nehunya ben Hakkanah my master, “If so there is no end to the matter. For you will find no man whose soul is yet in his body who is clean and guiltless of these eight matters.” He said to me, “Scion of nobles, and if not –? Arise and bring before me all the great ones of the company and all the mighty ones of the academy, and I shall declare before them the hidden, the concealed secrets, wonders of the ascent, and the weaving of the web upon which the perfection of the world and the excellence thereof doth stand, and the beauty of heaven and earth (wherein all the ends of the earth and the world and the ends of the firmaments of the height are bound, sewed and joined, hung and standing) and the path of the ladder to the height, of which one end is on earth and one end on the right foot of the throne of glory.”