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Nine Choirs, a Tenth Name, and Two Systems Welded Together

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Nine Choirs, a Tenth Name, and Two Systems Welded Together

The ranks of angels recorded elsewhere on this site show a join that is worth pointing out, because it is the same kind of collision visible in the archangel attributions.

The nine choirs of Christian tradition, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, Angels, are the arrangement of the Celestial Hierarchy attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a Greek Christian work of about the late fifth or early sixth century. Nine is not incidental to it; the scheme is three triads, and the triadic structure is doing Neoplatonic work.

The Kabbalistic scheme of angelic orders is a different list in a different language, ten in number to match the sephirot: Chaioth ha-Qadesh, Ophanim, Aralim, Chashmalim, Seraphim, Malachim, Elohim, Beni Elohim, Kerubim, Ishim. Two names overlap with the Dionysian nine, which is unsurprising since both draw on Ezekiel and Isaiah, but the lists are not versions of one another.

What this site records is the Dionysian nine with a single Hebrew name added at the top to reach ten and fill Kether. That is a weld, not a tradition. It produces a sequence in which nine Greek-derived Christian ranks and one Hebrew rank sit in one column, and it shifts the assignments: Seraphim, who in the Kabbalistic scheme belong to Geburah, are here placed at Chokmah, which in that scheme belongs to the Ophanim.

Constructions of this kind are entirely normal in the ceremonial tradition, which spent the nineteenth century tabulating every available system into a single grid of correspondences, and where two systems had different lengths one of them was adjusted. The tables in Crowley's 777 are the most complete instance and contain a number of similar accommodations.

The reason to say so plainly is that the resulting column is often presented as though it were a single inherited hierarchy. It is two hierarchies of different origin, different language and different number, fitted together, and neither of the traditions it draws on would recognise the result.

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