The waking encounter, between death and rebirth, in which the soul comes to live consciously among Angels, Archangels and the higher spiritual beings.
The Meeting with the Hierarchies names the moment in the soul's afterlife when the lonely review of earthly bonds gives way to the felt presence of higher beings. Rudolf Steiner described how, once kamaloka has run its course, the soul begins to sense the Hierarchies working upon the visions around it. Angels and Archangels illumine the cloud of memory the soul carries, and a true companionship of the spirit begins.
In Steiner's Own Words
This condition gradually changes as after death we develop the faculty to sense the working of the beings of the spiritual world, of the Hierarchies, on the visions that surround us. Therefore, the situation that I have characterized is only altered as a result of a feeling that develops little by little. Beings of the Hierarchies are working on the mist that surrounds us; they shine upon this mist as the sun's rays irradiate the clouds. We have to take a certain number of memories of our life before death with us. They surround us like a cloud and on the basis of them we must develop the faculty to receive the light of the Hierarchies. Generally speaking almost every soul in our time is prepared in this way to receive the influences of the higher Hierarchies.
What it Means Today
Most readers meet the idea of a ranked angelic world through a single old book: the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, written around the year 500. That treatise fixed the nine choirs, three triads of three, that medieval theology then inherited. Steiner stood squarely in that Dionysian line, yet he moved its centre of gravity. For him the choirs are not a static diagram of heaven to be admired from below. They are the beings the soul actually keeps company with once it has died, and the meeting with them is an event in a real biography, not an article of doctrine.
This is where his Milan lecture reads so unlike a catechism. The encounter is gradual and conditioned. The soul does not simply arrive in the choir of the Angels; it grows the faculty to feel them, as an eye opens slowly to dim light. And what it can receive depends on what it brought. The Goetheanum School of Spiritual Science, the research body Steiner founded at Dornach in 1923, took up exactly this thread, treating the hierarchies as collaborators in human destiny rather than objects of devotion. Read this way, the choirs of Dionysius stop being a ladder one climbs and become the chorus one rejoins. The practical question the entry leaves with a reader is plain and uncomfortable: with what inner clarity would I want to step into that company.
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