The Four and Twenty Elders by Henry John Stock
Beneath the handsome sky I have described, twenty-four elders moved on, two by two, and they had wreaths of lilies on their heads.
And all were singing: “You, among the daughters of Adam, benedicta are; and may your beauties blessed be eternally.”
—Dante, Purgatorio (Canto XXIX)
Above are mirrors—Thrones is what you call them— and from them God in judgment shines on us; and thus we think it right to say such things.
Here she was silent and appeared to me to turn toward other things, reentering the wheeling dance where she had been before.
—Dante, Paradiso (Canto IX)
The Grail appears in a circle of twenty-four lights. They are the twenty-four elders with the lily wreaths of whom Dante too speaks in his Divine Comedy (Purgatorio 29, v.83), described in medieval symbolism in the twenty-four books of the Old Testament. They represent high spiritual beings, leaders of human evolution, as Rudolf Steiner once explained; leaders of the twenty-four stages of world evolution, usually called Thrones in the Middle Ages. They encircle the force of Christ, of the Lamb, and bask in the sight of Him, but their light is outshone by the Grail.
—Walter J. Stein, The Ninth Century and the Holy Grail (p.144)
More posts on the Thrones.