I3
The Hierarchies
The prime Western source of descriptive material about the angelic
and archangelic hierarchies is attributed to a gifted youngAthenian stu-
dent of Plato's writings, an intimate of the apostle Paul, known to his-
tory as Dionysius the Areopagite. According to Steiner, Dionysius was
in Heliopolis in Egypt at the time of the crucifixion, and later in Ath-
ens helped found an esoteric school with Paul, which was to influence
Christendom for centuries. Steiner goes so far as to say that it was
through Dionysius, a great initiate, that the Rosicrucian spiritual path
was prepared and that from Dionysius later Western esoteric wisdom
and training was derived as well as "much of the deepest thought of the
leading scholars and masters of the Middle Ages."'
In Steiner's version, Dionysius, teaching into his nineties by word of
mouth to a small group of chosen pupils, proclaimed that space was
filled not only with matter but "with realm upon realm of spiritual be-
ings far more developed than man." These beings Dionysius divided
into three hierarchies, subdivided into three levels. His lowest hier-
archy, which he named the Third Hierarchy, he peopled with angels,
archangels, and archai; the next higher, or Second Hierarchy, with pow-
ers, mights, and dominions, known to him as exusiai, dynamis, and
kyriotetes; and the highest of all, the First Hierarchy, with thrones,
cherubim, and seraphim. To Steiner it was clear that Dionysius was re-
ferring to the same spiritual beings described millennia earlier by the
- Whether Steiner-evidently on the basis of his perusal of the &ashic Record-
is correct in attributing the most important text in the history of angelology,
Dionysius's The Celestial Hierarchy, to a contemporary of the apostle Paul, or as other
scholars attribute it, to a later Neoplatonist pseudo-Dionysius is immaterial. What
matters is the text.