The second rank of Steiner's nine hierarchies, the Spirits of Harmonies who shape the wisdom-plans of cosmic evolution.
Cherubim in Anthroposophy are the second rank of the nine spiritual hierarchies, the Spirits of Harmonies (German: Geister der Harmonien) standing beneath the Seraphim and above the Thrones in the first triad. Rudolf Steiner systematized this taxonomy in The Spiritual Hierarchies and Their Reflection in the Physical World (GA 110), the Düsseldorf cycle of April 1909. Their cosmic function is to take the highest ideas the Seraphim receive from the Trinity and transpose them into workable wisdom-plans, which the Thrones then pour into the primeval fire-substance of a new world-system. They are pattern-bearers of cosmic evolution. The Old Testament memory-traces (Genesis 3:24 guarding Eden, Ezekiel's four-faced creatures, the cherubim above the ark) remember this rank dimly. Steiner's specific cosmic-evolutionary role stays the anchor: the wisdom-harmonies that shape star-existence today still flow through Cherubim activity.
The Cherubim are spirits of highest cosmic wisdom. In Steiner's cosmology they sit one rank below the Seraphim (who receive the Trinity's plans) and one rank above the Thrones (who pour their own substance into matter). Their work is to think through what they have received until it becomes a workable harmony, a pattern that the lower hierarchies can carry into actual world-formation.
In Steiner's Own Words
Seraphim is a name which for those who understand it in its true sense, even in that of ancient Hebrew Esotericism, has always signified that the task of the Seraphim was to receive from the Trinity the highest ideas and aims for a system of worlds. The Cherubim, the next lower rank of the Hierarchies, had the task of building up in wisdom the aims and ideas which they received from the higher gods. Thus the Cherubim are spirits of highest wisdom, who understood how to transpose into workable plans, the inspirations given to them by the Seraphim.
What it Means Today
The clearest living application of the Cherubim doctrine sits inside the Goetheanum's First Class of the School of Spiritual Science in Dornach. The nineteen Class Lessons that Rudolf Steiner gave between February and August 1924 (GA 270) work the meditant in stages through the spiritual hierarchies, and the Cherubim appear in those lessons not as iconographic figures but as the wisdom-pattern the meditant is asked to think with. Class readers since 1924 (the work continues at Dornach under the present Class holders) approach the rank through specific mantric verses and through painted blackboards that map the cosmic-evolutionary sequence Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan. The Cherubim are not pictured. They are the wisdom by which the picture coheres.
That distinction matters for any reader coming to Steiner from the Genesis or Ezekiel imagery. The four-faced creatures of Ezekiel 1, the figures with flaming sword at the gate of Eden in Genesis 3:24, the gold cherubim above the ark in Exodus 25, are dim memory-traces, sense-images that the Hebrew prophets caught of beings whose actual work is cognitive and cosmic. Steiner's anchor stays in the function, not the figure. The Cherubim are what holds star-existence in its harmonic relations now, the same now as in 1909 when he gave the Düsseldorf lectures, the same now as on ancient Saturn when (in his account) they first surrounded the warmth-globe and waited for the Sun-condition in which their wisdom-work would begin. For Thalira readers, the practical question is whether one is willing to study the rank as cognitive cosmic substance rather than as winged image. The First Class verses give the meditant that door.
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