Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Aniel, Haniel, Anael

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Aniel, Haniel, Anael

The thirty-seventh of the seventy-two is usually printed Aniel, and it sits uncomfortably close to two other names in the same body of literature.

Haniel is one of the sephirothic archangels, assigned to Netzach in the standard Kabbalistic scheme, and appears in that role in the tables the seventy-two are set alongside. Anael is a planetary intelligence associated with Venus in the Agrippan and later magical literature, and appears widely in the grimoire tradition. All three are transliterations of Hebrew forms built on similar consonants, and English drops or renders the initial heh and the ayin inconsistently.

Whether they are one name or three is not a question the popular sources handle well. Some treat them as identical, some as related, some as distinct without comment. The determination has to be made in Hebrew, letter by letter, and the answer differs depending which source's spelling is taken as authoritative, which is itself a symptom of how the material has been transmitted.

The general lesson is more useful than the particular answer. Angelic onomastics in this literature is a field of near-collisions. A finite stock of Hebrew roots, two standard theophoric suffixes and several centuries of Latin-alphabet transmission guarantee that names will converge, and readers will find significance in the convergence.

Sometimes the convergence is real. The forty-second of the seventy-two is spelled in Hebrew exactly as the archangel Michael is spelled, and that is a genuine identity of form. Sometimes it is not: the forty-sixth is spelled with an ayin where the biblical Ariel has an aleph, so an apparent identity in English is not one in Hebrew at all.

The only way to tell them apart is to look.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.