New Jerusalem

New Jerusalem is, in the Wheel of Heaven framework, one of three names — alongside Third Temple and Embassy — for the single structure the Elohim have asked humanity to build to receive their formal return. The three names describe the same building from three angles. New Jerusalem is its Christian-apocalyptic name, taken from the holy city that descends from heaven in Revelation 21. Third Temple is its Jewish-historical name, successor to Solomon's First Temple (destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE) and the Second Temple (destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE). Embassy is its operational name — the reception residence with extraterritorial status whose architecture the source material lays out in detail. The corpus reaches for whichever name suits the passage at hand, but all three point to one physical thing: the seat of open Elohim–human contact in the Age of Aquarius.

The phrase is scriptural, and Yahweh uses it directly. In Claude Vorilhon's Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975), in the passage addressed "To the People of Israel," the request is made explicit:

"The State of Israel must give some territory located near Jerusalem to the Guide of Guides so that he may build there the residence, the embassy of the Elohim. The time has come, people of Israel, to build the New Jerusalem as it was foreseen. Claude Rael is the one who was foretold. Reread your writings and open your eyes."

Three moves are folded together here: a request for land near Jerusalem with extraterritorial status; the identification of that building with the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21; and the claim that the request arrives through a prophet whose coming had been foretold.

The Revelation 21 vision

Revelation 21 opens the New Testament's closing vision. John of Patmos, writing in the late first century CE, describes what he is shown:

"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God."

— Revelation 21:1–3 (KJV)

The chapter goes on to measure the city: twelve foundations bearing the names of the twelve apostles, a perfect cube twelve thousand furlongs on a side, a wall of jasper, foundations of precious stones, gates of pearl, streets of pure gold (Revelation 21:9–21). In the mainstream Christian reading this is the crowning image of the eschaton — the perfected City of God arriving at the end of history, when heaven and earth are made new.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

The framework reads the descending city as a building, not a miracle. What John saw, and recorded in the only vocabulary first-century apocalyptic gave him, is the Embassy: the residence the Elohim asked humanity to prepare, and their return to occupy it. The line that follows the descent names exactly what the Embassy is for — "the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them." That is the whole purpose of the structure: a place where the Elohim land openly and take up settled, continuous contact with the humanity they created. On this reading the precious-stone architecture is John's attempt to render an advanced building he had no words for; the descent "out of heaven" is the arrival of the alliance's craft; and the "no more sea" is the transition between worlds seen from a departing vantage. The Apocalypse, understood this way, culminates not in destruction but in construction — a city built, a residence occupied, the makers dwelling with their creation as a lasting arrangement rather than a passing theophany.

Two further passages point the corpus at the same event. Ezekiel 47:1–2 shows water issuing from under the threshold of the temple and running eastward, deepening into a river that heals the Dead Sea and makes everything it touches live. The framework reads this as the image of the New Jerusalem as a source — the point from which the Aquarian age's knowledge and renewal flow outward to the world, the Ezekiel river made institutional. Acts 15:16 — "After this I will return, and will build again the tabernacle of David, which is fallen down" — carries the same two movements the framework tracks throughout: a return after departure, and a rebuilding of what had fallen. On the corpus reading the "tabernacle of David" is the whole Elohim–Israel arrangement of the earlier ages, and its rebuilding is the Embassy's completion.

The site: near Jerusalem, then anywhere

Yahweh's stated preference was for Israel, near Jerusalem — the ground of the original Eden operation and the long Eden-lineage project that followed it. The passage to the people of Israel frames the grant as a last chance, warning that a refusal would send the Embassy elsewhere "as happened 2,000 years ago" — Vorilhon's reading of the rejection narrative repeating itself.

The Raëlian Movement made its first formal request in November 1991, to the Chief Rabbi in Jerusalem, with further requests to the prime minister and other officials. An Israeli government commission in 1993 found the movement peaceful and no threat to Israel's security; two rabbis on it reportedly advised that "it would be better not to do anything against Rael in case he really is the awaited Messiah." Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin declined the request, and no later administration reopened it.

On 13 December 1997 — the twenty-fourth anniversary of the first 1973 contact — a message attributed to Yahweh released the project from Israel:

"We must from now on ask for the necessary permission and extra-territorial status from all nations on Earth for the erection of our Embassy."

Israel keeps a final option — "for the last time, a short period of reflection" — but the Embassy may now be built in any country that grants the required status. The same message also reidentifies the chosen people: the "real Jews on Earth," it says, are no longer the people of Israel by descent but those who recognize the Elohim as their creators — the Raëlians. The corpus records this as the source's own claim, a shift from lineage to recognition; mainstream Judaism does not accept it, and the entry marks it as canon rather than consensus.

What the New Jerusalem is for

Beyond the reception itself, the source casts the site as "the spiritual and intellectual center of the world for millennia to come." From it the Aquarian age's knowledge, technology, and reorganization are to radiate: pilgrimage from every nation, research and educational institutions clustering around it, and a public replica open to visitors alongside the working Embassy so ordinary people can see the site without disturbing its operations. The building's specifications belong to the Embassy entry, but their scale fits the role — an extraterritorial site of roughly four square kilometers (land or water, with navigation barred in any water portion), a conference room and dining room, seven guest rooms, a swimming pool, a landing platform for the alliance craft, and a surrounding wall no more than two stories high.

Comparative traditions

The New Jerusalem stands where several older sacred-city expectations meet. The framework reads them in dialogue with the canon, preserving each tradition's own terms rather than collapsing them into one.

The Jewish Third Temple. Jewish tradition anticipates a Third Temple succeeding the First and Second, its most detailed blueprint the nine-chapter vision of Ezekiel 40–48. The contemporary Third Temple movement — the Temple Institute (founded 1987), the Temple Mount Faithful, and related organizations — actively prepares vessels, priestly training, and architectural plans, though the historic site is occupied by the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. The corpus's position differs from both the rabbinic mainstream and the activist movement: it does not require the Temple Mount specifically, since the source's preference for Israel-near-Jerusalem is not a requirement for that exact platform, and its New Jerusalem is the Aquarian-age Embassy with its own specifications.

The Christian heavenly Jerusalem. Beyond Revelation 21–22, the New Testament already speaks of "the heavenly Jerusalem" as a present reality for the community (Hebrews 12:22), and the theme runs through Augustine's City of God into the later theological tradition. Christian eschatology divides over what the descending city means — premillennialists read it as a literal future city, amillennialists as a symbol of the Church or the redeemed, postmillennialists variously — but in each case it is a theological image. The framework reads the same tradition as a Christian rendering of the New Jerusalem it identifies with the Embassy.

The Mormon New Jerusalem. The Latter-day Saint tradition names a specific site: Joseph Smith's 1831 revelation (Doctrine and Covenants 57) locates the New Jerusalem at Independence, Missouri, to be built in preparation for Christ's return. The parallel to the corpus's reading is structural — a prophet designating a particular divinely appointed place — while the content is entirely distinct. The two are noted side by side, not merged.

Islamic al-Quds and the wider pattern. Islam holds Jerusalem — al-Quds, "the Holy" — as the site of Muhammad's Night Journey (Quran 17:1) and of the Dome of the Rock (691–692 CE) and al-Aqsa Mosque. Beyond the Abrahamic sphere, sacred-center traditions recur across the world — Varanasi and the Hindu Sapta Puri, Bodhgaya and the Buddhist pilgrimage sites, Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mesoamerica, and many more. Comparative-religion scholarship explains the recurrence through shared human cognition, cultural diffusion, and independent elaboration of common concerns, and is right to caution against reading one event behind every version. The framework does not reject that account; it adds, as interpretation, that the recurrence may also preserve cultural memory of real sites of Elohim presence, of which the New Jerusalem would be the Aquarian-age recovery. That further reading is speculative, offered transparently as such.

Critical perspectives

The framework's reading is not the scholarly one, and the entry marks the difference plainly. Academic study of Revelation — Bauckham, Beale, Koester, Aune — reads chapter 21 as first-century apocalyptic literature written into the pressures of Roman imperial rule. Its descending city is understood as a symbol: of the Church, of the redeemed community, or of a literal future act of God, but in every case a theological image rather than the description of a building to be constructed. Mainstream Judaism, for its part, does not accept the identification of a Raëlian Embassy with Ezekiel's Third Temple, which it holds to belong to the messianic age rather than to a diplomatic residence in an unnamed country.

The corpus does not dispute that these are the consensus positions. It presents the immanent, physical reading — the descending city as the Embassy, the Elohim's return as the event Revelation 21 preserves — as the framework's own: a claim explicit in the Raëlian canon and foreign to the scholarship. The two readings are left standing beside each other. The corpus's reading does not require dismissing the mainstream symbolic or eschatological interpretation; it adds a reading the mainstream does not make, and is honest that the addition rests on the canon rather than on academic agreement.

See also

• Wheel of Heaven
• Embassy
• Third Temple
• Apocalypse
• Golden Age
• Cosmic Chain
• Age of Aquarius
• Age of Pisces
• Mark of the Beast
• Book of Revelation
• Hebrew Bible
• Founding of Israel
• Yahweh
• Elohim
• Raël
• Raëlism
• Message from the Designers
• Jesus
• Moses
• Solomon
• Ezekiel
• Isaiah
• Eden

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975. The principal source articulation in "To the People of Israel" section.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition; contains the December 13, 1997 relocation-authorization message.

Hebrew Bible and New Testament prefiguration sources

The Hebrew Bible. Ezekiel 47:1-12; Isaiah 2:2-4; Isaiah 60:1-3; Zechariah 14:8-9. Various translations and editions.

The New Testament. Acts 15:13-18; Revelation 21:1-22:5; Hebrews 12:22. Various translations and editions.

Mainstream Christian eschatological scholarship

Bauckham, Richard. The Theology of the Book of Revelation. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Beale, G. K. The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text. Eerdmans, 1999.

Koester, Craig R. Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Yale University Press, 2014.

Aune, David E. Revelation. 3 vols. Word Biblical Commentary, 1997-1998.

McGinn, Bernard. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. Columbia University Press, 1979; revised 1998.

Jewish Third Temple movement

The Temple Institute. https://www.templeinstitute.org/.

Inbari, Motti. Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? SUNY Press, 2009.

Mormon New Jerusalem doctrine

Smith, Joseph. Doctrine and Covenants. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1835. (Section 57, July 20, 1831 revelation.)

Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. Knopf, 2005.

Hebrew Bible and Second Temple historical scholarship

Vermes, Geza. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. Penguin, revised ed., 2004.

García Martínez, Florentino. The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated. Brill, 2nd ed., 1996.

Schiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jewish Publication Society, 1994.

Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome. The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide. Oxford University Press, 5th ed., 2008.

Islamic Al-Quds content

Grabar, Oleg. The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Elad, Amikam. Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship. Brill, 2nd ed., 1999.

Cross-cultural sacred-city traditions

Eck, Diana L. Banaras: City of Light. Knopf, 1982.

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt, 1959.

Eliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Sheed & Ward, 1958.

Smith, Jonathan Z. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Web resources

"New Jerusalem." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jerusalem.

"Third Temple." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Temple.

"New Jerusalem (Christian concept)." Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Jerusalem.

"New Jerusalem Dead Sea Scroll." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jerusalem_Dead_Sea_Scroll.

"Jerusalem in Islam." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_in_Islam.

New Jerusalem. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/new-jerusalem/

"New Jerusalem." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/new-jerusalem/.

"New Jerusalem." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/new-jerusalem/.

@misc{woh-new-jerusalem,
  author       = {{Wheel of Heaven}},
  title        = {New Jerusalem},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/new-jerusalem/}},
  note         = {CC0-1.0 public domain}
}