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Sacred Correspondences
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Binah, Saturn, and an Angel with Almost No Story

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Binah, Saturn, and an Angel with Almost No Story

Tzaphkiel is a good illustration of what the sephirotic archangels mostly are, which is positions rather than persons.

The name is read as the contemplation or the watching of God, from a root meaning to look out or keep watch, and it suits the sphere. Binah is understanding, the third sephirah, the receptive intelligence that gives form to what Chokmah pours out, the Great Mother of the scheme and the point at which limitation first enters. Its planet is Saturn, the planet of boundary and time, and the pairing of understanding with limitation is one of the more thoughtful moves in the whole diagram: to understand a thing is to define it, and to define it is to fence it.

What there is not, is narrative. Tzaphkiel appears in Agrippa's table of the angels of the sephiroth, in the Golden Dawn tables that descend from it, and in very little else. There is no scene, no cult, no shrine, no feast. Michael and Gabriel come to the table with scripture, centuries of story and several hundred dedications behind them. Tzaphkiel comes to it with a name and a slot.

That difference is a fact about how the table was assembled rather than a fact about the angels. Some of the ten positions were filled with figures who already existed, and others were filled with names that fit the sphere.

Tzaphkiel is regularly confused with Cassiel, the grimoire angel of Saturn. The two names share a planet and nothing else.

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