Metatron’s cube
A figure of thirteen points, usually drawn as thirteen circles, with a straight line from each one to every other. It is named after Metatron, an angel of Jewish mystical tradition, but the figure and the name are modern, from the New Age sacred geometry of Drunvalo Melchizedek.
Meaning
MathWorld describes Metatron’s cube as thirteen points, a centre and two rings of six arranged as concentric hexagons, with every pair joined: 78 lines in all. It is usually drawn with a circle round each point. In Drunvalo Melchizedek’s terminology, which MathWorld follows from his book of 1999, the thirteen circles are the “fruit of life”, taken from a larger version of the flower of life grid, and the lines between their centres make the cube. Today it is a figure of the sacred geometry he teaches, and the Platonic solids are one of that teaching’s subjects. MathWorld comments on the usual claim about them: chosen lines in the drawing do give the familiar outlines of a cube, an octahedron and a tetrahedron, but whether it shows all five Platonic solids depends on which lines and projections are picked, and that is no part of the figure’s definition.
Origin and history
The figure and its name are recent. MathWorld gives both “fruit of life” and “Metatron’s cube” as Melchizedek’s terms, citing pages 158 to 160 of the first volume of The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life (1999), and the pattern it is built on is the same grid of circles as the seed of life. The Jewish texts about Metatron, below, describe an angel: the Jewish Encyclopedia’s article on him and Hugo Odeberg’s edition of the Hebrew Book of Enoch say nothing of a cube or a figure of circles.
Metatron in Jewish tradition
The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) calls Metatron the name of an angel found only in Jewish literature. In the Babylonian Talmud (Hagigah 15a) he is a heavenly scribe, and the sage Elisha ben Abuyah, seeing him in the heavens, came to believe there were “two powers”. He bears the divine name, after Exodus 23:21, “My name is in him”, and yet, the Talmud insists, he may not be worshipped. The Targum identifies him with Enoch of Genesis 5, who was taken to heaven, and the later mystical works call him the prince of the presence and give him the lesser divine name. The encyclopedia derives his name from the Latin metator, “guide”, and records that scholars had traced him to Mithra, to Philo’s Logos and to Horus, concluding that he combines traits from different systems of thought.
The fullest account of him is the Hebrew Book of Enoch, or 3 Enoch, a Hebrew mystical work. In Odeberg’s 1928 translation Rabbi Ishmael asks Metatron why he is called by the name of his Creator, by seventy names, “greater than all the princes, higher than all the angels”, and he answers that he is Enoch, the son of Jared, taken to heaven and made an angel-prince. Later God clothes him in a garment of glory, crowns him and gives him a new name, the lesser YHWH. Odeberg put the book’s composition in the latter half of the third century; the Jewish Encyclopedia held that such works originated in antiquity but took their present form in the geonic period.
See also
Sources
- MathWorld: Metatron’s Cube, Eric W. Weisstein, MathWorld (Wolfram Research), entry
- MathWorld: Fruit of Life, Eric W. Weisstein, MathWorld (Wolfram Research), entry
- Meṭaṭron, Vol. 8, 1904–06, The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906), Joseph Jacobs and Ludwig Blau
- 3 Enoch, or The Hebrew Book of Enoch, Hugo Odeberg (editor and translator), 1928, Cambridge University Press (scan on the Internet Archive), Introduction, origin and date; ch. 4 and notes; ch. 12
- The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Volume One (publisher’s description), Drunvalo Melchizedek, 1999, Light Technology Publishing, book description
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Last reviewed October 1, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research