Raguel

Raguel is named in the Book of Enoch as one of the holy watchers, "who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries", the angel who calls the other powers to account and executes judgement upon them when they transgress. His name is read as "friend of God." In the scheme of seven archangels that circulated in early Christianity he is sometimes counted among them, the enforcer of divine justice and harmony who ensures that even the angelic host remains within its bounds. He is named in no book received as canonical, and his position was contested early: a Roman council in the eighth century is reported to have condemned the veneration of angels beyond the scripturally named few, Raguel among them, precisely because his authority rested on the apocryphal Enochic literature. Where he survives in tradition, it is as the archangel of fairness and just retribution, the guardian who watches the watchers.

Raguel has an earlier and more explicit textual attestation than several of the other later archangels: the Book of Enoch names him directly among a list of seven holy angels, describing his particular role as one who takes vengeance on the world of the luminaries, generally understood as some form of oversight or punishment connected to the heavenly bodies.

Enoch's standing across Christian tradition varies sharply by church, treated as fully canonical scripture by the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches and as apocryphal, valuable historically but not scriptural, by Catholic, most Orthodox, and Protestant traditions, which means Raguel's textual attestation is old and specific but not universally authoritative. His case is also notable for an early institutional reaction: a Western church council held under Pope Zachary in the eighth century specifically named and condemned devotion to a set of angels beyond the three, Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, that it accepted as scripturally grounded, and Raguel is generally identified among the names singled out in that condemnation alongside Uriel. This makes Raguel one of the clearer documented examples of a named angel who was not simply forgotten or left out of later Western tradition but was actively identified and rejected by name at a specific council, a more deliberate exclusion than the quieter fading that affected other minor figures.