The hierarchies of spirits, benign and otherwise: the seventy-two Shem angels, the nine choirs of Christian angelology, the seventy-two Goetic spirits and their ranks, the qliphoth of the inverse tree, the parts of the soul, the magical weapons, and the principles and operations of alchemy. Much of it comes from the grimoire tradition and from Kabbalistic sources reworked by later occultists. The entries distinguish what a text actually says from what later systematisers added to it.
Facts
Overview
Scope of This SectionRanked spirit-hierarchies of the Western and Abrahamic traditions and their inverse: the seventy-two Shem angels, the nine choirs of Christian angelology, the seventy-two Goetic spirits and their courtly ranks, the qliphoth, the parts of the soul, the magical weapons, and the principles, operations and colour stages of alchemy. 1 Learn More
Hierarchies of spirits, benign and otherwise
This section gathers the ranked spirit-beings of the Western and Abrahamic traditions and their darker counterparts: the seventy-two Shem angels derived from the divine name, the nine choirs of Christian angelology, the seventy-two Goetic spirits with their courtly ranks, the four elementals, and, on the inverse side, the qliphoth of the shadow tree. It also holds the parts of the soul and the magical weapons of ceremonial practice.
These are the intermediary beings of the tradition, above humanity, below the divine, through whom, in the older cosmology, the higher order was thought to act upon the lower.
Angel and Demon in One Framework
The tradition tends to arrange benign and malign spirits as mirror images within a single scheme: the seventy-two Shem angels against the seventy-two Goetic spirits, the Tree of Life against the qliphoth. The entries set out where each list comes from (the Shem HaMephorash read out of Exodus, the Ars Goetia of the Lesser Key of Solomon, the Celestial Hierarchy attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite), and treat the ceremonial practice around them descriptively.
The archangels proper, as figures of Jewish, Christian and Islamic belief, are gathered under Deities & Sacred Figures; this section concentrates on the graded hosts and their operative use in magic.
All Angels, Spirits & the Shadow
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Sources
1. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. Angels; s.v. DemonsView the Source Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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