An Elemental Archangel

Gabriel is one of only two angels named outright in the Hebrew Bible, appearing in the Book of Daniel to interpret the prophet's visions of the ram and the goat and of the seventy weeks. The New Testament gives Gabriel his most famous scene, the Annunciation in the Gospel of Luke, where he announces to Zechariah the coming birth of John the Baptist and, six months later, to Mary the coming birth of Jesus, making him the angel most closely associated in Christian art and devotion with the beginning of the gospel story. Islamic tradition assigns Gabriel, as Jibril, an even larger role, holding him to be the angel who delivered the revelation of the Quran to Muhammad across the roughly twenty-three years of his prophetic mission, so that across all three Abrahamic religions Gabriel functions above all as the messenger who carries the most consequential single piece of news each tradition has to tell.

None of that biblical and quranic material assigns Gabriel to any element; the Water attribution belongs entirely to the later ceremonial magic tradition formalised by the Golden Dawn from 1888, which paired the four archangels named at the quarters of its banishing ritual with the four classical elements largely on the strength of older angelological reputation rather than on any textual basis for the pairing itself.