Uriel

Only two angels are named in the Hebrew Bible: Michael and Gabriel, both in Daniel. Raphael is named in Tobit, which is canonical for Catholics and Orthodox and not for Jews or Protestants. Uriel is named in none of them.

Uriel comes from the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic literature. He appears in 1 Enoch, where he is among the angels set over the luminaries and the one who warns Noah; in 2 Esdras, where he is the angel sent to answer Ezra's questions about theodicy; and in the Apocalypse of Moses and related texts. He is prominent in the Hekhalot writings and in later Jewish magical material. This is a substantial pedigree, and it is not a canonical one.

That distinction had a consequence. A council held at Rome in 745 under Pope Zachary, dealing with the case of a preacher named Aldebert who was invoking angels by name, condemned the veneration of angels other than the three scripturally named ones, and lists of the proscribed names circulated afterwards including Uriel among them. The details of the proceeding are debated by historians and the surviving record is not as clean as later retellings make it, but the direction is clear enough: the Western church tried to hold angelic invocation to a very short list, and Uriel was outside it.

He nonetheless remained continuously in use, in Jewish mystical practice, in Eastern Christian devotion where he is venerated more freely, and above all in the Western magical tradition, which had no reason to observe an eighth-century Roman restriction. His placement in the north with the element of Earth, given here, is a Golden Dawn arrangement and is not attested in any of the ancient sources. In 1 Enoch his associations are with the heavenly lights and with fire rather than with earth.

The entry is therefore a good example of a general caution about this subject. The elemental and directional attributions carried by these figures in modern ceremonial practice are almost entirely nineteenth-century constructions laid over names of much greater antiquity, and the antiquity of the name is regularly mistaken for the antiquity of the attribution.

Uriel is absent from the Hebrew Bible, from the New Testament and from the Qur'an. Everything known about him comes from the apocalyptic literature, and that is the whole explanation both for his removal from the Latin calendar and for his survival in the Western esoteric tradition, which reads exactly that literature.

In 1 Enoch he is one of the archangels set over the world, and in the Astronomical Book he is the angel who takes Enoch through the courses of the luminaries and explains the calendar to him. Uriel is the angel who teaches how time is measured, which is an unusual portfolio and a memorable one.

In 4 Ezra, the apocalypse preserved in the Latin Bible as chapters three to fourteen of 2 Esdras, Uriel is sent to answer Ezra's questions about why the righteous suffer and why Israel has been given to a worse nation. What he actually does is refuse the terms of the question. He asks Ezra to weigh fire, measure wind or call back a day that has passed, and when Ezra says no man can, replies that these are things Ezra has lived among since birth and cannot judge, so how should he judge the ways of the Most High. The consolation offered is the limit of the questioner rather than an answer.

The name reads as God is my light, which sits well beside the calendar and the luminaries. His placement in the north with Earth comes from the Golden Dawn quarters and has no connection to any of the above.