Start Here: Ten Minutes

1. The premise, and who is making it

About one minute.

Wheel of Heaven proposes that the beings Genesis calls the Elohim were a small, technologically advanced human civilization from another world. They designed life on Earth, including humanity, and the religious texts of many traditions preserve compressed memories of their work.

The proposal comes from the Raëlian Messages, published by Claude Vorilhon (Raël) from 1974 onward. The site reads the ancient material through that lens and says so openly. It is written by one Raëlian author, under a pen name and with AI assistance, and it is not an official publication of the Raëlian Movement. The About and author pages give the details.

2. How to tell a source from an interpretation

About two minutes.

Every page carries a badge for the kind of claim it mainly makes:

• Direct: stated in a primary source and uncontroversial. The Hebrew word elohim is plural in form.
• Framework: stated in the Raëlian canon but not accepted by mainstream scholarship. The Elohim are a civilization of physical beings.
• Inferred: a reasonable reading of a source that the source does not state in so many words. The tower of Babel was built as a peace offering to the makers.
• Speculative: a synthesis that goes beyond any single source. The divine-combat stories of Greece, Mesopotamia and Canaan remember the same conflict.

A long page contains claims of more than one kind. The badge names the main one; the prose marks the others as it goes, with phrases such as "on this reading" or "mainstream scholarship holds". The Method page explains the labels in full.

3. One verse, read closely

About three minutes.

And the Elohim said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the skies, and over the cattle, and over all the land, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the land."

Genesis 1:26

Read

What the Hebrew says. The speaker is Elohim, a noun plural in form. The verb na'aseh, "let us make", is first-person plural, and so are the possessives be-tzalmenu ("in our image") and ki-dmutenu ("according to our likeness"). These forms are not in dispute.

How it is usually read. Readers have resolved the plural in four main ways: as a royal "we" (a plural of majesty), as a foreshadowing of the Trinity, as God addressing a council of attendant heavenly beings, or as a literal plurality of makers. Most biblical scholars today favour the council reading, comparing the heavenly assemblies of Psalm 82 and 1 Kings 22.

What Wheel of Heaven proposes. The fourth reading: the Elohim deliberate as a group because they were a group, a team of designers about to make humankind in their own physical likeness. The noun tselem, "image", ordinarily means a concrete figure, a statue or cut-out likeness, which fits a physical resemblance better than a spiritual one.

Why. The plural speech recurs at the same kind of moment: at the making of humanity, after Eden ("the man has become like one of us", Genesis 3:22), and at Babel (Genesis 11:7). Each time, the plural speakers decide something about humankind and then act on it. The Raëlian Messages give the same account of the creation independently of the grammar.

4. The strongest case against

About two minutes.

When Elohim names the God of Israel it usually takes a singular verb. The first verse of the Bible reads bara Elohim, "Elohim created", with the verb in the singular. For most readers that settles the question: the noun is plural in form and singular in meaning, and the "us" of verse 26 is addressed to a council of subordinate beings.

Wheel of Heaven accepts the grammar and does not rest its case on the plural form. It rests on the passages where the text speaks in the plural, and on the Raëlian account, which reads the singular verbs as the speech of one representative acting for the group. The council reading and the plural-makers reading both take the plural seriously; they disagree about who was in the room. Nothing in the Hebrew alone decides between them, and the Elohim entry lists the findings that would weaken the project's reading.

5. Where to go next

About two minutes.

• Follow the story. The timeline tells it in twelve chapters, one for each precessional age.
• Look the terms up. The Elohim entry is the most-linked page on the site; the encyclopedia has about 150 entries.
• Read the sources. The library holds the Raëlian books and new translations of Genesis and other texts, with the original language alongside and notes on each contested word.
• See the method at full length. Sendy and the Raëlian Messages compares the first Raëlian book with Jean Sendy's earlier work, passage by passage, and weighs the case that Raël borrowed from Sendy.
• Use the data. The Divine-Council Index lists divine councils across twelve traditions with source locations, in CSV and JSON, for anyone to check or reuse.