Celestial Hierarchies of Sentient Beings
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, William Quan Judge, Hieronymus von Mansfeld, George Robert Stow Mead · The Masque of Love Series · 14 pages
*Fourteen pages that are almost entirely pictures: a contents page followed by eleven full-page diagrams*, each of a different tradition's ordering of beings between the Absolute and man. It is the plate-album of this series: ten of the eleven sheets are also listed individually on the section page as .jpg images, and the eleventh, the Pythagorean Tetractys, is held there as its own PDF — this file gathers all of them in one place. Its subtitle names its purpose: guiding and animating Kosmos.
Most of the sheets share one design, which is what makes the comparison work: a black disc at the top marked ABSOLUTENESS, and a broad yellow pyramid descending from it carrying the ranks in order. The *Hierarchy of Compassion runs from Adi-Buddhi or Cosmic Ideation down through Maha-Buddhi, Fohat, the Seven Logoi of Life shooting out like fiery tongues, the seven Dhyani-Buddhas each in charge of a Round, the seven Dhyani-Bodhisattvas each in charge of a Globe, the seven super-terrestrial Bodhisattvas each in charge of seven Root-Races, the seven Manushya-Buddhas each in charge of a single Root-Race, and finally humanity at large. Its companion drawing shows the same doctrine as a seven-pointed star with the globes A to G ringed around it. The Dionysian sheet gives Hyparxis at the summit, then Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; Dominions, Virtues and Powers; Principalities, Archangels and Angels. The Kabbalistic sheet sets out the Sephirothal Tree from Kether the Crown down to Malkuth the Kingdom, with the left pillar marked Destruction, the right Creation and the middle Harmony. The Platonic puts Hyparxis, Gods, Demigods, Heroes, Men, Animals, Plants, Mineral World and Hades in a single column with their glosses beside them. The Ladder of Being after The Secret Doctrine divides its pyramid into three Dhyani-Chohan classes above, the human, animal, plant and mineral kingdoms in the middle, and three Elemental classes below. The Syrian (Inverted) sheet is astronomical, running from the invisible stars of the Milky Way down through the sphere of 1,122 stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury and Moon, each with the order of angels that rules it. The Simonian sheet, headed Intellectual Fire, is the most intricate — two black discs for the Universal Principle and the Boundless Power, then three worlds of being with lettered triangles and paired emanations. Two further sheets stand apart from the pyramid form: the Rootless Roots of Colour and Sound, seven bright concentric rings named for the notes of the scale set around a central prism, made for the 144th anniversary of the Theosophical Society; and The Divine Pedigree of Man*, a dense chart resolving into a human face, which maps the microcosm and macrocosm onto one another organ by organ. The last is the Pythagorean Tetractys, held separately in this series as its own file.
Read the full text (PDF, 2.8 MB, 14 pages)
