Principalities

Principalities is one of the nine choirs, or orders, of angels described in The Celestial Hierarchy, a treatise written around the late fifth or early sixth century by the anonymous Christian author known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. That work arranges the angels in three triads: the highest of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; the middle of Dominions, Virtues and Powers; and the lowest of Principalities, Archangels and Angels. The scheme drew together the various ranks named in scripture, the seraphim of Isaiah, the cherubim of Genesis and Ezekiel, and the thrones, dominions, principalities and powers listed in the Pauline epistles, into a single ordered hierarchy that became standard in medieval Christian theology and was carried further by Thomas Aquinas and by Dante. This entry describes Principalities as a figure of that documented theological and literary tradition.

Principalities renders archai, "rulers" or "origins," named alongside powers and dominions in Colossians 1:16 and Ephesians 3:10, and read by Aquinas as angels charged with the care of nations, kingdoms and large human communities collectively rather than individuals, a guardianship of peoples that he distinguishes from the personal guardian angels he assigns to the lowest choir. The same Greek word, arche, also underlies "archangel" one rank below, so that Principalities and Archangels share a linguistic root despite occupying formally distinct offices in Pseudo-Dionysius's scheme.

In this collection Principalities is also correlated with a sephirah of the Tree of Life, here Hod ("Splendor"). Mapping the angelic choirs onto the ten sephiroth of Kabbalah is not part of the original Dionysian scheme; it is a later development of Christian Kabbalah, given its now-familiar form by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which paired each sephirah with a divine name, an archangel and an angelic choir. The correspondence is presented here as a documented feature of that esoteric system, distinct from the Christian theology of Pseudo-Dionysius and from the Jewish sources of the Tree of Life, and not as the doctrine of any single tradition.

This collection places Principalities at Hod, Splendor, three spheres below the Agrippa-attributed sequential table's placement at Netzach, again the product of the consistent one-sphere shift that runs through this whole set of six choirs. The Golden Dawn's Hebrew table gives Netzach, where Agrippa's Principalities sat, to a host called Elohim, and assigns its own Hod to Beni Elohim, "sons of God," dropping the name Principalities from its scheme along with the rest of the Dionysian Latin choir names it declines to carry forward.