Beyond the Christian material, Michael appears once by name in the Quran, at 2:98, paired there with Gabriel as an angel whose enmity the Quran specifically forbids; later Islamic tradition, as Mikail, expands his role into an angel who oversees rain, provision and the sustenance of living things, a domain with no real equivalent in his Jewish or Christian reputation as warrior and protector. Rabbinic sources give him comparable prominence on the Jewish side: the Talmud names Michael as the greatest of the angels and, in a well known image, says he crosses any distance in one flight, a figure of speed that later commentators read as a mark of his closeness to the divine presence itself.
Fire suits this composite reputation better than Hod's Mercury does: across Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources Michael is consistently the angel who acts, who fights, defends and intervenes directly, rather than one who mainly interprets, informs or reveals as Gabriel and Raphael more typically do. The Golden Dawn's choice to set him at the fiery South, opposite Gabriel's watery West, keeps that older, cross-traditional sense of Michael as the active, combative archangel more clearly than his placement in the Mercury-ruled sphere of Hod does within the same system.