Angels, intelligences and hierarchy · Lexicon

From the book

The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I

Attributed to Abraham the Jew · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordAngels or intelligences are created immaterial ministers; hierarchies and choirs arrange their different offices.
In the bookThe writer compares their order with planets, metals, and natural spirits, while rejecting confusion of intellectual beings with material agents.
TranslationIntelligence retains its historical sense of an intellectual being, not merely a degree of cleverness.
A place to readRead scans 131–134 before 139–140: the definitions and reservations govern the later correspondences.

Meaning

The manuscript calls angels immortal, impassible, incorruptible, immaterial, and simple. Their office is to serve the Creator and govern under his command, mediating between created things and the divine order. Intelligences names such intellectual beings, especially where the account concerns celestial governance. The term does not denote a modern impersonal faculty or a measure of reasoning ability.

The text arranges these beings through a threefold distinction subdivided into nine. It then compares that order with spheres, planets, metals, and natural spirits. The resemblance provides a method for reading the lower world. It does not mean that a metal literally becomes an immaterial angel. Indeed, the writer explicitly criticizes the confusion of celestial bodies with the intelligences that govern them and of intellectual species with the universal spirit.

Use in the book

Scans 131–132 introduce angels as a more express created image of divinity than the lower world. The first class is above celestial things, free of matter and absorbed in the vision of God. The second governs stars and spheres. The third distributes powers among lower things. The exposition reports ancestral teaching but also corrects it where it confuses the bodies of stars with their governing intelligences. This corrective voice is part of the passage, not an objection supplied by the editor.²⁶²

Scan 133 states that God created these ministers from nothing. The three divisions are subdivided into hierarchies or choirs, with offices assigned to each. The sequence attributed to Hebrew theologians moves from first existence to the emergence of ideas of forms, the impression of forms, individual power, the drawing forth of elements, and the generation of metals, plants, and animals. The ninth order is called human beings’ teacher, defender, and guardian, although the transmitted opening construction awkwardly entrusts care of that order to human beings.

Scan 134 then qualifies the entire excursus. The writer says that the arrangement is not his own opinion and may appear remote from the immediate subject, but he includes it so that a similar order can be recognized in natural elemental things. This is a methodological use of inherited classification rather than an unreserved declaration that every reported detail is his own settled doctrine. The royal road depends upon comparing orders while attending to their purposes.²⁶³

The natural counterpart at scans 139–140 has three classes and nine distinctions. The highest favorable spirits are incorruptible and free of impure material envelopes; mercurial spirits follow; the lowest are described as Tartarean or quasi-satyr-like central powers. Their offices imitate those of intellectual essences and planetary spheres. The first mobile, starry heaven, Saturn, lead, Jupiter, and tin become successive points of correspondence.

This arrangement makes angelic classification useful to the exposition of matter, but the source repeatedly insists upon the difference of mode. The natural spirits are elemental and only called spirits under a qualified use of the word. Intellectual beings are not to be derived mechanically from a metallic substance simply because their offices correspond to a metal’s operation. The error of confusing a governing intelligence with the governed body is the same kind of error the author elsewhere finds in mistaking an effect for its first cause.

The hierarchy also establishes a scale of service. Created ministers have offices under divine command; the lower orders sustain forms of generation and conservation. The work’s artist seeks knowledge of that order so as to cooperate with nature. The classification is therefore practical within the book’s ambitions, but does not confer upon the artist the status or unlimited authority of the higher agents.

Places to read

Manuscript 52r · Scan 131Angels defined as immaterial created intelligences and an express image of divinity.
Manuscript 52v · Scan 132The three classes and the correction of bodies confused with their governors.
Manuscript 53r · Scan 133Creation from nothing and the subdivision into choirs with formative offices.
Manuscript 53v · Scan 134The final offices and the author’s reservation concerning the reported arrangement.
Manuscript 56r · Scan 139The natural threefold counterpart introduced through attributed Egyptian teaching.
Manuscript 56v · Scan 140Ninefold correspondences among intellectual essences, spheres, planets, and metals.

Translation

Intelligences is retained for the historical class of beings, and the explanatory context makes its personal or substantial sense clear. Choir and hierarchy translate the source’s own alternative classifications. The edition does not silently replace its offices with a standard list of angelic names from another text.

The writer’s reservations are translated alongside the classification. His statement that the arrangement is not his own opinion limits what can be inferred about his commitment to it. At the same time, his decision to use it as a model remains consequential. A faithful reading preserves both the distance and the operative use.

anges

Attested: H001-S131; H001-S132; H001-S133; H001-S134. Created intellectual ministers with differentiated offices.

intelligences

Attested: H001-S131; H001-S132; H001-S140. Intellectual beings, especially in celestial governance.

hiérarchie

Attested: H001-S133; H001-S139. The ordered grouping of ministers and the corresponding natural model.

chœurs

Attested: H001-S133. The alternative term for the subdivided angelic orders.

Source note

Hogart Manuscript 3, scan 132. The text criticizes the confusion of stellar bodies with their governing intelligences while reporting the inherited classification.

Hogart Manuscript 3, scan 134. The author expressly distances himself from the reported arrangement but retains it as a comparative model for natural order.