A Planetary Archangel

Samael carries a darker reputation in Jewish sources than most other angels bearing the archangel title. Rabbinic and later Kabbalistic texts frequently identify him as the Angel of Death, and in some strands of Jewish mysticism he is described as an accusing or even demonic figure, at times explicitly equated with Satan, and paired in some Kabbalistic sources as consort to Lilith, the archetypal night demon. That reputation sits uneasily with his role here as a planetary archangel granting strength and helping in works of protection, a tension the Western esoteric tradition generally resolves by reading Samael's severity as necessary and lawful rather than malevolent, a stern administering angel rather than an adversary, though the sources themselves are far from unanimous on which reading is correct.

The rival attribution recorded by Agrippa in 1533 adds a further complication: his Three Books of Occult Philosophy assigns Mars not to Samael but to an angel he calls Camael, and Samael does not appear at all in Agrippa's own table of the seven planetary angels, so the pairing of Samael with Mars recorded here belongs to a separate strand of the grimoire tradition, the scheme of planetary hours and the days of the week, rather than to the specific sephirotic table that became the Golden Dawn's main reference for planetary and sephirotic archangels alike.