Kabbalah

Yordei Merkavah — Descenders to the Chariot

The practitioners of this earliest mystical tradition were paradoxically called "those who go down to the chariot" even though every account describes their practice as an ascent.

Yordei Merkavah, literally "descenders of the chariot," is the term the Hekhalot literature itself uses for its visionary adepts, despite the fact that their goal required traversing upward through seven heavenly palaces. Scholars have offered several explanations for the apparently backward terminology: some read "descend" as referring to an inward turning or a trance-state entered by withdrawing from the external world, others as reflecting how the vision was thought to descend into the practitioner's perception, and still others see it as an idiom whose original logic has been lost. Whatever the etymology, the Yordei Merkavah practiced deliberate fasting, purification, and recitation of hymns and divine names to induce their visions, positioning themselves as a specialized, disciplined class of adept. Their self-designation preserves, in a single stubborn word, how differently this earliest stratum of Jewish mysticism conceived its own core metaphor compared to the ascent-language that later became standard.

Hekhalot literature