Khamael

In this collection Khamael appears as the archangel assigned to Geburah, one of the ten sephiroth (emanations) of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. The practice of assigning an archangel to each sephirah, together with a divine name and an angelic choir, was developed in Jewish Kabbalah and was taken up and systematised by Christian Kabbalists and, in its now-standard English form, by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Khamael governs Geburah in that scheme. Several of the names recur elsewhere in this collection under the planetary and elemental systems, a sign of the three overlapping traditions that Western esotericism inherited and never fully harmonised. The scheme is presented as a documented esoteric tradition rather than as religious doctrine or as a claim about angelic beings.

Khamael, "he who sees God" or, on another reading, "burner of God," fits Geburah's character as the sephirah of severity and martial judgement, but he is entirely absent from the older rosters: he appears in none of the Hebrew Bible's angel references, none of 1 Enoch's several lists of archangels, and none of the Eastern Orthodox or Coptic churches' own traditional sevens, which name entirely different figures. Khamael belongs specifically to later Western ceremonial and Kabbalistic compilations, among them popular nineteenth and twentieth-century Catholic devotional lists of "the seven archangels" that have no basis in any single older authoritative source.

Four spellings, one angel, and a planetary office that keeps being handed to somebody else.

The name is usually read as he who sees God, and it travels as Khamael, Camael, Kamael, Camiel and Chamuel depending on the language it passed through and the century. Geburah, where the sephirotic table places him, is severity, the fifth sephirah, the restraining judgement that holds back the unmeasured mercy of Chesed, and its planet is Mars.

Here the two systems agree, which is rare enough in this collection to be worth pointing out. Agrippa's table of the planetary angels gives Mars to Camael. The Golden Dawn's sephirotic table gives Geburah to Khamael, and Geburah is Mars. The Mars attribution therefore survives the crossing between traditions intact, and Samael, whom modern popular sources routinely give as the angel of Mars, does not appear in Agrippa's seven at all.

The persistent confusion with Samael has an obvious cause. Both names are attached to Mars in one source or another, both are short, both sound similar in Latin transcription, and both are associated with severity. Their roots are different and their characters are different.

The most recent layer is the softest. The Chamuel of contemporary angel literature is the same name again, recast as an angel of love and of finding lost things. That is a long way from Geburah, whose whole function in the diagram is to cut. Naming the drift is the only way to keep both readings usable.