The throne in heaven and Animal Coeleste interpreted theosophically
Now I will share with you something that is at the very core of my life-philosophy Animalism (a branch of anarchoprimitivism), which in fact is my life work, my main contribution to humanity, and which implies that we are animals, we are the relatives of the non-human animals, to be animals is our true nature, we should live like the animals in the forests, or, in accordance with what is good in them, because they are also fallen creatures like us, but without personal sin. To be animal isn't something bad or something low (as it is in the thinking of the theosophists Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg), to be ashamed of, it is instead our paradisic nature, something I call Paradisism.
But now to the point:
"At once I was in the Spirit, and I saw a throne standing in heaven, with someone seated on it." (Rev. 4:2)
There is a throne in heaven. You should not interpret it literally, because everything in the Book of Revelation is methaphors, symbols.
Heaven is in all things. Heaven is the innermost being of all things. There is a throne in every thing, every being. A throne "with someone seated on it. The One seated there looked like jasper and carnelian, and a rainbow that gleamed like an emerald encircled the throne." (Rev. 4:2-3) There is no clear description of the One who is seated on the throne, because it is not a human being. It is the Jehovah Himself. He/she dwells in the innermost of every being. Which means that paradise dwells in the innermost of every being, because Jehovah is Paradise Itself.
Saint John the apostle had a vision of the throne. It means that his spiritual eyes were opened, and he saw into the innermost of Nature, saw the true being of Nature, saw its perfect archetype, its divinity, or if you will, its Platonic Idea.
Saint John was a Jew, and there existed a tradition in Jewish mysticism of visions of the throne. It is called Merkabah mysticism, and according to conservative scholar Timo Eskola (b. 1955) it had some influence on early Christianity.
On the throne there were four animals (Rev. 4:6), or as many translations render it, four "living creatures". They were cherubim, animal angelic creatures, and were typical for Merkabah mysticism. According to Hasidism, a branch of Jewish mysticism, "The four Hayyot angels represent the basic archetypes that God used to create the current nature of the world" (Wikipedia)
In my theosophic interpretation, the four heavenly animals were Animal Coeleste (a term in neoplatonist mysticism, see here), the original animal nature of man and every being, the Heavenly Animal. The key to understanding this is to go to the greek word for animal, "zoon". Its roots lie in the word "zoe", greek for "life" (the same is the fact in Aramaic, the original language of the Book of Revelation, where "animal" is "haaywaan" and "life" is "hayya"). So when a greek or aramaic person uttered the word for animal, it sounded like "a being of life", a "life-ing", and when they uttered the word for life, it sounded like that force which animates an animal, what makes an animal alive. Life and animal were relatives. The life force in human beings were an animalistic spirit, the same spirit which animated animals. This is the key to understanding the four Animal Coeleste in the Book of Revelation. Very much in that book are archetypes, and the Animal Coeleste is the Archetype of the Archetypes. Observe now that in the middle of, in the centre of the Throne, lies another Animal Coeleste, a slaughtered Lamb (Rev. 5:6), also an animal, which signifies Jehovah in his state in this world, Jehovah among the people of the fallen earth, where He/She is in a humiliated state, in a crucified, slaughtered state. The slaughtered Lamb in the Book of Revelation is the archetype of the crucified God. Also this archetype resides in the innermost of every being, as long as the last being has not yet attained perfection.
What Saint John saw in his vision, was not to be taken literally, he saw the macrocosmic world and the microcosmic world at the same time. Every being is a whole cosmos, because we have an almost infinite number of beings inside us, because every atom and every quark is alive, an independent, living being, a life-being, an Animal Coeleste. Jehovah is himself an Animal Coeleste, and in fact all beings, also the plants and the minerals, are animals, life-beings, Animal Coeleste:s in this magnificent vision of Saint John. Our innermost being is so holy that the throne inside us is surrounded by 24 elders, as described in Rev. 4:4. These elders are maybe the organs in our body, each of them being an independent life-being, cooperating in a most divine manner.
