"The Chariot of the Prophet Elijah (or, "Let's Go, Ravens!" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Kabbalah, Magic and the Great Work of Self-Transformation"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
July 20
The Chariot of the Prophet Elijah (or, "Let's Go, Ravens!"
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Two days ago, on this very calendar,
we watched a prophetic English magician sit on a rock in the middle of the
Hudson River, refusing to bring food, and telling his patrons that ravens would
feed him instead. That wasn’t a random detail; Aleister Crowley was citing
scripture, and scripture was watching him do it: the prophet Elijah, fed by
ravens in the wilderness of Cherith while hiding from a king who wanted him
dead. Today, July 20th, is the day the Western and Eastern Churches alike set
aside to remember what happened to that same prophet at the end of his life—not
a death, but a departure. Walking beside his disciple Elisha near the Jordan,
Elijah was taken up, in the words of the second book of Kings, in “a chariot of
fire and horses of fire,” swept into a whirlwind, gone. He is one of exactly
two people in the entire Hebrew Bible said never to have died at all. The other
is Enoch. Everyone else who ever lived, scripture is careful to note, simply
died.
The of Roots of the Feast
July 20th is an old commemoration, and
an oddly persistent one: it’s kept by the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern
Orthodox Church, and the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod alike, which is rare
company for a figure from centuries before Christianity existed. Nobody can say
with certainty why this particular date was chosen; the most common explanation
is simply that it sat conveniently outside the crowded liturgical seasons of
Lent and Easter. What’s certain is who claims Elijah most fiercely: the Carmelite Order, whose entire founding
mythology runs through him. Sometime in the twelfth century, a group of
Christian hermits settled on Mount Carmel in what’s now northern Israel, in the
same caves where local tradition held that Elijah himself had once hidden from Queen Jezebel. The hermits adopted his ascetic,
cave-dwelling way of life, and when they organized into a formal religious
order, they named Elijah not a patron but a father—the Carmelites still call
him “the founder of the Carmelite ideal,” and July 20th remains one of their
principal feast days.
Elijah’s story, as told across the first and second books of Kings, is one long argument with royal power. He confronts King Ahab and Queen Jezebel over their promotion of Baal worship, calls down a drought as punishment, and wins a public contest of miracles against 450 prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel itself—the same mountain that later drew the hermits to him. It’s earlier in that story, while fleeing Ahab’s court, that Elijah hides by the brook Cherith and is fed, morning and evening, by ravens carrying bread and meat. This is the image that later gave Crowley his cover story for Esopus Island, and it’s also the image most often painted of Elijah in Christian art—Giovanni Lanfranco’s “Elijah Fed by the Ravens” being one of the better-known versions. It is worth noting plainly that Crowley, invoking Elijah as a magical precedent while accepting food from tourists instead, was doing something closer to ritual than scripture. The original Elijah genuinely had nothing; the ravens really were his only source.
The event we actually commemorate
today happens much later, after Elijah has trained his successor Elisha and
effectively completed his prophetic work. As the two men walk together near the
Jordan, a chariot of fire and horses of fire appear between them, and Elijah is
carried up into heaven in a whirlwind, leaving nothing behind but his cloak,
which falls to Elisha and becomes, quite literally, the mantle he inherits.
This is where a genuine and common mix-up enters the occult conversation, and
it’s worth untangling honestly rather than letting it pass. A great deal of
casual writing online treats Elijah’s fiery chariot as the origin point of Merkabah mysticism, the tradition of
Jewish esoteric contemplation built around visions of God’s heavenly
throne-chariot. It isn’t. Merkabah mysticism takes its name and its central
image from an entirely different vision: the prophet Ezekiel’s chariot,
described in the opening chapter of his own book, populated by four-faced
living creatures and wheels within wheels. Elijah’s ascension and Ezekiel’s
throne-vision are two separate chariots belonging to two separate prophets,
centuries apart, and conflating them flattens what’s actually a richer story.
Because Elijah never died in any
ordinary sense, later Jewish tradition gave him an ongoing job: he became the
figure who moves freely between this world and the next, appearing to sages and
mystics across the centuries to resolve arguments, deliver comfort, or reveal
what couldn’t otherwise be known. This tradition has its own name in Hebrew,
gilui Eliyahu, “the revelation of Elijah,” and it recurs constantly through
rabbinic literature—the Talmud alone contains a whole scattered catalogue of
appearances, with Elijah showing up to settle points of law left unresolved by
the sages, answer questions about the fate of the righteous, or simply visit a
rabbi in the marketplace. That reputation as a wandering, still-living witness
carried straight into folk custom: to this day, an empty chair and a filled cup
are set out for Elijah at the Passover seder, and observant Jews still sing a
hymn to him at the close of the Sabbath, watching for the prophet whose return,
according to the Book of Malachi,
will herald the coming of the Messiah. Few figures in Jewish tradition occupy
quite that space—neither dead ancestor nor angel, but a human being who kept a
foothold in both worlds after his chariot ride, and who the tradition has
genuinely never stopped consulting.
Of equal importance, earlier in his story, fleeing into the wilderness in despair after his triumph over Baal’s prophets, Elijah is told to stand on Mount Horeb and wait for God to pass by. A great wind tears the mountain apart; God isn’t in the wind. An earthquake follows; God isn’t in the earthquake. Fire comes after that; God isn’t in the fire either. Only then, in what most English translations render as “a still small voice”—literally, in the Hebrew, a “sound of thin silence”—does Elijah encounter what he came for. It’s a strange thing for the same prophet who later exits the world in a blaze of fire and horses to have already taught, decades earlier, that the loudest phenomena aren’t where the divine actually lives. Every occultist chasing thunder and lightning for their workings might do well to remember that Elijah, of all people, found his answer in the quiet.
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OCCULT READS PRESENTS:
DAILY OCCULT REVIEW
Modern Occultist is proud to present today’s “Daily
Occult Review” from our ongoing series—as part of the newly-launched Occult
Reads... In honor of Elijah, his chariot, and the Kabbalistic tradition
that grew up in its long shadow...
Kabbalah, Magic and the Great Work of Self-Transformation
By Lyam Thomas Christopher | Llewellyn Worldwide
For readers who want to go past the folklore and into the
actual system that grew out of centuries of chariot-and-throne mysticism, this
is the closest thing we have to a modern, structured entry point. Built as a
complete self-initiation course through the grades of the Golden Dawn, using
Israel Regardie’s own foundational work as its anchor, it walks the
practitioner up the Kabbalistic Tree of Life one sphere at a time, with daily
rituals and assignments for each stage. It won’t teach you to summon a fiery
chariot, but it will teach you, carefully and in order, the same map of ascent
that Jewish mystics were already tracing long before Elijah’s name got attached
to it by mistake.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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