The Spirits of Motion, second rank of the second hierarchy in Steiner's angelology, who set planetary spheres in motion and gave humanity its astral-body germ at Old Moon.
Dynamis in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's name, taken from the Greek of the Pauline letters, for the second rank of the second hierarchy of angels, sitting between the Kyriotetes above and the Exusiai below. Steiner systematised the doctrine in GA 110, The Spiritual Hierarchies, given as ten lectures at Dusseldorf in April 1909, where he aligned the Greek title Dynamis with the Latin Virtutes (Virtues) of Dionysius the Areopagite and the German Geister der Bewegung (Spirits of Motion) of his own corpus. Their cosmic office is to execute, as moving power, what the Spirits of Wisdom have directed. They condensed the Ancient Moon out of the old Sun, and they were the hierarchy that bestowed the germ of the astral body on humanity during that Moon evolution. Colossians 1:16 names them under the word powers.
Dynamis is Rudolf Steiner's term, drawn from Greek Pauline scripture, for the angelic rank known in Latin as Virtutes and in English as Mights or Spirits of Motion. They occupy the middle position of the second triad in his nine-fold hierarchy. Their cosmic action is the executive moving-power that animates planetary spheres, and on Old Moon they gave humanity the first germ of the astral body.
In Steiner's Own Words
We know that the next condition is again one of condensation. The third condition of our World system is that of the Ancient Moon. Those of you who have given attention to the communications from the Akashic Record know that the ancient Moon had come into being because the Sun substance had condensed still more, as far as to the condition of water. The Moon contained no solid earth as yet, but was composed of fire, air and water. It had so coordinated the watery element. Gas or air was condensed in it to the element of water. Who effected this? That Hierarchy of spiritual Beings brought this about, whom we call Mights, Virtutes, or Spirits of Motion. Thus it happened through the Virtutes, that the mass of the ancient Moon contracted to the limits of the orbit of the present Mars.
What it Means Today
Anthroposophic Christology reads the Dynamis-stream as the cosmic-motion power that crossed into earthly history at the Mystery of Golgotha. The hierarchy that once condensed the Ancient Moon and set the planets turning is the same hierarchy whose moving-impulse, in Steiner's account, pulsed through the Christ event in three concentrated years. Sergei Prokofieff worked this line out at the Goetheanum School for Spiritual Science from the 1980s onward, in lecture cycles given at Dornach and printed by Verlag am Goetheanum, treating the Mystery of Golgotha not as a static doctrine but as the deed by which the Second Hierarchy, Dynamis at its centre, bound itself into earthly biography.
For a working practitioner this changes how the Pauline word power is read. The Virtutes of Colossians 1:16 are not vague heavenly officials. They are the executors of cosmic motion, the rank that took the Ancient Moon and made it move, and whose breath, on Steiner's account, still moves the planetary spheres above us. A student of esoteric Christianity meeting the word powers in Paul, or a eurythmist tracing the planetary gestures developed by Steiner and Marie Steiner at Dornach after 1912, is in both cases working with the same hierarchy, named in two languages, met from two angles.
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