Raphael

Raphael's single scriptural home is the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit, accepted as canonical scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians but excluded from the Hebrew Bible and from Protestant Bibles, a status that makes Raphael, unlike Michael and Gabriel, absent from Bibles used by Jews and by most Protestant denominations. In the story, Raphael travels in human disguise as a companion and guide to the young Tobias, instructs him to catch a fish and keep its heart, liver and gall, uses the burning heart and liver to drive off the demon Asmodeus who has killed each of Sarah's previous seven husbands on their wedding nights, and applies the fish's gall to cure the blindness of Tobias's father, the elder Tobit, before finally revealing his true angelic identity and returning to heaven. The story is the fullest narrative portrait of any archangel's direct action among human beings anywhere in scripture, canonical or deuterocanonical.

Air fits Raphael's later reputation as healer and guide reasonably well within the Golden Dawn's own logic, since the element governs mind, communication and the giving of counsel in that system, functions closer to Raphael's role as Tobias's travelling instructor than to any element more obviously tied to medicine or the body itself.

Raphael stands in the east in the Golden Dawn quarters, which makes him the first angel named in the banishing ritual and the one associated with the dawn. His element is Air and his ritual weapon in most schools is the dagger.

Air in the Western elemental scheme is intellect, speech, the medium in which things are exchanged, the space between two parties rather than either of them. The east is where the light returns. Assigning the angel of healing and of the journey to the quarter of the rising sun and the element of communication is coherent, and it agrees with the planetary attribution, since Mercury is the airy planet of the classical characters and Raphael is Mercury's angel in the grimoire tables.

Two systems, therefore, make Raphael airy and mercurial. The third makes him solar, because the sephirotic table puts him in Tiphareth, and Tiphareth is the sphere of the Sun.

That is not a small discrepancy and it is not resolvable. It arises because the planetary attributions came down through the Latin magical literature while the sephirotic ones came down through Jewish Kabbalistic sources, and the Golden Dawn adopted both and tabulated them side by side without reconciling them.

The practical rule follows directly. An attribution for Raphael is only meaningful once the system it belongs to has been named, and a table that gives him a planet without saying which tradition it is drawing on cannot be used.