Ariel

Few names in this literature have accumulated as many separate identities, and almost none of them are connected to each other.

In the Hebrew Bible, Ariel appears in Isaiah 29 as a designation for Jerusalem, in a passage of judgement; the word is variously read as lion of God or as altar hearth, and the two readings pull in different directions. It also appears in Ezra 8 as a personal name, and in 2 Samuel in a phrase about warriors whose sense is disputed.

In the seventy-two, Ariel is the forty-sixth, governing five degrees of Scorpio. Crucially, the standard lists write it with an initial ayin, where the biblical Ariel has an aleph. In Hebrew these are different words. The identity exists only in English.

In the later magical and occult literature Ariel turns up repeatedly and in incompatible roles: as a name in Gnostic material, as a spirit in various grimoires, as an angel of the elements in nineteenth and twentieth-century angelology, and, in the most widely known modern treatment, as an archangel of nature and animals. That last is very recent, belongs to popular angel publishing of the late twentieth century onward, and has no textual root in any of the earlier occurrences.

Shakespeare's Ariel in The Tempest, an airy spirit, is a further and independent branch.

The attribute given to the forty-sixth in modern lists, nature and environmental connection, almost certainly reflects the popular archangel rather than anything in the derivation. It is a case of a recent identification feeding back into an older list, and it is worth naming as such, because it is a live example of the process that produced most of the rest of the apparatus.

Assigning the forty-sixth angel to nature and the environment is a good case study in how the offices of the seventy-two are actually determined, because here the mechanism is recent enough to be visible.

The elements available to whoever made the assignment were: a three-letter Hebrew root with no obvious lexical meaning; a position at fifteen to twenty degrees of Scorpio; a decan and its planetary ruler; a tarot card; a choir and a sephirah; and a name that in English looks like Ariel. Of these, the one carrying an obvious association for a modern compiler is the last, and the association it carries, Ariel as an angel of nature, postdates the list by centuries and comes from an entirely different body of writing.

The result is a loop. A popular angelology assigns nature to a figure called Ariel. A compiler of the seventy-two, finding an Ariel at position forty-six, imports the association. The attribute is then printed in tables of the seventy-two and reads as traditional.

This is not a hypothesis about a hidden process; it is the ordinary way lists of correspondences grow, and it can be watched happening in comparable cases across the literature. Nor is it unique to the modern period. The same thing must have happened repeatedly in the centuries when this material was being assembled, and it is one reason the offices have no derivable rule behind them.

The value of this particular case is that the dates are known. A reader who understands what happened at position forty-six has a working model for what probably happened at the other seventy-one, where the evidence is thinner and the confidence of the sources is no lower.