Originally posted by
Aragorn
The ophanim — also called "thrones" — in the Bible are also described as having four faces: of a man, a lion, a bull and an eagle. Some non-canon Judeo-Christian scriptures describe certain angels with a large face on their chest, and/or with their wings covered in a myriad eyes.
This might have something to do with their higher dimensional nature. I quoted physicist Michio Kaku about this in another thread. I think they look this weird to us only from our three-dimensional perspective, which creates some sort of mirroring effect and a latency in time. It is a bit like a hall of mirrors, there may only be one person in there, but the observer sees a multitude of faces, hands, eyes, etc...
Any being that moved in time differently than we did (we are helplessly moved forward in one temporal dimension, at a steady pace and are essentially trapped in this flow of time) would appear very strange to us. We might see them in a distorted way and as being present in many places at the same time. It is rather interesting that Hindu gods for instance are often depicted with many arms, sometimes thousands. It may just appear that way due to the time latency effect.