Raphael

Islamic tradition's closest equivalent to Raphael is usually identified as Israfil, the angel who will sound the trumpet announcing the resurrection and the Day of Judgment, though Israfil is not named directly in the Quran and rests instead on hadith and later tradition; the identification with Raphael is a modern comparative convenience rather than a claim either tradition itself makes, since Israfil's defining role, herald of the end of the world, has little in common with Raphael's biblical function as healer and travelling guide.

Within the Golden Dawn's own system, Tiphareth carries a symbolic weight beyond Raphael's presence there: the sphere is conventionally read as the position of a sacrificed or dying and rising god figure within the Tree of Life's broader symbolism, a role occultists of the period associated variously with Christ, with the Egyptian Osiris and with other solar or vegetation deities understood as expressions of the same underlying pattern. Raphael's governance of Tiphareth in that context sets the healer archangel over the sphere the system treats as the Tree's own symbolic centre of death, healing and renewal combined, a considerably larger role than his function as Tobias's companion in the Book of Tobit alone would suggest.

Tiphareth is beauty, the sixth sephirah, and it sits at the centre of the Tree of Life with paths running to almost everything else. It is the sphere of the Sun, the point of balance between the severity on one pillar and the mercy on the other, and the place where the Golden Dawn correspondences file the sacrificed and resurrected gods. In the scheme of the grades it is the sphere of the adept.

Raphael is placed here, and Michael is not, which is the exact reverse of the planetary table where Michael takes the Sun and Raphael takes Mercury.

The internal logic of the sephirotic placement is sound on its own terms. Tiphareth is the sphere of harmony and of restoration to the centre; healing is restoration to balance; the Sun in the classical planetary characters is the source of vitality and the physician's ally. Read that way, the angel whose name means God heals belongs in the solar sphere and nowhere else.

The difficulty is that the same argument runs equally well for Michael, and the planetary tradition ran it. Michael is the angel of the light against the dark, of the victory that restores order, and the solar attribution follows just as naturally.

So this is not a mistake that one tradition made and another corrected. It is two coherent systems, descending by different routes, reaching opposite conclusions from compatible reasoning. Any table that gives Raphael a planet has to be identified as planetary or sephirotic before it can be read at all.