A Sephirotic Archangel

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.