A Sephirotic Archangel

In this collection Tzaphkiel appears as the archangel assigned to Binah, 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. Tzaphkiel governs Binah 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.

Tzaphkiel, whose name is generally read as "contemplation" or "knowledge of God," belongs to the same late stratum as Raziel: he is absent from the Hebrew Bible, from the Talmud, and from the early Merkabah and Hekhalot literature that does supply real textual depth for a figure such as Sandalphon elsewhere in this collection. His attachment to Binah, the sephirah of understanding, follows the logic of his name rather than any older narrative role, and his standard modern spelling and placement both descend chiefly from the Christian Kabbalist and Golden Dawn material of the Renaissance and after.