Haziel

The seventy-two are conventionally arranged in nine groups of eight, each group assigned to a choir of angels, to a sephirah and to a governing archangel. The arithmetic is exact and the structure is elegant. Its parts come from three different places.

The nine choirs are from The Celestial Hierarchy, a Greek Christian treatise written around the year 500 under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert mentioned in Acts. The attribution is false and has been known to be false since the Renaissance, Isaac Casaubon's critical work of 1614 is part of the same movement that unmasked it, but the text is a genuine and important piece of late antique Christian Neoplatonism. It sets out three triads: Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; Dominions, Virtues and Powers; Principalities, Archangels and Angels.

The sephiroth are the ten emanations of Kabbalistic theosophy, systematised in the Zohar and in the literature around it. There are ten of them, not nine, so the mapping onto the choirs requires an adjustment, usually by treating Kether and Chokmah differently or by omitting Malkuth from the scheme.

The archangels are a further layer, drawn from Jewish angelological sources of varying date, in which Metatron, Raziel, Tzaphkiel, Tzadkiel, Khamael, Michael, Haniel, Raphael and Gabriel are assigned to the sephiroth.

Overlaying the three and dividing seventy-two by nine to get eight is Christian Kabbalah at work. It is a genuine tradition with a real history, and its result is coherent. But no one before the sixteenth century could have stated it, because two of its three components had never been brought into contact before then.

Haziel is assigned forgiveness and mercy. Reading across all seventy-two attributions, the vocabulary they are drawn from turns out to be narrow and revealing.

The attributes cluster into a small number of fields. There is healing and health. There is protection and defence. There is knowledge, memory and learning. There is love, friendship, loyalty and reconciliation. There is justice, truth and integrity. There is prosperity, abundance and success. There is courage, strength and resilience. There is spiritual growth, elevation and enlightenment. Between them these cover almost the whole list, and several attributions differ from one another only in wording.

That narrowness is informative. A set of seventy-two distinct offices, if independently derived, would be expected to include specific and odd ones, the Goetia's catalogue, by contrast, offers understanding the speech of birds, making waters stormy and building towers. The Shem attributions have nothing of that kind. They are uniformly benign, uniformly abstract, and phrased in a register that would not be out of place in a modern book of daily affirmations.

The reason is the transmission. The attributes reach English through nineteenth and twentieth-century French occult writing, itself working within a devotional idiom, and then through late twentieth-century popular publishing that smoothed them further. Each stage moved the vocabulary toward the general and the positive.

A reader who wants to know what the seventy-two were originally for will not learn it from the attribute list. That list describes what the system has become. Its earlier layers, a technique for dividing the divine name, and a Renaissance angelology built on it, had different concerns entirely.