He Lifted His Eyes to the Likeness of a Man Upon the Throne

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The Seventh Gate and the Roar Behind It

He had climbed all night, if night meant anything, and at the threshold of the seventh palace his knees gave out. The guardians stood on either side, taller than towers, their faces turned toward a light he could not yet look at. They did not stop him. They had weighed him at every gate below, tested the seals in his mouth, and let him pass. Now there was only the last door, and behind it a roar.

It was not the roar of any storm he knew. It was song. A thousand thousand voices, none of them still, rising and breaking and rising again over a floor that trembled as they sang. The servants of the throne were terrified even as they poured praise. He felt their terror in the shaking of the heavens beneath his feet, as if the whole sky were only a footstool, and something above it too heavy to be named.

The Throne Raised High Above the River of Fire

The door opened, and he did not fall so much as forget how to stand.

The throne was raised high and lifted up, and it was fearful, and it was terrible. Its wheels turned without moving. Beings bore it up on their shoulders and cried out as they carried it, "Sing for joy, supernal dwelling. Shout for joy, precious vessel." Beneath the throne ran a stream of flaming coals, a river of lava that poured and never emptied, and in that fire, unscorched by it, dwelt the One they carried. The messengers of the Power came and went along the banks of the burning river, and with sweet mouths they woke the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence), the Presence, and added their voices to the flood. "Holy, holy, holy," the heavens answered themselves, "is the Lord of Hosts."

He Lifted His Eyes Where No Man Lives to Look

He knew the warning. Every child of his people knew it. No one shall look upon the face and live. It was cut into him deeper than his own name, and he had carried it up through six palaces like a stone lodged in his chest.

He lifted his eyes anyway.

The thing he saw was not a fire without shape, and it was not a wheel, and it was not a wing. Fixed upon the throne, at the center of all that burning, was the likeness of a man. The infinite had chosen a form, and the form was his own. He gazed at the seated Glory and made out the outline of hands, of a face, the shape he washed each morning and thought nothing of, set now at the heart of heaven with the whole choir bent toward it. The angels around the throne wore it too. They had the face of a man, and under their wings were the hands of a man, and they ran and toiled and knelt and fell on their faces as he had fallen, and the fear of the King was upon them as it was upon him.

The Voice From the Glory Named What He Had Done

Then the Glory spoke, and the song did not pause for it, and still he heard every word.

"In the first temple," the voice said, "I did not speak with My children except by a voice. But you have come up here, and you have compelled Me. You have compelled My throne, and My servants, and all of these, to stand before you." There was no anger in it. There was something worse than anger, a kind of grief. "And would that it might last," the voice said. "Would that it might endure."

He understood then what he had done. He had not been invited. He had forced the door of heaven with the seals and the names and the long starving discipline of the climb, and the Presence had come out to meet the summons the way a father rises when a child will not stop knocking, half in love and half in sorrow.

Rise and Sit as You Sit in the House of Study

He was still on his face. The voice found him there.

"My children, why are you fallen, lying upon your faces? Stand. Seat yourselves before My throne in the order in which you sit in the academy below." The man rose, shaking, and there were others with him now whom he had not seen before, other climbers who had made the same terrible passage, and they arranged themselves before the fire as they arranged themselves in the house of study on earth, row upon row, as though the highest heaven were only another room of the same school.

"Take hold upon a crown," the voice told them. "Receive a seal. Hear the order of this secret of the Law, how you shall perform it, how you shall explain it, how you shall practice it, and how you shall climb the roads of your own hearts." He took the crown. He did not understand it. He understood only that he had been permitted to look upon the shape at the center, the man fixed in the fire, and that he had lived, and that the seeing was not the end of the road but the seal set upon its beginning.

The gates opened behind him. The song went on without him, as it had before him and would after, and he went down through the six palaces carrying what he had been given and speaking none of it aloud, back into the world where the sky is only sky and no one looks up and sees the throne.