Dominions

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

The choir's own name reflects a translation choice as much as a scriptural one. Paul's Letter to the Colossians (1:16) lists kyriotetes, "dominions" or "lordships," among the powers created in Christ, rendered in the Latin Vulgate as dominationes; Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae, assigns this choir the office of regulating and directing the duties of the angelic ranks beneath it, distributing the commands of the higher choirs downward through the hierarchy rather than governing human affairs directly, a task he reserves for Principalities, three ranks lower.

In this collection Dominions is also correlated with a sephirah of the Tree of Life, here Geburah ("Severity"). 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.

The classic sequential table often attributed to Agrippa, pairing the nine Dionysian choirs one to one down the Tree before an additional tenth host at the foot, places Dominions one sphere higher than this collection does, at Chesed rather than Geburah, under the Hebrew name Chashmalim. The Golden Dawn keeps that Hebrew name, Chashmalim, at Chesed but drops the name Dominions from its table altogether, replacing it and every other Dionysian name except Seraphim with its own wholly Hebrew set of ten hosts, none of which was drawn directly from Pseudo-Dionysius's own Greek.