A Planetary Archangel

In this collection Cassiel appears as the archangel governing Saturn, one of the seven "planets" of pre-modern astronomy (the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn). Pairing an archangel with each planet belongs to the tradition of Western ceremonial magic and Christian Kabbalah, where it was set out in works such as Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) and the later pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, and codified in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

Several archangels are listed more than once in this collection because they were inherited through three overlapping schemes, planetary, elemental and sephirotic, that Western esotericism never fully reconciled; Cassiel here carries the planetary attribution to Saturn. The scheme is presented as a documented esoteric tradition rather than as religious doctrine or as a claim about spiritual beings.