Angels

Angels 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 Angels as a figure of that documented theological and literary tradition.

The Greek angelos simply means "messenger" and, in its most general sense, names the whole created order of these beings rather than any single rank; Pseudo-Dionysius narrows the common word to the ninth and lowest choir specifically, the rank he holds to stand closest to humanity and most directly engaged with individual human affairs, including, in later tradition though not explicitly in his own text, the office of personal guardian angels assigned to particular people rather than to nations or nature.

In this collection Angels is also correlated with a sephirah of the Tree of Life, here Malkuth ("Kingdom"). 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 Angels at Malkuth, Kingdom, the physical world itself in Kabbalistic cosmology, one sphere below the Agrippa-attributed sequential table's placement at Yesod, the last step in the consistent shift running through this entire set of six choirs. The Golden Dawn's own Hebrew table gives Malkuth to a host it calls Ishim, "souls" or "men," dropping the name Angels even though Malkuth's association with the physical, human world makes it, of all ten spheres, the one where a name meaning simply "messengers to humanity" would fit best.