Aniel

The thirty-seventh of the seventy-two is usually printed Aniel, and it sits uncomfortably close to two other names in the same body of literature.

Haniel is one of the sephirothic archangels, assigned to Netzach in the standard Kabbalistic scheme, and appears in that role in the tables the seventy-two are set alongside. Anael is a planetary intelligence associated with Venus in the Agrippan and later magical literature, and appears widely in the grimoire tradition. All three are transliterations of Hebrew forms built on similar consonants, and English drops or renders the initial heh and the ayin inconsistently.

Whether they are one name or three is not a question the popular sources handle well. Some treat them as identical, some as related, some as distinct without comment. The determination has to be made in Hebrew, letter by letter, and the answer differs depending which source's spelling is taken as authoritative, which is itself a symptom of how the material has been transmitted.

The general lesson is more useful than the particular answer. Angelic onomastics in this literature is a field of near-collisions. A finite stock of Hebrew roots, two standard theophoric suffixes and several centuries of Latin-alphabet transmission guarantee that names will converge, and readers will find significance in the convergence.

Sometimes the convergence is real. The forty-second of the seventy-two is spelled in Hebrew exactly as the archangel Michael is spelled, and that is a genuine identity of form. Sometimes it is not: the forty-sixth is spelled with an ayin where the biblical Ariel has an aleph, so an apparent identity in English is not one in Hebrew at all.

The only way to tell them apart is to look.

Each of the nine octads of the seventy-two is assigned a governing archangel: Metatron, Raziel, Tzaphkiel, Tzadkiel, Khamael, Michael, Haniel, Raphael, Gabriel, following the sephiroth from Kether downward.

The column has a mixed pedigree and it repays unpacking.

Michael, Gabriel and Raphael are the best attested. Michael and Gabriel are named in the Book of Daniel; Raphael is named in Tobit. All three are firmly established in Jewish and Christian angelology by late antiquity.

Metatron belongs to a different stratum: the Hekhalot literature and the merkavah tradition, where he is a figure of exceptional standing, sometimes identified with the translated Enoch. The name has no convincing Hebrew etymology, and its origin has been argued over for a very long time.

Raziel is associated with the Sefer Raziel ha-Malakh, a compilation of magical and cosmological material with a complicated medieval textual history.

Tzaphkiel, Tzadkiel, Khamael and Haniel are principally known from the sephirothic scheme itself, and are attested most clearly in the Kabbalistic and later magical literature rather than in earlier sources.

So the column mixes figures from the Hebrew Bible, from the Apocrypha, from Jewish mystical literature of late antiquity, from medieval magical compilation and from Kabbalistic systematisation. The nine of them are made to line up with the nine choirs of Pseudo-Dionysius, a Greek Christian text of around 500, and with nine of the ten sephiroth.

This is the pattern throughout the apparatus around the seventy-two: a coherent final table assembled from components of widely different date and provenance, presented without any indication that they differ.