Angels and Spirits

The ordered ranks of angels that Western tradition takes for granted are not laid out anywhere in scripture. They were assembled, and the assembly can be dated.

The Hebrew Bible supplies pieces: seraphim in Isaiah, cherubim guarding Eden and overshadowing the ark, an unnamed messenger of the Lord, and only in the latest books two named angels, Gabriel and Michael. Raphael appears in Tobit. The apocryphal and pseudepigraphal literature, particularly 1 Enoch, supplies a great deal more, including named archangels, the fallen watchers and a developed cosmology of the heavens.

The nine choirs, seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, angels, are the work of the writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, around the year 500, who arranged the scriptural terms into three triads in the Celestial Hierarchy. He wrote under the name of a first-century convert of Paul, which gave the scheme apostolic weight it did not have; the pseudonym was suspected in the Renaissance and is now universally accepted. Aquinas incorporated the scheme, and it became standard Western teaching.

The magical current draws on a different structure. The Shem ha-Mephorash, the seventy-two-fold name, is derived by a Kabbalistic operation on three verses of Exodus, each of seventy-two letters, read in boustrophedon to yield seventy-two three-letter names; each is given an angelic suffix to produce seventy-two angels, matched to the degrees of the zodiac in five-degree divisions.

Facing them in the grimoire tradition stand the seventy-two demons of the Ars Goetia in the Lesser Key of Solomon, each with a name, a rank, a legion count and a seal. The pairing of the seventy-two angels against the seventy-two spirits, so that each demon has an angelic counterpart with power to constrain it, is set out in the manuscripts associated with Thomas Rudd and was taken up by the Golden Dawn.

The practical tradition distinguishes two operations, and the distinction structures everything in the grimoires.

Invocation calls a spirit inward, the operator seeks communion with, or the presence of, a higher intelligence, classically the holy guardian angel, whose attainment is the central aim of the Abramelin operation and of much later ceremonial practice. Evocation calls a spirit outward, to visible or perceptible appearance in a triangle or vessel outside the protective circle, and constrains it to a task. The apparatus that follows, purification and fasting, timing by planetary hour and day, consecrated tools, the drawn circle, the seal or sigil of the spirit, the names of God used as constraint, is the machinery of the second operation.

The classic texts are the Key of Solomon, the Lesser Key with its Ars Goetia, the Heptameron, Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy with the spurious Fourth Book, and the Abramelin material.

Two source-critical points belong here. First, the demon catalogues were published by a sceptic: Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum of 1563 lists sixty-nine spirits and their offices as part of an argument that the whole business was delusion and that accused witches should not be executed. The Goetia's list descends from Weyer's. The tradition's standard reference work is therefore a debunking text that was subsequently used as a manual.

Second, some entries are demonstrably invented. Enochian, the angelic language and system received by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s, is a separate and internally elaborate system whose status is disputed even among practitioners, and Dee himself recorded doubts about Kelley.

Practitioners describe results in terms ranging from literal appearance to psychological operation on the operator, and that disagreement about what is being contacted is as old as the practice.