(6) These ten Sephiroth which are ineffable, whose appearance is like scintillating flames, have no end but are infinite. The word of God is in them as they burst forth, and as they return; they obey the divine command, rushing along as a whirlwind, returning to prostrate themselves at his throne.

(7) These ten Sephiroth which are, moreover, ineffable, have their end even as their beginning, conjoined, even as is a flame to a burning coal: for our God is superlative in his unity, and does not permit any second one. And who canst thou place before the only one?

(2) Ten are the numbers, as are the Sephiroth, and twenty-two the letters, these are the Foundation of all things. Of these letters, three are mothers, seven are double, and twelve are simple.

(3) And out of the triad one stands apart; and in the heptad there are two triads, and one standing apart. The dodecad symbolizes war, the triad of amity, the triad of enmity, three which are life-giving, three which are death-dealing, and God, the faithful king, rules over all from the throne of his sanctity. One above three, three above seven, and seven above twelve, and all are linked together, and one with another.

(4) The Book of Successful Contemplation (Ying Kuan Ching) says: The sun sinks in the Great Water and magic pictures of trees in rows arise. The setting of the sun means that in Chaos (in the world before phenomena, that is, the intelligible world), a foundation is laid: that is the condition free of opposites {wu chi). Highest good is like water, pure and spotless. It is the ruler of the Great Polarity, the god who is revealed in the sign for that which greatly disturbs, Chin (19). Chen is also symbolized by wood, wherefore the image of trees in rows appears. A sevenfold row of trees means the light of the seven body-openings (or heart-openings). In the norlii-west is the direction of the creative. When it moves on one place farther, the abysmal is there. The sim which sinks into the Great Water is the image for the creative and abysmal. The abysmal is the direction of midnight (mouse, Tzu% north). At the winter solstice the thunder (Chin) is in the middle of the Earth quite hidden and covered up. Only when the sign Chin is reached, does the Light-pole come over the earth again. That is the picture representing the row of trees. The rest can be correspondingly inferred.

(1) Now that the Hierarchy itself has been, in my judgment, sufficiently defined, we must next extol the Angelic Hierarchy, and we must contemplate, with supermundane eyes, its sacred formations, depicted in the Oracles, in order that we may be borne aloft to their Divinely resplendent simplicity, through the mystic representations, and may extol the source of all Hierarchical science with God-becoming reverence and with thanksgivings. First of all, however, let this truth be spoken --that it was through goodness that the superessential Godhead, having fixed all the essences of things being, brought them into being. For this is the peculiar characteristic of the Cause of all things, and of goodness surpassing all, to call things being to participation of Itself, as each order of things being was determined from its own analogy. For all things being share in a Providence, which bubbles forth from the superessential Deity, Cause of all things. For they would not be, unless they had participated in the Essence and Origin of things being. All things then, without life, participate in It by their being. For the being of all things is the Deity, above being; things living participate in its life-giving power, above all life; things rational and intellectual participate in its self-perfect and preeminently perfect wisdom, above all reason and mind. It is evident, then, that all those Beings are around It, which have participated in It, in many forms.

(7) Here I must lay hold on the whole divine body in the midst or centre at the heart, and explain the whole body, how nature is or existeth, and there you will see the highest ground, how all the seven spirits of God continually generate one another, and how the Deity has neither beginning nor end.

(1) Come, then, let us at last, if you please, rest our mental vision from the strain of lofty contemplation, befitting Angels, and descend to the divided and manifold breadth of the many-shaped variety of the Angelic forms, and then return analytically from the same, as from images, to the simplicity of the Heavenly Minds. But let this first be made plain to you, that the explanations of the sacredly depicted likenesses represent the same ranks of the Heavenly Beings as sometimes ruling, and, at other times, as being ruled; and the last, ruling, and the first, being ruled; and the same, as has been said, having first, and middle, and last powers --without introducing anything absurd into the description, according to the following method of explanation. For if indeed we were to say that some are ruled by those above them, and then that they rule the same, and that those above, whilst ruling those below, are ruled by those same who are being ruled, the thing would manifestly be absurd, and mixed with all sorts of confusion. But if we say that the same rule and are ruled, but no longer the self-same, or from the self-same, but that each same is ruled by those before, and rules those below, one might say appropriately that the Divinely pictured presentations in the Oracles may sometimes attribute, properly and truly, the very same, both to first, and middle, and last powers. Now the straining elevation to things above, and their being drawn unswervingly around each other, as being guardians of their own proper powers, and that they participate in the providential faculty to provide for those below them by mutual communication, befit truly all the Heavenly Beings, although some, pre-eminently and wholly, as we have often said, and others partially and subordinately.

(31) VII. The Plane of the Consciousness of the Gods If, as we have seen, it is most difficult to speak in understandable terms concerning the phases of life and activity on the last mentioned Plane of Consciousness, what must be the difficulty of even hinting at the life and activities of the highest plane of all—the Plane of the Consciousness of the Gods On this highest of all Planes of Consciousness, however, dwell beings so high in the scale of knowledge, power, life, and bliss that even the imagination of the advanced student or teacher can scarcely grasp the idea. This is the Plane of the Gods, in verity—of being so far advanced that they are practically akin to the conception of the Gods created by man to account for the Universe, and to serve as objects of worship.

(9) Let us, then, make a mental picture of our universe: each member shall remain what it is, distinctly apart; yet all is to form, as far as possible, a complete unity so that whatever comes into view shall show as if it were the surface of the orb over all, bringing immediately with it the vision, on the one plane, of the sun and of all the stars with earth and sea and all living things as if exhibited upon a transparent globe.

Bring this vision actually before your sight, so that there shall be in your mind the gleaming representation of a sphere, a picture holding sprung, themselves, of that universe and repose or some at rest, some in motion. Keep this sphere before you, and from it imagine another, a sphere stripped of magnitude and of spatial differences; cast out your inborn sense of Matter, taking care not merely to attenuate it: call on God, maker of the sphere whose image you now hold, and pray Him to enter. And may He come bringing His own Universe with all the Gods that dwell in it- He who is the one God and all the gods, where each is all, blending into a unity, distinct in powers but all one god in virtue of that one divine power of many facets.

More truly, this is the one God who is all the gods; for, in the coming to be of all those, this, the one, has suffered no diminishing. He and all have one existence while each again is distinct. It is distinction by state without interval: there is no outward form to set one here and another there and to prevent any from being an entire identity; yet there is no sharing of parts from one to another. Nor is each of those divine wholes a power in fragment, a power totalling to the sum of the measurable segments: the divine is one all-power, reaching out to infinity, powerful to infinity; and so great is God that his very members are infinites. What place can be named to which He does not reach?

Great, too, is this firmament of ours and all the powers constellated within it, but it would be greater still, unspeakably, but that there is inbound in it something of the petty power of body; no doubt the powers of fire and other bodily substances might themselves be thought very great, but in fact, it is through their failure in the true power that we see them burning, destroying, wearing things away, and slaving towards the production of life; they destroy because they are themselves in process of destruction, and they produce because they belong to the realm of the produced.

The power in that other world has merely Being and Beauty of Being. Beauty without Being could not be, nor Being voided of Beauty: abandoned of Beauty, Being loses something of its essence. Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty; and Beauty is loved because it is Being. How then can we debate which is the cause of the other, where the nature is one? The very figment of Being needs some imposed image of Beauty to make it passable and even to ensure its existence; it exists to the degree in which it has taken some share in the beauty of Idea; and the more deeply it has drawn on this, the less imperfect it is, precisely because the nature which is essentially the beautiful has entered into it the more intimately.

(11) I think, therefore, that those ancient sages, who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues, showed insight into the nature of the All; they perceived that, though this Soul is everywhere tractable, its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated, a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it, or representing it, and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it.

It belongs to the nature of the All to make its entire content reproduce, most felicitously, the Reason-Principles in which it participates; every particular thing is the image within matter of a Reason-Principle which itself images a pre-material Reason-Principle: thus every particular entity is linked to that Divine Being in whose likeness it is made, the divine principle which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each creation. Such mediation and representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for the created to be without share in the Supreme, and for the Supreme to descend into the created.

The Intellectual-Principle in the Supreme has ever been the sun of that sphere- let us accept that as the type of the creative Logos- and immediately upon it follows the Soul depending from it, stationary Soul from stationary Intelligence. But the Soul borders also upon the sun of this sphere, and it becomes the medium by which all is linked to the overworld; it plays the part of an interpreter between what emanates from that sphere down to this lower universe, and what rises- as far as, through soul, anything can- from the lower to the highest.

Nothing, in fact, is far away from anything; things are not remote: there is, no doubt, the aloofness of difference and of mingled natures as against the unmingled; but selfhood has nothing to do with spatial position, and in unity itself there may still be distinction.

These Beings are divine in virtue of cleaving to the Supreme, because, by the medium of the Soul thought of as descending they remain linked with the Primal Soul, and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the Intellectual Principle, the single object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their being.

(2) This, then, is the revelation of their names, so far as we can give it; and we ought to say what we think their Hierarchy is. For I suppose we have sufficiently shewn above, that the purpose of every Hierarchy is an unswerving devotion to the divine imitation of the Divine Likeness, and that every Hierarchical function is set apart for the sacred reception and distribution of an undefiled purification, and Divine Light, and perfecting science. And now I pray that I may speak worthily of the most exalted Minds--how the Hierarchy amongst them is exhibited through the Oracles. One must consider, then, that the Hierarchy is akin, and in every respect like, to the first Beings, who are established after the Godhead, who gave them Being, and who are marshalled, as it were, in Its very vestibule, who surpass every unseen and seen created power. We must then regard them as pure, not as though they had been freed from unholy stains and blemishes, nor yet as though they were unreceptive of earthly fancies, but as far exalted above every stain of remissness and every inferior holiness, as befits the highest degree of purity--established above the most Godlike powers, and clinging unflinchingly to their own self-moved and same-moved rank in their invariable love of God, conscious in no respect whatever of any declivity to a worse condition, but having the unsullied fixity of their own Godlike identity--never liable to fall, and always unmoved; and again, as "contemplative," not contemplators of intellectual symbols as sensible, nor as being led to the Divine Being by the varied texture of holy representations written for meditation, but as being filled with all kinds of immaterial knowledge of higher light, and satiated, as permissible, with the beautifying and original beauty of super-essential and thrice manifested contemplation, and thus, being deemed worthy of the Communion with Jesus, they do not stamp pictorially the deifying similitude in divinely-formed images, but, as being really near to Him, in first participation of the knowledge of His deifying illuminations; nay more, that the imitation of God is given to them in the highest possible degree, and they participate, so far as is allowable to them, in His deifying and philanthropic virtues, in the power of a first manifestation; and, likewise as "perfected," not as being illuminated with an analytic science of sacred variety, but as being filled with a first and pre-eminent deification, as beseems the most exalted science of the works of God, possible in Angels. For, not through other holy Beings, but being ministered from the very Godhead, by the immediate elevation to It, by their power, and rank, surpassing all, they are both established near the All-Holy without any shadow of turning, and are conducted for contemplation to the immaterial and intelligible comeliness, as far as permissible, and are initiated into the scientific methods of the works of God, as being first and around God, being ministered, in the highest degree, from the very source of consecration.

(9) These deities are formed into groups of five pairs, each group of five being surrounded by a fivefold circle of radiances, the male Bodhisattvas partaking of the nature of the Divine Fathers, and the female Bodhisattvas partaking of the nature of the Divine Mothers. All these divine conclaves will come to shine upon thee in one complete conclave. They are thine own tutelary deities. Know them to be such.

(4) And from thence came the Names of the Thrones and Principalities, all according to the Essences of the first and great God goes forth again into many thousand Thousands, yet there is a certain Number [of them,] and in the Center of God none, [or no Number but Infinity;] and thus out of the Fountain of every Essence are gone forth, first the Thrones, and in the Throne many thousand Thousands.

(1) It is necessary then, as I think, first to set forth what we think is the purpose of every Hierarchy, and what benefit each one confers upon its followers; and next to celebrate the Heavenly Hierarchies according to their revelation in the Oracles; then following these Oracles, to say in what sacred forms the holy writings of the Oracles depict the celestial orders, and to what sort of simplicity we must be carried through the representations; in order that we also may not, like the vulgar, irreverently think that the heavenly and Godlike minds are certain many-footed and many-faced creatures, or moulded to the brutishness of oxen, or the savage form of lions, and fashioned like the hooked beaks of eagles, or the feathery down of birds, and should imagine that there are certain wheels of fire above the heaven, or material thrones upon which the Godhead may recline, or certain many-coloured horses, and spear-bearing leaders of the host, and whatever else was transmitted by the Oracles to us under multifarious symbols of sacred imagery. And indeed, the Word of God artlessly makes use of poetic representations of sacred things, respecting the shapeless minds, out of regard to our intelligence, so to speak, consulting a mode of education proper and natural to it, and moulding the inspired writings for it.

(21) Behold, the first, innermost and deepest birth or geniture stands in the centre, and is the heart of the Deity, which is generated by the qualifying or fountain spirits of God; and this birth or geniture is the light, which yet, though it be generated out of the qualifying or fountain spirits, no qualifying or fountain spirit of itself alone can comprehend, but every qualifying or fountain spirit comprehendeth only its own instanding, innate place or seat in the light; but all the seven spirits jointly together comprehend the whole light, for they are the father of the light.

(5) These Ten Numbers, beyond the Infinite one, have the boundless realms, boundless origin and end, an abyss of good and one of evil, boundless height and depth, East and West, North and South, and the one only God and king, faithful forever seated on his throne, shall rule over all, forever and ever.

(5) Such, then, is the style of the example in arithmetic. And let the testimony of geometry be the tabernacle that was constructed, and the ark that was fashioned, - constructed in most regular proportions, and through divine ideas, by the gift of understanding, which leads us from things of sense to intellectual objects, or rather from these to holy things, and to the holy of holies. For the squares of wood indicate that the square form, producing fight angles, pervades all, and points out security. And the length of the structure was three hundred cubits, and the breadth fifty, and the height thirty; and above, the ark ends in a cubit, narrowing to a cubit from the broad base like a pyramid, the symbol of those who are purified and tested by fire. And this geometrical proportion has a place, for the transport of those holy abodes, whose differences are indicated by the differences of the numbers set down below.

(1) How many, and of what sort, are the Orders of the supercelestial Beings, and how the Hierarchies are classified amongst themselves, I affirm, the deifying Author of their consecration alone distinctly knows; and further, that they know their own proper powers and illuminations, and their sacred and supermundane regularity. For it is impossible that we should know the mysteries of the supercelestial Minds and their most holy perfections, except, some one might say, so far as the Godhead has revealed to us, through them, as knowing perfectly their own condition. We, then, will utter nothing as from ourselves, but whatever angelic visions have been gazed upon by the holy Prophets of God, we, as initiated in these, will set forth as best we can. The Word of God has designated the whole Heavenly Beings as nine, by appellations, which shew their functions. These our Divine Initiator divides into three threefold Orders. He also says that that which is always around God is first and is declared by tradition to be united closely and immediately, to Him, before all the rest. For he says that the teaching of the Holy Oracles declares, that the most Holy Thrones, and the many-eyed and many-winged hosts, named in the Hebrew tongue Cherubim and Seraphim, are established immediately around God, with a nearness superior to all. This threefold order, then, our illustrious Guide spoke of as one, and of equal rank, and really first Hierarchy, than which there is not another more Godlike or immediately nearer to the earliest illuminations of the Godhead. But he says, that which is composed of the Authorities, and Lordships, and Powers is second; and, as respects the lowest of the Heavenly Hierarchies, the Order of the Angels and Archangels and Principalities is third. Next: Caput VII. Sacred Texts | Christianity « Previous: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite: On the Heavenly Hi... Index Next: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite: On the Heavenly Hi... » Sacred Texts | Christianity

But the first Psyche loved Eros, who was with her, and poured her blood upon him and upon the earth. Then from that blood the first rose sprouted upon the earth out of the thorn bush, for a joy in the light that was to appear in the bramble. After this the beautiful, fragrant flowers sprouted up from the earth according to their kind from the blood of each of the virgins of the daughters of forethought. When they had become enamored of Eros, they poured out their blood upon him and upon the earth. After these things every herb sprouted up in the earth according to its kind, having the seed of the authorities and their angels. After these things the authorities created from the waters all species of beasts and reptiles and birds according to their kind, having the seed of the authorities and their angels. But before all these things, when Adam of light appeared on the first day, he remained upon the earth about two days. He left the lower forethought in heaven and began to ascend to his light. And immediately darkness came upon the whole world. Now, when Sophia, who is in the lower heaven, wanted to receive authority from Pistis, she created great luminaries and all the stars, and put them in the heaven to shine upon the earth and to perfect chronological signs and seasons and years and months and days and nights and seconds, and so on. And thus everything up in the sky was ordered. Now, when Adam of light wanted to enter his light, that is, the eighth heaven, he was unable because of the poverty that had mixed with his light. Then he created a great eternal realm for himself; in that eternal realm he created six realms and their worlds, six in number, which are seven times better than the heavens of chaos and their worlds. But all these realms and their worlds exist within the infinite region that is between the eighth and chaos beneath it, and they are reckoned with the world that belongs to the poverty. If you wish to know the arrangement of these, you will find it written in the Seventh Cosmos of Hieralias the Prophet.