In this collection Raziel appears as the archangel assigned to Chokmah, 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. Raziel governs Chokmah 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.
Raziel has no scriptural attestation at all, canonical or apocryphal; his fullest early appearance is the medieval Jewish mystical compilation Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, the "Book of the Angel Raziel," associated with the Chassidei Ashkenaz and the circle of Eleazar of Worms in the thirteenth century, though the book claims a legendary transmission from Raziel to Adam himself. First printed only in 1701, the Sefer Raziel became a standard source for protective amulets and practical Kabbalah; its late medieval origin makes Raziel, whose name means "secret of God," a considerably younger figure in the textual record than his placement at Chokmah, the second-highest sephirah, might suggest.