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We know from the Scriptures that there are Nine Orders of
the Angels. These are: Angels, Archangels, Virtues, Powers,
Principalities, Dominations, Throne, Cherubim and Seraphim.
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St. Paul was the first to acknowledge these Orders in his
writings to Ephesians and the Colossians; from this we can
determine that St. Paul recognised Nine Orders in total.
Those indicated above and in the table below.
It was Cornelius Agrippa, who assigned these Nine Orders
of Angels to the Kabalhlistic Tree of Life, as follows:
| Seraphim |
The Primum Mobile |
Kether |
| Cherubim |
The Starry Heaven |
Chokmah |
| Thrones |
The sphere of Saturn |
Binah |
| Dominations |
The sphere of Jupiter |
Chesed |
| Powers |
The sphere of Mars |
Geburah |
| Virtues |
The sphere of the Sun |
Tiphereth |
| Principalities |
The sphere of Venus |
Netzach |
| Archangels |
The sphere of Mercury |
Hod |
| Angels |
The sphere of the Moon |
Yesod |
From the perspective of the Pauline Art the above table
is important as it indicates the particular Angelic Order
associated with each of the traditional planets.
But what about the Primum Mobile and Starry Heaven? Well,
in medieval astronomy, the Primum Mobile, or "first
moved," is the outermost moving sphere in the universe.
Astronomers believed that the seven naked-eye planets (including
the Moon and the Sun) were carried around the spherical
Earth on invisible orbs, the Universe.
The Starry Heaven is the area which is between the planets
and the Primum Mobile. The ancient Greek philosophers believed
in a stationary Earth, which was the centre of the Universe.
At night they observed the stars which appeared to revolve
in a circle around a point in the northern sky. They concluded
that the heavens were in continual circular motion. From
this observation they reasoned that the stars must be attached
to a rigid heaven that held them fixed in the sky (in which
the planets revolved), so that their positions did not change
relative to one another as the sky turned.
Naturally this may seem a little ridiculous with the astronomical
knowledge that we today possess. What the ancients were
trying to do, which is still relevant today, is to identify
those areas within our Solar System, were they believed
the angels had dominion over.
What the table does tell us is that at the top of the tree
is the Universe (Primum Mobile) the outer most mechanism
which makes our total Universe revolves. Between the traditional
planets, which can be observed to move independently in
variable orbits, and the The Primum Mobile is the area known
as the Starry Heavens, where the star are held in fixed
positions by the heaven.
References:
De occulta philosophia libri tres (Three
Books of Occult Philosophy,) by Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535),
published in Cologne 1533.
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