Archangels

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

Outside the Dionysian scheme, where they rank eighth of nine and are concerned chiefly with delivering the most significant divine messages, the term "archangel" is used far more loosely: popular Western usage, and named lists such as those naming Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and others as "the archangels," typically treat the title as marking the highest angels of all rather than a specific middle-low rank, a usage flatly at odds with Pseudo-Dionysius's own ordering. Only two figures, Michael and Gabriel, are called archangel in the canonical scriptures at all; every longer list beyond that pair rests on later, non-canonical, and mutually disagreeing sources.

In this collection Archangels is also correlated with a sephirah of the Tree of Life, here Yesod ("Foundation"). 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 sets Archangels at Yesod, Foundation, one sphere below the Agrippa-attributed sequential table's placement at Hod, continuing the same consistent shift found across this set of choirs. The Golden Dawn abandons the name Archangels entirely in its own Hebrew table, giving Yesod instead to a host called Kerubim, its term for the choir this collection elsewhere calls Cherubim, and Hod, where Agrippa's Archangels sat, to Beni Elohim, so that neither Hebrew scheme preserves the Greek-derived word "archangel" at any sphere at all.