A Sephirotic Archangel

In this collection Sandalphon appears as the archangel assigned to Malkuth, one of the ten sephiroth (emanations) of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. The practice of assigning an archangel to each sephirah, together with a divine name and an angelic choir, was developed in Jewish Kabbalah and was taken up and systematised by Christian Kabbalists and, in its now-standard English form, by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Sandalphon governs Malkuth in that scheme. Several of the names recur elsewhere in this collection under the planetary and elemental systems, a sign of the three overlapping traditions that Western esotericism inherited and never fully harmonised. The scheme is presented as a documented esoteric tradition rather than as religious doctrine or as a claim about angelic beings.

Sandalphon has real depth in the older sources that most names in this atlas lack. The Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 13b, describes him as an angel standing on the earth with his head reaching the celestial creatures, weaving crowns from Israel's prayers and setting them on his Maker; later Kabbalists, among them Moses Cordovero, identified him with the prophet Elijah transformed into angelic form after his ascent, a transformation-narrative distinct from, though later paired with, the Enoch-into-Metatron story told elsewhere in this collection. The fraternal pairing of Sandalphon and Metatron as bottom and top of the Tree is the later systemic symmetry; the Chagigah tradition is not.