Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The East, the Dawn, and the Attribution That Contradicts the Tree

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The East, the Dawn, and the Attribution That Contradicts the Tree

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.

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.