Tzadkiel

In this collection Tzadkiel appears as the archangel assigned to Chesed, 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. Tzadkiel governs Chesed 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.

Tzadkiel's name, "righteousness of God," and his attachment to Chesed, the sephirah of mercy, follow the same naming logic as Tzaphkiel's at Binah; some later, non-canonical devotional and occult sources identify an angel of this name with the figure who stayed Abraham's hand at the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, though the biblical text itself names no angel there at all, and other traditions assign that unnamed role to Michael or leave it unattributed entirely. The attribution to Tzadkiel specifically is a late and disputed one, not a reading the Genesis text supports on its own.

Chesed is mercy, the fourth sephirah, the unmeasured outpouring that Geburah below it has to restrain. Its planet is Jupiter, and Jupiter in Hebrew is Tzedek, righteousness. Tzadkiel means the righteousness of God. Name, planet and sphere all sit on the same root, which is tidier than most of this subject manages.

The story most often attached to him is the binding of Isaac. Some Jewish traditions name Zadkiel as the angel who called from heaven and stopped Abraham's knife. Others name Michael. Others name Tadhiel, a name that appears almost nowhere else. Genesis 22 names nobody at all: the text has the angel of the LORD, unidentified, and says no more.

That sequence is worth watching, because it is how a great deal of angelology was produced. An unnamed figure in scripture attracts a name, different communities supply different names, each name accumulates a small body of associated lore, and later compilations list the results side by side as though they were separate angels with separate offices.

A second layer of accumulation is much more recent. Twentieth-century angel devotion, working from theosophical sources and then from the New Age literature that followed them, has given Zadkiel a fixed association with forgiveness, mercy and a violet flame. None of that is in Agrippa, in the Golden Dawn tables or in the Jewish material. It is a real tradition, and it is a modern one, and the two should not be quoted as one.