Anael

This collection records a planetary angel of Venus under the name Anael and a sephirotic angel of Netzach under the name Haniel. Netzach is the sphere of Venus. These are not two angels who happen to share an office; they are one name in variant transliterations, and the appearance of two entries is an artefact of the two attribution systems having been transmitted through different languages.

The underlying Hebrew is most often given as Haniel or Hanael, understood as containing the element chen, grace or favour, with the divine element el. The form Anael comes through the Latin magical literature, where the initial guttural was not represented, and it is the form used in the grimoires and in Agrippa's planetary tables. Other variants in circulation include Aniel, Hanael and Onoel. Gustav Davidson's dictionary lists them and treats them as one figure, which is the ordinary scholarly position.

This kind of doubling is common in angelology and worth recognising as a class of problem rather than an isolated oddity. Names entered Latin from Hebrew through Greek intermediaries, through Arabic in some cases, and through copyists working in scripts they did not read. Khamael, given here for Geburah, appears elsewhere as Camael, Kamael and Chamuel, and is regularly confused with Samael of Mars despite the two having distinct origins and quite different characters, Samael carrying an adversarial sense in a good deal of Jewish material that Khamael does not.

The count of angels in any given list is therefore unreliable in a specific way. Lists compiled from multiple traditions will duplicate figures whose names travelled by different routes, and will occasionally split one angel into two with divergent attributes, each acquiring its own accumulated lore. The seventy-two angels of the divine name catalogued elsewhere on this site are relatively secure against this because they are generated by a fixed procedure from a fixed text. The archangels are not generated by any procedure, and their lists differ between every tradition that keeps one.

The planetary angels are not free-standing personalities. They are positions in a timetable, and Anael's position is Friday.

The scheme runs on the Chaldean order of the planets by apparent speed: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. Assign those in rotation to the twenty-four hours of a day and the planet ruling the first hour of each successive day steps through the familiar week. That is why the days are named as they are across Europe: dies Veneris gives vendredi and viernes, and the Old English Frigedaeg substitutes Frigg for Venus while keeping the same slot.

Anael holds the Venus slot. The Heptameron attributed to Peter of Abano, the compact operating manual that stands behind a great deal of later grimoire practice, sets out for each day its angel, its sigil, its perfume, the direction to face and the hours in which the work may be done. Friday's entry is Anael's.

The consequence is worth stating plainly, because it changes how the attribution should be read. To work with Anael in this tradition is to work at a stated hour on a stated day using a stated suffumigation. The angel is the name of a slot in a machine for scheduling ritual, and the machine matters more than the biography, because there is almost no biography to have.

The sephirotic Haniel of Netzach is the same name doing a quite different job: a position on a diagram rather than a place in a calendar.