The paper addresses the panel's theme by mixing insights from philosophy, religious thought, the history of religions, and anthropology into an intellectual cocktail that invites comparative discussion of concepts and practices of human, meta-human, and metaphysical hierarchies. Its aim is to distil a set of general propositions and to assess the current state of the art. The thinkers discussed include Plato; selected figures from Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, esotericism, and occultism; as well as Thomas Aquinas, Hume, Nietzsche, Louis Dumont, David Graeber, Marshall Sahlins, and others.