774 EPILOGUE
The cherubim bless the image of the Throne-Chariot above the
firmament, and they praise the majesty of the fiery firmament
beneath the seat of his glory. And between the turning wheels,
angels of holiness come and go, as it were a fiery vision of most
holy spirits; and about them flow seeming rivulets of fire, like
gleaming bronze, a radiance of many gorgeous colors, of mar-
velous pigments magnificently mingled.^15The theistic tradition of Jewish ascension goes from its biblical sources,
through the Jewish gnostics and the ancient and medieval Kabbalists, to
modern interpreters who visit god but do so, as once the biblical Enoch
made that ascent, without losing his person and spirit. In the sixteenth cen-
tury this way continues in the work of the Spanish mystical poet Luis de
Leon (1527/8-91). An Augustinian monk of New Christian (converso) origin,
whose great-grandmother Leonor de Villanueva was burned to death in an
auto-da-fe in 1512, Leon chose musical and celestial metaphors to reveal the
soul's adhesion to god. But there is no immersion in the deity's blinding
light. As the chariot pierces the highest sphere, the soul still hears and feels as
it passes into oblivion and peace. It retains its human qualities as it comes
into the presence of its divine maker:
Here the soul sails around
inside a sea of sweetness, and finally wheels
about and then is drowned
so that it hears or feels
nothing that foreign accident reveals.
O happy deep collapse!
O death conferring life! O sweet oblivion!ASCENSION DURING ONE'S LIFE
TO THE ETERNAL
The gnostics developed their own lexicon to map the experience of self-
knowledge, which drew on the philosophical speech of Alexandrian platon-
ism as well as the mythologies of the Bible and of classical Greek and
- Vermes, Dead Sea Scrolls, 212-13.