Dominions of the Hierarchies
The Dominions of the Hierarchies from the Angels up to the Thrones are the planetary spheres in ascending order, if the geocentric Ptolemaic system is taken as a basis. They overlap with the Dominions of the Archangels, which are also assigned to the planetary spheres. The highest hierarchies, the Cherubim and Seraphim, have the whole zodiac as their field of activity. Man, as the tenth hierarchy, has the Earth as his domain during his earthly life. In the life between death and a new birth he wanders through all the planetary spheres up to the zodiac, first ascending, then descending again.
In detail, the following assignment results, which is based on the occult order of the planets, which is based on the sidereal periods and not on the spatial distances of the celestial bodies, which in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages could not be determined with sufficient accuracy and could only be deduced indirectly. Later, Nicolaus Copernicus, the new founder of the heliocentric world view, also pointed out this problem in his work De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium.
The following occult sequence results from the planetary rhythms: Moon (27.3 days) - Mercury (88 days) - Venus (224.7 days) - Sun (365.25 days = 1 year) - Mars (687 days) - Jupiter (4332.6 days = approx. 12 years) - Saturn (10759.2 days = approx. 30 years). If one translates this purely temporal order into a spatial scheme for illustration purposes, Mercury and Venus appear to be reversed in their spatial order compared to the arrangement given in today's astronomy, but that Mercury in the occult sense nevertheless corresponds exactly to the planet that is also called Mercury today, and the same then naturally applies to Venus. Otherwise, due to the loops of the planetary orbits observed from the geocentric point of view, one would have to speak of a Mercury pentagram and a Venus hexagram, which, however, does not correspond to the facts. That the occult order is very well justified from a spiritual point of view is shown by the effects of the planetary rhythms in the human being and in nature. This temporal-rhythmic order is also reflected in the dominions of the hierarchies. The spatial distances of the planets play no role in this.
„Herewith the present physical system is drawn, only a point of time is chosen where, when the Earth, Mercury and Venus are on one side of the Sun, the other planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are on the other. That is what is drawn here, nothing more. Here is Earth, Mercury, Venus, and on the other side of the Sun Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. So it is only a change of perspective. This system is quite conceivable, but only if this constellation is there. It was actually there at a time when above Saturn were the twins. It was then possible to observe clairvoyantly and particularly well the dominion of the spiritual hierarchies. It became apparent that the sphere of the angels was all around the earth as far as the moon. Really, if one does not take the physical system as a basis, but this peculiar constellation, then around the earth is the circle of the angels up to the moon, then further up to Mercury the circle of the archangels, then up to Venus the circle of the spirits of personality, up to the sun first the circle of the powers or exusiai or spirits of form; then comes the circle, as I characterised it yesterday, of the virtutes or powers, then the circle of the dominions and then that of the thrones (see drawing p. 103).“ (Lit.:GA 110, p. 102)
Harmony of the spheres and angelic hierarchies
The harmonies of the spheres are closely connected with the activity of the angelic hierarchies. Rudolf Steiner spoke about this in great detail in his lectures on the Apocalypse of John (GA 346) for the priests of the Christian Community.
„Let us take the physical world as it first confronts us. This physical world is only apparently what it confronts us as. For this physical world would not present us with the variety of its nuances of colour, its nuances of warmth, and all that flows in upon man from all sides of the world's environment, if, in all that the world now appears to us in this present age, we thought only of the physical content and overlooked the fact that that which appears physical to us is actually spiritual. If we place ourselves in the soul of such a human being as the apocalyptic is, we must, I would say, acquire the soul-language of such a human being, and this soul-language must become so much our own for our own personal spiritual use that we can say, in a trivial expression, that it must become flesh and blood to us.
So I would like to give you such parts of the inner soul language of an initiate which he does not always use outwardly exoterically, but which is actually his means of inwardly forming his ideas, his particular co-experience of the spiritual world. There is this, for example: Dampen the lightning and you will understand the colour. - That is initiatory language. What does it mean? The initiate sees the lightning in its appearance, he sees this flare-up coming out of the universe, he regards it as the flare-up of the spirit within the space of the world, and he thinks of this lightning as damped down and ever more damped down, thus ever milder and milder, and gets the damping down, the mild shaping of the coloured; the lightning spreads out, as it were, and becomes a coloured surface. That is the idea of an initiate. Or the initiate says: Let the thunder become quieter, quieter and quieter, and hear its modulation, and the musical arises. - And so the initiate sees that which spreads out, as it were, as a carpet of the senses, as the revelation towards one side, and it is a quite real conception for him if one thinks in this way: One has the content of the world in its coloured variety - what I am drawing (plate 12, left) could just as well be colour as sound - and how the content of the world approaches our senses is like the sensuous-physical veil that spreads out as our world of perception into which we first weave our abstract, apparent thoughts. Behind all this, the initiate sees - that is, if you imagine the tablet (plate 12, far left) as the carpet that is spread out everywhere, it is what is tonal, colourful, warm in the world - behind this carpet, the initiate sees the incident lightning. They are behind it, and that which is now and then seen as real lightning simply breaks through this carpet of the senses from backwards in the spiritual world. In every appearance of lightning there is a ray of light from the spiritual world. And if we look at this lightning, how it is softened and muffled to the uniformly coloured lightning on earth, we have the earth in its colouring before us.
If we look up at the sky and at the stars, we see points in the stars which also appear to us as coming out of the spiritual, only in the permanent living revelation of the lightning. But in all this the initiate sees the outer revelation of that which is behind, and he says to himself: Actually you must see - and he also sees it when his soul becomes more and more active - the red rose. It begins to spray its red upwards and downwards as if in silent flashes, and while the foreground dulls, backwards the red encroaches on the sphere of the seraphim, just as everything tonal encroaches on the Sphere of the Cherubim, and just as everything we touch encroaches on the Sphere of the Thrones. And when you see nature around you, you actually have everything in the physical world before you as an illusion, for in truth it is the muted works of the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones. Let us look, my dear friends, into the coloured world, as it appears, it is only the evenly toned down lightning effect of the Seraphim. This is actually what in ancient times was called the Maja character of the sensual-physical world, that one does not know that there are in reality Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones everywhere.
Now we go a little further in the initiation. Let us go on to where the apocalyptic puts the main emphasis on the opening of the seals. Yes, what happens there? The colour of the world is detached, the warmth is detached, and more and more spiritual effects are appearing that are already similar to the true forms of the lightning that are taking shape. Instead of seeing the zigzagging flashes of lightning, when we break through the sensory carpet we see what is behind it as a spiritual world; we see behind it gently flowing flashes of lightning. We know that those beings live in it who are the servants of the Seraphim, the Cherubim and the Thrones. It is similar with the tonal, similar with the warmth, similar with the tangible, the palpable. And just as that which at first appears to us as the earthly carpet of the senses is extinguished and behind it appears this world of such lightning-like formations and forms such self-contained figures out of the astral fire and expands more and more, in the same measure the stars begin to radiate down; so that we follow like threads of light that which they are, and star threads, star rays, lights mingle into the things which work elementally. The earthly unites with the heavenly, and we know that we are entering the first state of the second world, where everything is still naturally luminous, where we only suspect that there are beings behind it. At most we perceive elementary beings, but in these elementary beings we see, as it were, the organs of action of strong, significant, sublime beings. We come, so to speak, into the first district of the Kyriotetes, Dynameis, Exusiai. They are still behind us, as it were, but they enter into these beings, and as we progress further along the path of initiation, we gradually come to the point where these beings, Kyriotetes, Dynameis, Exusiai, gradually reveal themselves more and more in their own beingness. This is connected with the fact that the world-sounding harmony of the spheres enters, but the individual tones of this world-harmony, which now resound and which actually form harmonies and melodies only in great periods of time, also form only harmonies in time, When time becomes a unity, the apocalyptic cites them as trombone sounds, so that in the tones of the trombones we have the pure life of the second hierarchy, while the first hierarchy underlies the actual experience of the senses in quite great power.
And further on we come out of this world, in which, I would like to say, all the effects of the senses have become flooded and grandiose and majestic and are thus not only superimposed on the things and processes of the physical world, but are the actual expression of the beingness, In the second Hierarchy, which works in the elemental beings, we come more and more out of this world into a third region where we no longer perceive anything natural, nor natural dissolved into elemental, but where we must perceive spiritually all that we wish to perceive. We enter a district of the spiritual world of which we must speak in the following manner; we must say to ourselves: Having passed through that which is like the dissolving sense-perceptions of the earth, which at the same time take shape in forms, and which are seized by the widening sense-perception of the stars, we have arrived at recognising, as in the last residues of sense-perception, all that works in Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynameis in the universe, in such a way that these entities are as if inwardly bound to the true substantiality of the stars. The starry world has transformed itself into the entities of the Hierarchies. Instead of looking up to the stars in the light of our senses, we live in the world of hierarchies. There the hierarchies are still saturated with what I would call splashed and dissolved sense knowledge. Now we enter the third district, where we no longer perceive everything earthly sensually, where we must perceive the soul-sensual without the impact of the sensual; we enter the district of the actual spiritual world and first get to know it in Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai. These beings can be recognised in their spirituality, and we must know, when we give them form as painters and the like, that they have this sensuous form only because they are woven into the soul-spiritual elements, into the beingness of the higher Hierarchies. We must know, for example, when we paint wings on them, that these wings are from the Beings of the second Hierarchy, who lend them their substantiality, but that they receive a head from the first Hierarchy, who lend them this design and its content. We must only be fully aware that what is within the Third Hierarchy - Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai - we can only behold in the Spirit.
What I am now discussing, my dear friends, has an immense historical significance, because if you take over writings from ancient times which deal, so to speak, intimately with these spiritual worlds, you cannot read them at all without being aware of the fact that by living into the spiritual world we first perceive, as it were, the lowest hierarchy in a spiritual way, while we still perceive the higher hierarchies with the ingredients of the sense world. And you must be aware that the old initiatory wisdom, which described it quite correctly as I am now describing it, has gradually fallen into all kinds of misunderstandings in the times of the decadence of the spiritual. Thus, among the more worldly initiates of the Middle Ages, we always find the matter described in such a way that the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones are close to the earth as the lowest hierarchies, and that one ascends through Dynameis, Kyriotetes, Exusiai to the angels, archangels and elemental forces. Just look at medieval books that are illustrated, you will not know and you will ask why the angels sit above the Seraphim. It is because these processes were no longer known intimately and were no longer imagined quite organically. This error arose when the originally quite pure teaching became contaminated with the symbols of the Babylonians during the time of the Jewish-Babylonian captivity in pre-Christian times through the contact of the Jews with the Babylonians, and through the Kabbalah, through medieval Jewish mysticism, this error of the hierarchy of the spiritual hierarchies spread further. If one wants to understand the development of ideas about the spiritual in the course of human evolution, one must be familiar with such things, and this is the right place to discuss these things in connection with making the Apocalypse comprehensible.
This is how we get out into the spiritual world. The first entities we encounter in the truly spiritual are actually those of the Third Hierarchy. The apocalyptic shows how intimately he is acquainted with all this, for more and more his endeavour is such that for everything he now describes he makes angels appear who bear the phenomena. What is quite phenomenal is that the earthly regions can reflect something that the angels bring in as messengers of the higher Hierarchies, and with this angelic appearance we enter the region where we really see how divine love reigns there as the actual ingredient of the world to which we human beings belong. For first of all we see how the somewhat normal Angeloi, Archangeloi, Archai are something like the embodiment of the higher Hierarchies. Just as, when we look at the hands, arms, feet, legs and the rest of the human body, we have the sensation: These are angels, but they are like limbs, actually like the corporeality of the higher divine spirits; they are spiritual-soul corporeality. So that one feels, my dear friends, one is in pure spirituality, but with this spirituality in the corporeality of God. That is what one ascends to.“ (Lit.:GA 346, p. 244ff)
Literature
- Rudolf Steiner: Geistige Hierarchien und ihre Widerspiegelung in der physischen Welt, GA 110 (1991), ISBN 3-7274-1100-7 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
- Rudolf Steiner: Vorträge und Kurse über christlich-religiöses Wirken, V, GA 346 (2001), ISBN 3-7274-3460-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
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