A Sephirotic Archangel

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.