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The Hierarchies, and Who Arranged Them

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The Hierarchies, and Who Arranged Them

The ordered ranks of angels that Western tradition takes for granted are not laid out anywhere in scripture. They were assembled, and the assembly can be dated.

The Hebrew Bible supplies pieces: seraphim in Isaiah, cherubim guarding Eden and overshadowing the ark, an unnamed messenger of the Lord, and only in the latest books two named angels, Gabriel and Michael. Raphael appears in Tobit. The apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature, particularly 1 Enoch, supplies a great deal more, including named archangels, the fallen watchers and a developed cosmology of the heavens.

The nine choirs, seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, angels, are the work of the writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, around the year 500, who arranged the scriptural terms into three triads in the Celestial Hierarchy. He wrote under the name of a first-century convert of Paul, which gave the scheme apostolic weight it did not have; the pseudonym was suspected in the Renaissance and is now universally accepted. Aquinas incorporated the scheme, and it became standard Western teaching.

The magical current draws on a different structure. The Shem ha-Mephorash, the seventy-two-fold name, is derived by a Kabbalistic operation on three verses of Exodus, each of seventy-two letters, read in boustrophedon to yield seventy-two three-letter names; each is given an angelic suffix to produce seventy-two angels, matched to the degrees of the zodiac in five-degree divisions.

Facing them in the grimoire tradition stand the seventy-two demons of the Ars Goetia in the Lesser Key of Solomon, each with a name, a rank, a legion count and a seal. The pairing of the seventy-two angels against the seventy-two spirits, so that each demon has an angelic counterpart with power to constrain it, is set out in the manuscripts associated with Thomas Rudd and was taken up by the Golden Dawn.

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