An Error

The appellation "incorporeals" does not owe its provenance to the commonality of a single same genus, as is the case with bodies, but by reference to a simple negativity with respect to bodies. That is why there is nothing in the way of some of them being beings, and others non-beings, and some being prior to bodies, while others are accompaniments of them; of some being separable from bodies, while others are inseparable; of some subsisting in themselves, while others have need of other things for their existence; of some being identical with their activities and with self-moving modes of life, while others exist as by-products of modes of life and other types of activity. For they have received this appellation of theirs by way of negation, stating what they are not, rather than by way of assertion of what they are. (Porphyry, Sentences XIX, as translated by John Dillon, emphasis mine)

I had been laboring under the assumption that incorporeal things were always prior to corporeal things, and therefore that the spirit was prior to the body, but this seems not to be the case: Porphyry makes the point that some incorporeals are not prior to bodies, and indeed Plotinus seems to assume that the spirit only exists for the express purpose of animating the body (that is, that the body must exist before or together with it).

So it may be mistaken, in their view, to consider the ætherial realms prior to the material ones, as I had been: they come into being together and act together.