Mythical celestial beings

World symbolism includes classes of beings considered to dwell above mankind in various stations or heavens. Western symbolism knows only the classes of angels, but there are in other traditions men in space, just as there are on earth. These beings, however, differ from earthmen in behaviour, in appearance, in mind and in faculties. Other celestral beings imaged include incorporeal powers and intelligences. In Greek mythology, for example, there are the Furies, the Fates, the Graces, the Harpies, the Hours and the Muses. In Indian mythology also there are Gandharvas, Aswins and others.

The celestial beings sometimes represent the instrumentalities of divine action. There is also a class of beings who function as messengers, and another who are intermediaries, often intimately associated with the fate of nations, or with individual spiritual life. In the last case there is the reified figure of Wisdom (Sophia). Sophia long has been present in the European consciousness as demonstrated by the mythology of early Gnostic Christianity, and before that of Parmenides' 'Truth'. Sophia reappeared in J Boehme and G Gichtel and their followers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is present in the Romantic mysticism of Novalis, Goethe, Steiner, and Jung and their disciples.