Michael

Michael has the strongest scriptural pedigree of any archangel. Daniel calls him the great prince who has charge of your people, identifying him as Israel's heavenly patron and protector; the New Testament Epistle of Jude describes him disputing with the devil over the body of Moses, a story not found in the Hebrew Bible itself but drawn from a noncanonical text, the Assumption of Moses; and the Book of Revelation gives him his most dramatic role, leading the angelic host in war against the dragon and casting it down from heaven. Out of this warrior-protector reputation grew a vast later cult: Michael became the patron of soldiers and of the dying, the guardian invoked at the hour of death to weigh souls, and the dedicatee of major shrines including Mont Saint-Michel in France and Michaelmas, 29 September, one of medieval Europe's most widely kept feast days.

His placement at Hod in the sephirotic scheme, governing Mercury, language and the structuring of intellect, sits oddly against that older warrior and psychopomp reputation, and the mismatch is characteristic of how the Golden Dawn's system sometimes fitted long-established figures into a structural slot defined by planetary logic rather than by continuity with their scriptural character.

Hod is splendour, the eighth sephirah, the base of the pillar of severity, and its planet is Mercury. In the Golden Dawn reading it is the sphere of intellect, of language, of form and analysis, and of ceremonial magic itself, which makes it the sphere the ritual magician is standing in while consulting the table.

Michael is placed here. The solar warrior of Daniel and Revelation, the angel of the fiery south, is filed in the sphere of Mercury.

That looks like an error until it is set beside Raphael in Tiphareth, and then it becomes clear that the two are a single swap. Whatever moved Raphael into the solar sphere moved Michael out of it, and the pair of them exchanged planets somewhere between the Latin grimoire tradition and the Kabbalistic one.

A justification can be constructed after the fact, and versions of it are taught. Michael contends, adjudicates and weighs souls in the medieval judgement scenes; Hod is the sphere of discrimination, of telling one thing from another. Read that way the placement is about the intellect that judges rather than the fire that burns.

The more honest account is that the two tables descend from different bodies of literature by different routes, the Golden Dawn inherited both, tabulated them beside each other and did not choose between them. Practitioners have noticed the conflict for well over a century. Nobody has resolved it, because there is no authority standing above both systems that could.