Thrones

Unlike Seraphim and Cherubim, whose names come from vivid Old Testament visions in Isaiah, Genesis, Exodus and Ezekiel, Thrones rests on a much thinner scriptural basis: a single verse in Paul's Letter to the Colossians, which states that in Christ all things were created, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers, a bare list of four terms with no description of what any of them actually look like or do. Pseudo-Dionysius took that list, together with a similar one in Ephesians, as scriptural warrant for naming several of his lower and middle choirs, Thrones, Dominions and Principalities among them, effectively building visual and functional content that Paul's own text never supplies.

A separate throne-vision does exist in the Hebrew Bible, in Daniel's account of the Ancient of Days, where thrones were set up before the divine court convenes for judgment, but Daniel's thrones are seats rather than angelic beings, and Pseudo-Dionysius's choir of Thrones is not clearly drawn from that passage at all. The choir's whole identity, in other words, rests less on any angel actually called a throne appearing in scripture and more on Paul's bare word being taken up centuries later and given a place, an exalted, supermundane tendency towards higher things, within a hierarchy scripture itself never describes.

This collection's placement of Thrones at Chesed does not match Agrippa's own table, which assigns Thrones instead to Binah, the third sephirah, and gives Chesed to a different choir he calls Dominations, transliterated in his Latin text as Hasmalim. The Golden Dawn departs from both: its wholly Hebrew-named system assigns Chesed to Chashmalim and has no place called Thrones at all, having replaced every Dionysian Greek and Latin choir name except Seraphim with a separate Hebrew set.

The pattern repeats across all three of the Kabbalistic correspondences described in this collection: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones each receive a different sephirah depending on whether Agrippa, the Golden Dawn, or the scheme recorded here is consulted, and no single version can be called uniquely authoritative. What the three tables share is only the underlying assumption that nine or ten ranks of angels ought to correspond in some fixed way to the ten sephiroth of the Tree of Life, an assumption itself imported into Kabbalah from outside, since neither the original Dionysian hierarchy nor the earliest Jewish Kabbalistic sources connect the two systems in this manner. The correspondence, in other words, belongs to the history of Renaissance and modern esotericism rather than to either of the older traditions it appears, at first glance, to be quietly synthesising.