Archangels
Planetary Archangels
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Origin 1200 to 1600
Samael, whose name is usually read as the Venom or Severity of God, is the planetary archangel of Mars, the severe angel of strength, judgment, and necessary destruction. He is a strikingly double figure in Jewish lore, at once a great angel of the Lord and, in other texts, an accuser, angel of death, and adversary, embodying the dangerous edge of divine power. As the Martial archangel he governs what Mars rules: force, courage, conflict, discipline, surgery, and the cutting away of what must go. He is invoked on Tuesday and in workings for strength, protection, and the breaking of obstacles. In the Tree of Life he is the archangel of Geburah, the sphere of Severity and of Mars, and his symbols are the sword and the color red.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period1200 to 1600 1Tradition: The grimoire tradition Place of Origin Place of OriginReach the Renaissance through the medieval Latin grimoires 1 Attributed Author / CompilerA late medieval grimoire commonplace, with no identifiable originator 1 Attributed Author / Compiler Rival Systems
A Rival System's AttributionSourced to the subject's own accountAgrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy: the angel of Mars is Camael. Samael does not appear in his table of the seven angels at all. The name recorded here belongs to the scheme of the planetary hours and the days of the week. 2Tradition: Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy Identity
Ruling Planet Learn More
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.
The Gnostic Samael, and the Poison in the Name
The name has two competing readings and neither has won. Taken as sam-el it is the poison or venom of God; taken from a root meaning blind it is the blind god. Both are proposed by serious readers and the material does not settle between them, which is unusual, because most angel names in this collection are transparent.
The blind reading has one striking body of support outside Judaism. Several Gnostic texts, among them the Apocryphon of John and the Hypostasis of the Archons, give the demiurge three names, Yaldabaoth, Saklas and Samael, and gloss the last as the blind god. The figure they describe is a creator who fashions the material world in ignorance and declares himself the only god because he cannot see that anything exists above him. That is an extraordinary place for the name to appear, and it is independent of the Jewish material rather than derived from it.
Within Jewish literature Samael hardens over time. Late antique apocalyptic uses Sammael as a name for Satan outright. The Zohar and the Kabbalah that follows it set him at the head of the qlippoth, the husks or shells, and pair him with Lilith.
Western ceremonial magic inherited the name attached to Mars and had to do something with the reputation. Its solution was to read the severity as lawful rather than malevolent, the surgeon and not the murderer. That reading is coherent and it is also a choice, made late, against the weight of the older sources.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
The planetary office belongs to ceremonial magic rather than to the Jewish literature the name comes from, and the atlas keeps the two claims apart.
Mars, Planets Samael holds the martial office in the seven planetary archangels of the Western magical tradition, the angel of strength, judgment and necessary destruction.
Samael is paired with Tuesday and Mars in the scheme of the planetary hours that also names the weekday. Samael does not appear in Agrippa's own table of the seven planetary angels at all.
Belongs to Tradition
One of the planetary, elemental and sephirotic archangels of the Western esoteric synthesis, the scheme by which this atlas classifies the type.
Samael is a strikingly double figure in Jewish lore, at once a great angel of the Lord and, in other texts, an accuser, an angel of death and an adversary. That doubleness is Jewish material; the planetary office over Mars is a later Western overlay on the name.
Originates in Language
The name is Hebrew in form and is usually read as the venom or the severity of God. It is post-biblical: Samael belongs to the rabbinic and later Jewish material, not to the Hebrew Bible.
Sources
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