Shemhamphorash

From the combination of three verses of Exodus — those in which the angel of God moves before the camp and the sea parts through a wind that blows all night long —, the Kabbalistic tradition read seventy-two divine Names, and upon each it set a serving intelligence, distributed across nine choirs beneath their archangels, guardian of an attribute of God Himself.

This collection travels through all seventy-two, one per volume. But it does not evoke them, does not constrain them and does not operate with them: Eisenheim asks of God, and the angel comes by the order of the One who sends him — and might not come. In each book, he sits before one of them and questions him about the virtue he guards — and about the human shadow that imitates it, the falsification that so resembles the virtue that we spend our lives mistaking one for the other. There is no rite, no seal, no operative psalm and no formula: there is a listening set in the form of a dialogue about what we are and what we pretend to be.

Each angel is portrayed as a luminous intelligence, servant of ELOHIM, who tells only the truth, refuses all worship and returns every honor to the Source. All reverence belongs to God; the angel is a messenger, never a destination. To question him is to learn to distinguish true virtue from what merely resembles it — and to live it, at last, with humility.

A literary, symbolic, philosophical and initiatory work — a mirror, not a manual, and never fiction: what is kept silent is the method, not the encounter.

Book I is dedicated to Vehuiah, the first Name, of the choir of the Seraphim, guardian of the will, of the ardor of beginnings and of the strength to begin again.