Michael

Beyond the Christian material, Michael appears once by name in the Quran, at 2:98, paired there with Gabriel as an angel whose enmity the Quran specifically forbids; later Islamic tradition, as Mikail, expands his role into an angel who oversees rain, provision and the sustenance of living things, a domain with no real equivalent in his Jewish or Christian reputation as warrior and protector. Rabbinic sources give him comparable prominence on the Jewish side: the Talmud names Michael as the greatest of the angels and, in a well known image, says he crosses any distance in one flight, a figure of speed that later commentators read as a mark of his closeness to the divine presence itself.

Fire suits this composite reputation better than Hod's Mercury does: across Jewish, Christian and Islamic sources Michael is consistently the angel who acts, who fights, defends and intervenes directly, rather than one who mainly interprets, informs or reveals as Gabriel and Raphael more typically do. The Golden Dawn's choice to set him at the fiery South, opposite Gabriel's watery West, keeps that older, cross-traditional sense of Michael as the active, combative archangel more clearly than his placement in the Mercury-ruled sphere of Hod does within the same system.

The elemental archangels are the youngest of the three sets in this collection and the only one with a single identifiable point of origin. They come from the quarters of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn taught it in the late nineteenth century, where the operator names four angels around the circle: Raphael before, Gabriel behind, Michael on the right hand and Auriel on the left.

Facing east, as the ritual assumes, that arrangement puts Raphael in the east with Air, Michael in the south with Fire, Gabriel in the west with Water and Uriel in the north with Earth. The whole elemental set follows from the operator's orientation.

Fire takes Michael for reasons the tradition never needed to argue. The scriptural Michael carries a sword, leads armies and casts out the dragon; the Fire of the Western elemental scheme is will, ardour and the initiating force, and its ritual weapon is the wand or the sword depending on the school.

The attribution is also unusually well behaved. Michael is solar in the planetary table and fiery here, and Fire is the solar element, so two of the three systems agree about him. Only the sephirotic placement in Hod, the sphere of Mercury, breaks the pattern.

Uniformity across modern practice is the mark of a young system with one source. The planetary and sephirotic sets, which are older and travelled by several routes, are nothing like as stable.