Merkabah

The Book of Ezekiel opens with a vision by the river Chebar among the Judean exiles in Babylon: a storm out of the north, four living creatures each with four faces and four wings, wheels within wheels rimmed with eyes, a firmament stretched above them, and above that a throne bearing the likeness of a human figure surrounded by fire and brightness. The scene returns with variations in chapter 10, where the creatures are identified as cherubim. The Hebrew word merkavah, chariot, is not itself used of the vision in Ezekiel 1; it became the standard term for it in later usage.

That vision became the object of a specific discipline. Maaseh Merkavah, the work of the chariot, is treated in the Mishnah as dangerous knowledge, not to be expounded even to a single student unless he is wise and understands of his own knowledge. The surviving texts of the tradition (Hekhalot Rabbati, Hekhalot Zutarti, Maaseh Merkavah, 3 Enoch), describe an ascent, described paradoxically in the sources as a descent, through seven palaces guarded at every gate and entered by means of seals and passwords, arriving at last before the throne. Preparation involved fasting, repeated chanting and set bodily postures, and much of the material consists of hymns and long lists of angelic names.

The dating is contested. The manuscripts are late and the texts were edited over long periods. Gershom Scholem placed the tradition early, in the rabbinic period, and treated it as the first chapter of Jewish mysticism; later scholarship has argued for a wider date range and for considerably less continuity with the rabbinic academies than he assumed. What is not contested is that the tradition existed and that it is the earliest layer of Jewish mysticism that can be identified at all.

There is no geometry anywhere in it. The Hekhalot texts describe palaces, gates, angels, hymns and a throne. They do not describe polyhedra.

The figure called the Merkaba in modern sacred geometry is a compound of two regular tetrahedra sharing a common centre, one inverted with respect to the other. It is a real and well-studied solid. Its eight outer points are the vertices of a cube; the region where the two tetrahedra intersect is a regular octahedron; and the whole can equally be described as an octahedron with a pyramid raised on each of its eight faces. Seen along the right axis its silhouette is the six-pointed star, which is why it is sometimes described as a three-dimensional Star of David.

Its documented history is Renaissance rather than esoteric. It was illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci for Luca Pacioli's De Divina Proportione, printed in Venice in 1509, where it appears as an elevated octahedron. Johannes Kepler named it the stella octangula in the early seventeenth century, treating it as a compound of two tetrahedra. At no point in that history did it carry a mystical meaning.

The identification of this solid with the word Merkabah is recent. It was set out and popularised by Drunvalo Melchizedek from the mid-1980s: the teaching that a field of two counter-rotating tetrahedra of light surrounds the human body, that it can be activated through specific breathing exercises, and that it functions as a vehicle, drawing on the chariot sense of the word, for travel between dimensions or states. The spelling Merkaba, without the final consonant, is often used to mark this modern sense, though the two spellings are not applied consistently.

Read as a modern spiritual practice with a forty-year history, it is what it is, and it has a substantial following. Read as a recovery of what Ezekiel saw or what the Hekhalot mystics practised, it is not supportable. No text in that tradition mentions tetrahedra, counter-rotation, or a geometric body of light, and the connection between the two senses of the word is the word itself and nothing more.