New Jerusalem is, in the Wheel of Heaven framework, one of three names — alongside\nThird Temple and Embassy — for the single structure\nthe Elohim have asked humanity to build to receive their formal return.\nThe three names describe the same building from three angles. New Jerusalem is its\nChristian-apocalyptic name, taken from the holy city that descends from heaven in\nRevelation 21. Third Temple is its Jewish-historical name, successor to Solomon's\nFirst Temple (destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE) and the Second Temple (destroyed\nby the Romans in 70 CE). Embassy is its operational name — the reception residence\nwith extraterritorial status whose architecture the source material lays out in detail.\nThe corpus reaches for whichever name suits the passage at hand, but all three point to\none physical thing: the seat of open Elohim–human contact in the\nAge of Aquarius.
\nThe phrase is scriptural, and Yahweh uses it directly. In Claude\nVorilhon's Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975), in the passage addressed\n\"To the People of Israel,\" the request is made explicit:
\n\n\n\"The State of Israel must give some territory located near Jerusalem to the Guide of\nGuides so that he may build there the residence, the embassy of the Elohim. The time\nhas come, people of Israel, to build the New Jerusalem as it was foreseen. Claude Rael\nis the one who was foretold. Reread your writings and open your eyes.\"
\n
Three moves are folded together here: a request for land near Jerusalem with\nextraterritorial status; the identification of that building with the New Jerusalem of\nRevelation 21; and the claim that the request arrives through a prophet whose coming had\nbeen foretold.
\nRevelation 21 opens the New Testament's closing vision. John of Patmos, writing in the\nlate first century CE, describes what he is shown:
\n\n\n\"And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were\npassed away; and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem,\ncoming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I\nheard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men,\nand he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be\nwith them, and be their God.\"
\n— Revelation 21:1–3 (KJV)
\n
The chapter goes on to measure the city: twelve foundations bearing the names of the\ntwelve apostles, a perfect cube twelve thousand furlongs on a side, a wall of jasper,\nfoundations of precious stones, gates of pearl, streets of pure gold (Revelation\n21:9–21). In the mainstream Christian reading this is the crowning image of the\neschaton — the perfected City of God arriving at the end of history, when heaven and\nearth are made new.
\nThe framework reads the descending city as a building, not a miracle. What John saw, and\nrecorded in the only vocabulary first-century apocalyptic gave him, is the Embassy: the\nresidence the Elohim asked humanity to prepare, and their return to occupy it. The line\nthat follows the descent names exactly what the Embassy is for — \"the tabernacle of God\nis with men, and he will dwell with them.\" That is the whole purpose of the structure:\na place where the Elohim land openly and take up settled, continuous contact with the\nhumanity they created. On this reading the precious-stone architecture is John's attempt\nto render an advanced building he had no words for; the descent \"out of heaven\" is the\narrival of the alliance's craft; and the \"no more sea\" is the transition between worlds\nseen from a departing vantage. The Apocalypse, understood this way,\nculminates not in destruction but in construction — a city built, a residence occupied,\nthe makers dwelling with their creation as a lasting arrangement rather than a passing\ntheophany.
\nTwo further passages point the corpus at the same event. Ezekiel 47:1–2 shows water\nissuing from under the threshold of the temple and running eastward, deepening into a\nriver that heals the Dead Sea and makes everything it touches live. The framework reads\nthis as the image of the New Jerusalem as a source — the point from which the Aquarian\nage's knowledge and renewal flow outward to the world, the Ezekiel river made\ninstitutional. Acts 15:16 — \"After this I will return, and will build again the\ntabernacle of David, which is fallen down\" — carries the same two movements the\nframework tracks throughout: a return after departure, and a rebuilding of what had\nfallen. On the corpus reading the \"tabernacle of David\" is the whole Elohim–Israel\narrangement of the earlier ages, and its rebuilding is the Embassy's completion.
\nYahweh's stated preference was for Israel, near Jerusalem — the ground of the original\nEden operation and the long Eden-lineage project that followed it. The\npassage to the people of Israel frames the grant as a last chance, warning that a refusal\nwould send the Embassy elsewhere \"as happened 2,000 years ago\" — Vorilhon's reading of\nthe rejection narrative repeating itself.
\nThe Raëlian Movement made its first formal request in November 1991, to the Chief Rabbi\nin Jerusalem, with further requests to the prime minister and other officials. An Israeli\ngovernment commission in 1993 found the movement peaceful and no threat to Israel's\nsecurity; two rabbis on it reportedly advised that \"it would be better not to do anything\nagainst Rael in case he really is the awaited Messiah.\" Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin\ndeclined the request, and no later administration reopened it.
\nOn 13 December 1997 — the twenty-fourth anniversary of the first 1973 contact — a message\nattributed to Yahweh released the project from Israel:
\n\n\n\"We must from now on ask for the necessary permission and extra-territorial status from\nall nations on Earth for the erection of our Embassy.\"
\n
Israel keeps a final option — \"for the last time, a short period of reflection\" — but the\nEmbassy may now be built in any country that grants the required status. The same message\nalso reidentifies the chosen people: the \"real Jews on Earth,\" it says, are no longer the\npeople of Israel by descent but those who recognize the Elohim as their creators — the\nRaëlians. The corpus records this as the source's own claim, a shift from lineage to\nrecognition; mainstream Judaism does not accept it, and the entry marks it as canon\nrather than consensus.
\nBeyond the reception itself, the source casts the site as \"the spiritual and intellectual\ncenter of the world for millennia to come.\" From it the Aquarian age's knowledge,\ntechnology, and reorganization are to radiate: pilgrimage from every nation, research and\neducational institutions clustering around it, and a public replica open to visitors\nalongside the working Embassy so ordinary people can see the site without disturbing its\noperations. The building's specifications belong to the Embassy entry, but\ntheir scale fits the role — an extraterritorial site of roughly four square kilometers\n(land or water, with navigation barred in any water portion), a conference room and\ndining room, seven guest rooms, a swimming pool, a landing platform for the alliance\ncraft, and a surrounding wall no more than two stories high.
\nThe New Jerusalem stands where several older sacred-city expectations meet. The framework\nreads them in dialogue with the canon, preserving each tradition's own terms rather than\ncollapsing them into one.
\nThe Jewish Third Temple. Jewish tradition anticipates a Third Temple succeeding the\nFirst and Second, its most detailed blueprint the nine-chapter vision of Ezekiel 40–48.\nThe contemporary Third Temple movement — the Temple Institute (founded 1987), the Temple\nMount Faithful, and related organizations — actively prepares vessels, priestly training,\nand architectural plans, though the historic site is occupied by the Dome of the Rock and\nthe al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. The corpus's position differs from\nboth the rabbinic mainstream and the activist movement: it does not require the Temple\nMount specifically, since the source's preference for Israel-near-Jerusalem is not a\nrequirement for that exact platform, and its New Jerusalem is the Aquarian-age Embassy\nwith its own specifications.
\nThe Christian heavenly Jerusalem. Beyond Revelation 21–22, the New Testament already\nspeaks of \"the heavenly Jerusalem\" as a present reality for the community (Hebrews 12:22),\nand the theme runs through Augustine's City of God into the later theological tradition.\nChristian eschatology divides over what the descending city means — premillennialists\nread it as a literal future city, amillennialists as a symbol of the Church or the\nredeemed, postmillennialists variously — but in each case it is a theological image. The\nframework reads the same tradition as a Christian rendering of the New Jerusalem it\nidentifies with the Embassy.
\nThe Mormon New Jerusalem. The Latter-day Saint tradition names a specific site:\nJoseph Smith's 1831 revelation (Doctrine and Covenants 57) locates the New Jerusalem at\nIndependence, Missouri, to be built in preparation for Christ's return. The parallel to\nthe corpus's reading is structural — a prophet designating a particular divinely appointed\nplace — while the content is entirely distinct. The two are noted side by side, not merged.
\nIslamic al-Quds and the wider pattern. Islam holds Jerusalem — al-Quds, \"the Holy\" —\nas the site of Muhammad's Night Journey (Quran 17:1) and of the Dome of the Rock\n(691–692 CE) and al-Aqsa Mosque. Beyond the Abrahamic sphere, sacred-center traditions\nrecur across the world — Varanasi and the Hindu Sapta Puri, Bodhgaya and the Buddhist\npilgrimage sites, Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan in Mesoamerica, and many more.\nComparative-religion scholarship explains the recurrence through shared human cognition,\ncultural diffusion, and independent elaboration of common concerns, and is right to\ncaution against reading one event behind every version. The framework does not reject that\naccount; it adds, as interpretation, that the recurrence may also preserve cultural memory\nof real sites of Elohim presence, of which the New Jerusalem would be the Aquarian-age\nrecovery. That further reading is speculative, offered transparently as such.
The framework's reading is not the scholarly one, and the entry marks the difference\nplainly. Academic study of Revelation — Bauckham, Beale, Koester, Aune — reads chapter 21\nas first-century apocalyptic literature written into the pressures of Roman imperial rule.\nIts descending city is understood as a symbol: of the Church, of the redeemed community,\nor of a literal future act of God, but in every case a theological image rather than the\ndescription of a building to be constructed. Mainstream Judaism, for its part, does not\naccept the identification of a Raëlian Embassy with Ezekiel's Third Temple, which it holds\nto belong to the messianic age rather than to a diplomatic residence in an unnamed\ncountry.
\nThe corpus does not dispute that these are the consensus positions. It presents the\nimmanent, physical reading — the descending city as the Embassy, the Elohim's return as\nthe event Revelation 21 preserves — as the framework's own: a claim explicit in the\nRaëlian canon and foreign to the scholarship. The two readings are left standing beside\neach other. The corpus's reading does not require dismissing the mainstream symbolic or\neschatological interpretation; it adds a reading the mainstream does not make, and is\nhonest that the addition rests on the canon rather than on academic agreement.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Le Livre qui dit la vérité. 1974.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Les Extra-Terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète. 1975. The principal source articulation in \"To the People of Israel\" section.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Accueillir les Extra-Terrestres. 1979.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005. The consolidated English-language edition; contains the December 13, 1997 relocation-authorization message.
\nThe Hebrew Bible. Ezekiel 47:1-12; Isaiah 2:2-4; Isaiah 60:1-3; Zechariah 14:8-9. Various translations and editions.
\nThe New Testament. Acts 15:13-18; Revelation 21:1-22:5; Hebrews 12:22. Various translations and editions.
\nBauckham, Richard. The Theology of the Book of Revelation. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
\nBeale, G. K. The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text. Eerdmans, 1999.
\nKoester, Craig R. Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Yale University Press, 2014.
\nAune, David E. Revelation. 3 vols. Word Biblical Commentary, 1997-1998.
\nMcGinn, Bernard. Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. Columbia University Press, 1979; revised 1998.
\nThe Temple Institute. https://www.templeinstitute.org/.
\nInbari, Motti. Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? SUNY Press, 2009.
\nSmith, Joseph. Doctrine and Covenants. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1835. (Section 57, July 20, 1831 revelation.)
\nBushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling. Knopf, 2005.
\nVermes, Geza. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English. Penguin, revised ed., 2004.
\nGarcía Martínez, Florentino. The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated. Brill, 2nd ed., 1996.
\nSchiffman, Lawrence H. Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls. Jewish Publication Society, 1994.
\nMurphy-O'Connor, Jerome. The Holy Land: An Oxford Archaeological Guide. Oxford University Press, 5th ed., 2008.
\nGrabar, Oleg. The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem. Princeton University Press, 1996.
\nElad, Amikam. Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic Worship. Brill, 2nd ed., 1999.
\nEck, Diana L. Banaras: City of Light. Knopf, 1982.
\nEliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Harcourt, 1959.
\nEliade, Mircea. Patterns in Comparative Religion. Sheed & Ward, 1958.
\nSmith, Jonathan Z. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
\n\"New Jerusalem.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jerusalem.
\n\"Third Temple.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Temple.
\n\"New Jerusalem (Christian concept).\" Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Jerusalem.
\n\"New Jerusalem Dead Sea Scroll.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jerusalem_Dead_Sea_Scroll.
\n\"Jerusalem in Islam.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_in_Islam.
\n", "extra": {"alternative_names":["the New Jerusalem","the Heavenly Jerusalem","the descending Holy City","Third Temple","Embassy","the residence of the Elohim"],"category":"Places & Locations","claim_type":"framework","editorial_pass":"2026-07","entry_type":"concept","infobox":{"biblical_prefigurations":"Ezekiel 47:1-2 (water from the temple threshold); Acts 15:16 (rebuild the tabernacle of David); Revelation 21:1-3 (the descending New Jerusalem)","distinguished_from":"The Embassy (operational specifications, own entry); the Third Temple (Jewish-historical succession, own entry); the historic First and Second Temples","original_location_preference":"Israel, near Jerusalem — the site of the original Eden operation","principal_source":"*Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet* (Vorilhon, 1975), 'To the People of Israel'; *Let Us Welcome the Extra-Terrestrials* (1979); *Message from the Designers* (2005)","relocation_authorization":"December 13, 1997 message from Yahweh — authorization to seek extraterritorial status from any nation after Israel's refusals; Israel keeps a 'last chance' option","status_in_framework":"Foundational Aquarian-age structure; the operational center from which the age's transformation is to radiate","three_term_identification":"New Jerusalem (Christian-apocalyptic name); Third Temple (Jewish-historical name); Embassy (operational name) — three names for one building","type":"Aquarian-age structure built to receive the Elohim's formal return; the seat of open Elohim-human contact"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","same_as":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q567888","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Jerusalem","https://www.britannica.com/topic/New-Jerusalem"],"see_also":[{"description":"The operational specifications of the same structure.","path":"wiki/embassy","title":"Embassy"},{"description":"The Jewish-historical name for the same intended reception structure.","path":"wiki/third-temple","title":"Third Temple"},{"description":"The prophet whose temple-threshold vision the corpus reads as prefiguration.","path":"wiki/ezekiel","title":"Ezekiel"},{"description":"The Revelation eschatology that supplies the descending-city imagery.","path":"wiki/apocalypse","title":"Apocalypse"},{"description":"The Aquarian transformation the structure is meant to center and radiate outward.","path":"wiki/golden-age","title":"Golden Age"},{"description":"Reads the Qumran Aramaic New Jerusalem text — the measured city awaiting construction — as an ancestor of this entry.","path":"articles/unsealed-in-year-one","title":"Unsealed in Year One"}],"timeline":["age-of-aquarius"]} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/new-jerusalem/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/new-jerusalem/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "embassy", "title": "Embassy", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/embassy/" },{"slug": "third-temple", "title": "Third Temple", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/third-temple/" },{"slug": "ezekiel", "title": "Ezekiel", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/ezekiel/" },{"slug": "apocalypse", "title": "Apocalypse", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/apocalypse/" },{"slug": "golden-age", "title": "Golden Age", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/golden-age/" },{"slug": "unsealed-in-year-one", "title": "Unsealed in Year One", "kind": "Article", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/articles/unsealed-in-year-one/" }] } }