CHAPTER 1
Hierarchies, Realms, Domains & Kingdoms
Modern ears, regard early creation stories as fanciful fables. And so they sound until, digging deeper into understandings of their time, a clear logic is exposed.
It was not until modern science, questioned the rules of early science, that an idea and a purpose, ceased to be the basis of everything. That foundation is still not questioned in all other disciplines. Engineers, Artists, Designers, Inventors, Builders, Novelists, Musicians, and any other creative discipline, start with a purpose and an Idea. The universally accepted law of the time was: Law and Order are of necessity, set into creation within the idea.
Hierarchy is not the same as a chain of command. Hierarchy, (‘sacred-origin’),50 is the order in which the stones are laid down in the making. In building a cathedral, the foundation is the ‘hierarchy’. In Genesis, the sun, laid as the first stone of the material universe, is seen as the pinnacle of the hierarchy triangle. It sets the bounds of the planets because it is the centre of gravity for the solar-system. The sun, also sets the bounds of light and darkness naturally, as we move around it. It governs the dominion we call, ‘our solar-system’. The sun was set as ruler or king. If a king has no subjects, he has no rule. Greeks, knowing this, tried to design a system called Democracy, by which, the foundations rule. In doing so, they came up against the universally stated law of Ideas: Law and Order are set within the Creator’s idea. But the creator is source and therefore the base of creation. We might say we have now been introduced to this topsy-turvy world, where the king is servant of all and the servant is king.
Babylonians appear to be the first to document the sequence from idea to reality. Forming a hierarchical triangle, they observed the process for turning an idea into a physical reality. You can see this structure built into their fables. The influence of the three education centres of the time, (Babylon, Egypt and Phoenicia), meant that the whole early world embraced this hierarchy from idea to reality. Small wonder then why most of the creation stories follow the same pattern. Small wonder also why the Genesis account follows this pattern, but gives so much more detail than the other accounts.
One hindrance might be, in regard to the fables themselves, it should not be assumed that early listeners believed them literally51. Modern humans have no problem separating out principles woven into myths and fables. J. R. Tolkin, and C. S. Lewis did not invent this method of teaching, it is a principle they learned from Greeks, who learned it from the Babylonians, who learned it from the earliest ages of communication before writing. Babylonians and Egyptians, could just as easily distinguish between the principle and the story line. Gods of these different kingdoms then, may have had different names and stories, but the creative procedures conformed to common world concepts. On the whole, order, structure, and hierarchy underlying the myths, conform to scientific laws today.
That there is a hierarchy in life is beyond doubt, for scripture readers and scientists alike, world order demands it. The kingdom of Heaven, is no different. Creationists, believe the physical realm is based on a spiritual pattern. Without order and hierarchy, everything would return to Chaos. An anarchy of warring powers, would end in annihilation. If matter does not conform to laws and stay with boundaries it will collapse. Ancient Science taught us this by cataloguing and describing a hierarchy of life. Intelligence needs a catalogue to make sense of so much detail.
Kingdoms and domains
Humans depend heavily on categorization to store and recall knowledge. Today, in the scientific world, categorization is organized into domains and kingdoms on a hierarchy. Most A-level students of Biology will recognize figure-three, where primary groups called Domains, are divided into Kingdoms. It was a decidedly late-modern decision to treat ‘Life’ simply as a pinnacle of the hierarchy.52 Every other era before it, recognized a spiritual domain above or alongside the physical domain and incorporated with it. Early Sumerians in Egypt and Babylon, being rather more adventurous and explicit in their categories, began with the assumption that, for a realm to run like clockwork, it must have begun life as an idea. Hence, it started in the spiritual dimension with an idea, (because that is where ideas live).53 The idea had to be communicated, (hence each pinnacle god is said to have ‘spoken’ the world into existence), then other Elohim, motivated and shape the chaos by laws and boundaries. Finally, ‘Breath’ is impregnated into inanimate materials to produce life and purpose. A summary of all the early models in, on page , categorizes the major building blocks of kingdoms and domains, as the ancient world understood them.
The Unified Egyptian creation story54
This story varies according to the period. Before Egypt united as one kingdom they had ten names for creator gods, one for each separate kingdom. Gods were like flags back then, being both territorial and local. In each of these kingdoms, one god was held supreme because he had the idea of creation. The ‘idea’, gave the creator god the right of ownership of all that was created within that idea. Ptah, was the creator god according to Memphis, while Amun took the credit in Thebes. These consolidated into Ra, (the sun god), who become the co-deity in Egypt during unified Kingdom period. When Egypt united, Khnum, became recognized as the creator god with the idea, and therefore owner of all creation.
Khnum had the idea and the design, enlisting Shu, (the god of air), to separate sky goddess, Nut, from the earth god, Geb. Ra, organized and motivated life to grow out of Nun (chaos). Egypt was probably the source of the multi-god theory, having thousands of them. The Greeks later used the Egyptian model with similar conclusion, But Egyptian hierarchy, (having more than a thousand gods) ran out of planets and continued using: seasons, rivers, mountains and other objects within nature to describe where each god fitted in the Hierarchy. Later, the god-children rebelled against their parents, and the spiritual realm went to war, trying to take the throne of Khnum.
50 The word hierarchies is built from the Greek words: hieros, (sacred) and archein, (origin ), it is the order in which something is built, not the order of control.
51 I speak of the fables collectively, I do not give evidence as to the literal / poetical arguments of Genesis.
52 See Fig 1
53 Ibid Chapter 2 What are Spiritual attributes?
54 The accounts that foll will differ from source to source but the principles are generally maintained