“Laying aside the theological disputes of Christianity which try to blend together the Jewish Creator of the first chapter of Genesis with the “Father” of the New Testament, Jesus states repeatedly of his Father that “He is in secret.” Surely, he would not have so termed the ever-present “Lord God” of the Mosaic Books, who showed Himself to Moses and the Patriarchs, and finally allowed all the elders of Israel to look on Himself. When Jesus is made to speak of the temple at Jerusalem as of his “Father’s house”, he does not mean the physical building, which he maintains he can destroy and then again rebuild in three days, but of the Temple of Solomon; the wise kabalist, who indicates in his Proverbs that every man is the temple of God, or of his own divine spirit.
This term of the “Father who is in secret”, we find used as much as in the kabala as in the Codex Nazaraeus, and elsewhere. No one has ever seen the wisdom concealed in the “Cranium”, and no one has beheld the “Depth”, (Bythos). Simon, the Magician, preached “one Father unknown to all.” We can trace this appellation of a “secret” God still farther back. In the Kabala the “Son” of the concealed Father who dwells in light and glory, is the “Anointed”, the Seir-Anpin, who unites in himself all the Sephiroth, he is Christos, or the Heavenly man.
It is through Christ that the Pneuma, or the Holy Ghost, creates “all things”, (Ephesians iii., 9), and produces the four elements, air, water, fire, and earth. This assertion is unquestionable, for we find Irenaeus basing on this fact his best argument for the necessity of there being four gospels. There can be neither more nor fewer than four – he argues. “For as there are four quarters of the world, and four general winds, (Katholika Pnevmata)…it is right that she, (the Church), should have four pillars. From which it is manifest that the Word, the maker of all, he who sitteth upon the Cherubim…as David says, supplicating his advent, ‘Thou that sittest between the Cherubim, shine forth!’ For the Cherubim also are four-faced and their faces are symbols of the working of the Son of God.”
We will not stop to discuss at length the special holiness of the four-faced Cherubim, although we might, perhaps, show their origin in all the ancient pagodas of India, in the vehans, (or vehicles), of their chief gods; as likewise we might easily attribute the respect paid to them to the kabalistic wisdom, which, nevertheless, the Church rejects with great horror. But we cannot resist the temptation to remind the reader that he may easily ascertain the several significances attributed to these Cherubs by reading the Kabala.
“When the souls are to leave their abode”, says the Sohar, holding to the doctrine of the pre-existence of souls in the world of emanations, “each soul separately appears before the Holy King, dressed in a sublime form, with the features in which it is to appear in this world. It is from this sublime form that the image proceeds”, (Sohar, iii., page 104 ab.) Then it goes on to say that the types or forms of these faces “are four in number – those of the angel or man, of the lion, the bull, and the eagle.” Furthermore, we may well express our wonder that Irenaeus should not have reinforced his arguments for the four gospels – by citing the whole Pantheon of the four armed-Hindu gods!
Ezekiel in representing his four animals, now called Cherubim, as types of the four symbolical beings, which, in his visions support the throne of Jehovah, had not far to go for his models. The Chaldeo-Babylonian protecting genii were familiar to him; the Sed, Alap or Kirub, (Cherubim), the bull, with the human face; the Nirgal, human-headed lion; Oustour the Sphinx-man; and the Nathga, with its eagle’s head. The religion of the masters – the idolatrous Babylonians and Assyrians – was transferred almost bodily into the revealed Scripture of the Captives, and from thence came into Christianity.
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 