A Sephirotic Archangel

Islamic tradition's closest equivalent to Raphael is usually identified as Israfil, the angel who will sound the trumpet announcing the resurrection and the Day of Judgment, though Israfil is not named directly in the Quran and rests instead on hadith and later tradition; the identification with Raphael is a modern comparative convenience rather than a claim either tradition itself makes, since Israfil's defining role, herald of the end of the world, has little in common with Raphael's biblical function as healer and travelling guide.

Within the Golden Dawn's own system, Tiphareth carries a symbolic weight beyond Raphael's presence there: the sphere is conventionally read as the position of a sacrificed or dying and rising god figure within the Tree of Life's broader symbolism, a role occultists of the period associated variously with Christ, with the Egyptian Osiris and with other solar or vegetation deities understood as expressions of the same underlying pattern. Raphael's governance of Tiphareth in that context sets the healer archangel over the sphere the system treats as the Tree's own symbolic centre of death, healing and renewal combined, a considerably larger role than his function as Tobias's companion in the Book of Tobit alone would suggest.