Superhierarchies 147tual bodies: egoic, buddhic, and atmic-sheaths provided for earth by
the more elevated spirits of motion, wisdom, and will, as well as by the
sublimest cherubim and seraphim. Working all together, these spiritual
hierarchies are viewed as ruling over and guiding human evolution, but
they are considered of a nature so sublime and so different from all that
humans are normally concerned with "that it is only possible to come
to a very distant impression of them through comparison and analogy."
Beings of the Second Hierarchy-exusiai, dynamis, and kyriotetes-
whose principal abode is given as the sun sphere, are qualified by
Steiner as creator spirits who, over great spaces, call life into being and
transform living things over long ages. The kyriotetes are organizers,
the dynamis carry out their directives, the exusiai maintain what has
been formed.To Steiner, the exusiai, or spirits of form, are the same as
the Hebrew Elohim, plural of Eloha, or god, whose work is spelled out
in Genesis as the "Six Days of Creation," meaning, says Steiner,"the to-
tality of the spiritual intelligences by whose agency all worlds and all
things are conceived and are objectively manifest at all levels, manifes-
tation occurring when ideation is impressed on cosmic substance."
Not only, says Steiner, do beings of the Second Hierarchy manifest
their selfhood creatively, as do beings of the Third Hierarchy, they go
further:"They detach from themselves what they create, so that it per-
sists as an independent being." Detached from beings of this Second
Hierarchy are the group souls, or devas, that animate and interpene-
trate the beings of the nature kingdoms of plants and animals. With an-
imals, each species is endowed with physical, etheric, and astral bodies,
but, according to Steiner, no "I." Instead of an ego, each animal has a
group ego or group soul, "a real being, wiser than man,'' dwelling on
the astral plane, from which it directs individual animals on earth
through their instinct. Other clairvoyants maintain that animals and
birds can develop egos, a notion that Steiner goes along with to the ex-
tent that a person's horse or dog or parrot can develop by close associ-
ation with humans. Plants, lacking both astral bodies and egos, have
their group soul on the next higher plane, the lower devachan.
Minerals, last to condense in the course of earth's history, are described
as having their group egos on the still higher devachan. Occultists see