Raziel

In this collection Raziel appears as the archangel assigned to Chokmah, 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. Raziel governs Chokmah 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.

Raziel has no scriptural attestation at all, canonical or apocryphal; his fullest early appearance is the medieval Jewish mystical compilation Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, the "Book of the Angel Raziel," associated with the Chassidei Ashkenaz and the circle of Eleazar of Worms in the thirteenth century, though the book claims a legendary transmission from Raziel to Adam himself. First printed only in 1701, the Sefer Raziel became a standard source for protective amulets and practical Kabbalah; its late medieval origin makes Raziel, whose name means "secret of God," a considerably younger figure in the textual record than his placement at Chokmah, the second-highest sephirah, might suggest.

Raziel is known almost entirely through a book attributed to him, which is the reverse of the usual direction in angelology. The name is built on raz, secret, and reads as the secret of God.

The legend attached to it is old and widely repeated: the angel gave Adam a book of heavenly knowledge after the expulsion from Eden, it passed to Noah, who is said to have built the ark by it, and eventually to Solomon. The book is presented as the original source of the whole tradition of practical wisdom, which is a claim about authority rather than a claim about a text.

Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, the work that actually circulates under the name, is a medieval Hebrew compilation drawing on earlier Hekhalot mysticism and on the late antique magical material of Sefer ha-Razim. It combines cosmology, angelology, the names and seals of angels and practical instructions, and it was printed at Amsterdam in 1701.

The printed edition then acquired a life of its own that had nothing to do with reading it. A copy in the house was held to protect the house from fire, so people who could not read a word of it kept one, and the book functioned as an amulet. Surviving copies with heavy wear on the binding and none on the pages are the physical record of that.

Chokmah, where the sephirotic table places him, is the first outflowing wisdom before it takes any form. Assigning the keeper of secrets to the sphere of undifferentiated wisdom is a legible choice by whoever built the table.