Tzaphkiel

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.

Tzaphkiel is a good illustration of what the sephirotic archangels mostly are, which is positions rather than persons.

The name is read as the contemplation or the watching of God, from a root meaning to look out or keep watch, and it suits the sphere. Binah is understanding, the third sephirah, the receptive intelligence that gives form to what Chokmah pours out, the Great Mother of the scheme and the point at which limitation first enters. Its planet is Saturn, the planet of boundary and time, and the pairing of understanding with limitation is one of the more thoughtful moves in the whole diagram: to understand a thing is to define it, and to define it is to fence it.

What there is not, is narrative. Tzaphkiel appears in Agrippa's table of the angels of the sephiroth, in the Golden Dawn tables that descend from it, and in very little else. There is no scene, no cult, no shrine, no feast. Michael and Gabriel come to the table with scripture, centuries of story and several hundred dedications behind them. Tzaphkiel comes to it with a name and a slot.

That difference is a fact about how the table was assembled rather than a fact about the angels. Some of the ten positions were filled with figures who already existed, and others were filled with names that fit the sphere.

Tzaphkiel is regularly confused with Cassiel, the grimoire angel of Saturn. The two names share a planet and nothing else.