The Spiritual Hierarchies

We have all heard of angels, whether our personal guardian angel or the classical images of the archangels. What many people fail to realize, however, is that there are distinct classes of angels that operate within what is called a spiritual hierarchy. The spiritual hierarchy consists of nine classes of angels, with each class serving as the source and mediator of different aspects of creation and life.

This teaching was initially brought forth by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the fifth century and became the foundation for Christian angelology. It also established the concept of spiritual development grounded in objective knowledge of the structure of heaven and the beings who govern it. In earlier eras, initiation did not occur through an objective understanding of the spiritual world, but rather through clairvoyant experiences of a series of images or archetypes that were largely mysterious to the individual. It is during the Christian era that humanity gains the capacity to grasp the spiritual world from an objective, scientific perspective, and understanding the hierarchies is central to this task.

The Celestial Hierarchies becomes the cornerstone for creating a living image of the cosmos, revealing the ladder to heaven, or the grades and qualities of human initiation. It also reveals that what we call “heaven” is actually the bodies of different classes of spiritual beings. We do not live within a cosmos of impersonal energy made of waves and particles, but rather within the bodies of great spiritual beings whom we can grow to sense and understand within ourselves. We live within the body of angels whose very essence is united with ours and directly contributing to our spiritual bodies and basic faculties of perception. Just as the elementals and beings of lower kingdoms live within us, we live within a series of greater beings ascending in order toward the Godhead itself. Thus, our experience of God is mediated by the hierarchies within which we operate.

In 1909, we see this lineage continue when Austrian mystic and scholar Rudolf Steiner brings the spiritual hierarchies into modern times through his ten-part lecture series titled The Spiritual Hierarchies (GA 110). Here he acknowledges the classical image of the hierarchies and expands upon it. He describes how angelic activity has not only shaped the physical world and humanity, but also the spiritual planes themselves. He also discusses the destiny of humanity, revealing that through spiritual development, human beings will one day reach the level the angels occupy today, becoming the tenth hierarchy.

When we consider what these two individuals have presented, we see a picture very different from what both modern science and the New Age often imagine. We encounter a vision of a vibrant living cosmos, not a mechanical hologram of energy waves that we may one day dominate as self-made gods, but a reality of beings living within beings at different stages of development. To evolve naturally, we are called to surrender the lower ego and attune ourselves to God’s will, which is perceived and experienced through the hierarchies. The lower ego rejects authority and hierarchy, believing such structures are rooted in domination. The spiritual hierarchies, however, are not about controlling humanity, but about revealing the unfolding of life and creation itself, which has progressed through successive stages that together form a natural hierarchical order.