The Seven Burning Sanctuaries Above the Chariot Throne

The awareness lifts before the first sanctuary like a man stepping out of his own body. Below, the encampment in the desert is still chanting. Above, a wall of light stands where the sky should end, and a gate is cut into it, and through the gate the first of seven temples opens its doors.

A priest waits inside. He is not a man. His robe is woven holiness, the breastplate and the bells and the pomegranates of the old vestments multiplied into fire, and he wears it the way the High Priest in Jerusalem once wore linen and gold. He lifts no knife. There is no animal here, no blood gutter, no ash heap, no smoke. The angel-priest opens his mouth and the offering that rises is sound.

The Offering That Has No Blood

On the floor below, in the world, the priests of the Temple are cutting throats and dashing blood against the corners of a stone altar. Here the same service runs, and it is clean. The voices of the holy ones climb in ordered ranks, praise laid on praise the way a butcher lays portions on the fire, except nothing dies. This is the original. The altar in Jerusalem is the copy, and a faint one.

The seer understands the difference and the understanding is vertigo. Everything done in stone below was learned from this. The garments, the courses of priests, the divisions of singers, all of it was drawn down from a pattern that was burning here before the first cedar was felled for the first sanctuary on earth.

Seven Doors Singing at Once

Then the second gate. Then the third. The temples are not stacked like floors. They open inward, each one inside the next, seven shrines nested in seven walls of fire, and over each one a different chief priest presides. The seven chief priests do not take turns. They sing together, seven liturgies in seven sanctuaries, and the songs do not collide. They braid.

Beneath each chief priest stand the princes, and beneath the princes the hosts, rank under rank under rank, the whole structure mirroring the order of Aaron's sons but lifted to a scale the eye cannot hold. A prince in the lowest of these temples commands more singers than there are stars a shepherd can name. And every one of them is silent until its note, and every note falls exactly where it was set before the world.

The deeper the seer goes, the stranger the sound becomes. By the fourth temple the words are no longer words. They are the shapes that words are cut from. By the fifth the praise no longer rises toward something. It surrounds, the way water surrounds a swimmer who has lost the surface.

The Stones Remember How to Praise

At the innermost shrine the building itself wakes up. The bricks of the wall are not silent stone. They open like mouths. The carved cherubim on the panels lift their faces and bless, and the floor blesses, and the lintels and the thresholds and the very corners of the chambers join the chorus, so that there is no longer any difference between the worshippers and the room they worship in. The structure of the seventh temple is alive, and all of it is singing one thing.

The cherubim do not move like statues remembering they can move. They fall. They prostrate, and when they rise their wings make a sound, and the sound is a blessing, and under the blessing there is a low rushing that the seer has not noticed until now because it has been there the whole time, the way the sea is there before a man wading out finally hears it.

The Chariot Moves

The rushing is the chariot.

Past the last rank of the holy ones, where the seventh sanctuary has no further wall, the throne stands, and it is not a chair. It is a vehicle, a chariot of fire and light, and its wheels are not wheels. They are covered with eyes, living eyes, hundreds of them, open, unblinking, turning. The wheels turn and the eyes turn inside the turning, and where the eyes pass they leave behind them a fire that has the shape of mercy and a fire that has the shape of judgment, both at once, neither consuming the other.

The beings closest to it are called elim, the gods of knowledge, the highest of all the ranks, and they do not sing now. They cannot. Their voices have become the sound of many waters, a roar with no edges, the noise the world made on the second day when it was still mostly sea. Under that roar the angels of flame let go of their standing and fall, full length, faces down, before the moving throne.

The seer reaches the threshold and stops. There is a line here, and on the far side of the line is the glory itself, and the glory has no shape that the eye was built to keep. To go one step further would be to be unmade and re-made into something that could bear to look, and the seer is still wearing the desert, still tethered to a body chanting in a cave above a dead sea, and the tether holds.

So he stands at the door of the innermost fire while the wheels of eyes turn and the elim roar like the deep and the seven sanctuaries sing behind him all the way back down to the world, one liturgy in seven rooms, and the chariot moves, and the door does not close, and it does not open.