he covered his faces: and with two he covered is a fragment from the prophet Isaiah's vision of the seraphim (Isaiah 6:2). The full verse reads: Above it stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. The phrase is an English rendering of the Hebrew וּבִשְׁתַּיִם יְכַסֶּה פָנָיו — describing one specific, deliberate gesture of the highest angelic beings in the presence of the Divine. It appears here as a named subject in the system of Liber 777, corresponding to the Angelic Functions in the World of Yetzirah.

Position on the Tree of Life

This phrase is assigned to Tiphereth (6), the sphere of Beauty, Harmony, and the Sun in the microcosm. On the Tree of Life, Tiphereth mediates between the upper and lower sefirot. In the vision, the seraph's act of covering its faces represents an immediate, instinctive shielding of the highest perceptive faculty before the direct light of the Holy One—a gesture of pure reverence that aligns with Tiphereth's quality of balanced, self-aware submission to the central source. It is not the covering of the feet (Netzach) nor the flight (Hod); it is the first, most essential concealment.

Historical context

The verse arises from Isaiah's temple vision (c. 8th century BCE), a foundational text in Jewish angelology and Merkabah mysticism. In the original Hebrew, the seraphim (שְׂרָפִים, “burning ones”) are described with six wings—an unprecedented detail in the Tanakh. Later Jewish interpretive traditions, notably in the Targum Jonathan and the Talmudic discussions (e.g., Chagigah 13b), debated the meaning of each pair of wings. The covering of the faces was universally understood as an act of modesty and awe: the seraphim cannot gaze directly upon the Divine Countenance, so they shield themselves. This is not a sign of shame but of ontological limitation. In Hekhalot literature, the covering gesture became a fixed detail of the angelic liturgy, recited in the Kedushah (the Sanctus) prayer, where the congregation echoes the seraphic praise: “Holy, holy, holy.” Christian exegesis (e.g., Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy) later adopted the six-winged seraph as the highest angelic rank, with the covered faces symbolizing the inaccessibility of divine mysteries even to the purest intellects.

In the 777 system, this phrase is extracted from the continuous biblical description and treated as an isolated function. Its place in the table demonstrates how each discrete wing-pair action can be correlated with a distinct sefirotic principle. Here, “he covered his faces” corresponds to the Tiphereth aspect of the angelic functions—the central point of the seraphic posture, the moment of interiorized awe before the vision of Divine Beauty.

In the Liber 777 table (row XCII, Angelic Functions in Yetzirah, step 6), he covered his faces: and with two he covered designates the specific yetziratic angelic activity that takes place in Tiphereth: the halting, the inward-facing, the gesture that precedes and conditions the outward flight.