Raphael

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Raphael is one of the named archangels of the Abrahamic traditions — the figure associated above all with healing, and, in the story that gave him his fullest character, with the safe-keeping of a traveller. The Hebrew name Rāphāʾēl means roughly “God heals,” and that meaning has clung to him through every tradition that received him.

His one extended appearance is in the Book of Tobit, a work preserved in the Greek and Catholic Old Testament and counted among the Apocrypha by Jews and most Protestants. There the angel travels disguised as a kinsman named Azarias, guiding the young Tobias on a long journey, instructing him to keep the heart, liver, and gall of a fish; the gall later cures the blindness of Tobias’s father, and the burnt organs drive off the demon Asmodeus who had killed the woman Sarah’s seven bridegrooms. Only at the close does the companion reveal himself: “I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels which present the prayers of the saints.” That line, naming a fixed company of seven who stand before God, became the seed of a great deal of later angelology.

The number was not idle. The Book of Enoch, an older apocalyptic work, lists Raphael among the chief angels and gives him charge over the spirits of men and over healing; the early Jewish texts that elaborate the heavenly court place him among the four or seven who surround the throne. Christian tradition took him up cautiously — the Western church eventually honoured Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael as the three archangels named in scripture, while treating the longer lists of names with reserve. Islamic tradition knows a comparable figure in Israfil, the angel who will sound the trumpet at the end of the world, though the identification is one of resemblance rather than straightforward sameness.

It was the magical and astrological literature of the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance that gave Raphael his planetary office. In the systems that matched the seven archangels to the seven classical planets, he was assigned a governing intelligence — most often the Sun or Mercury, with the assignments splitting between the two and varying from source to source. The grimoires and the tables of correspondence that descend from this period treat such attributions as working knowledge: which angel to invoke, under which planetary hour, for which end. Healing remained the thread that ran through all of it.

What survives in Raphael, across these uses, is a remarkably stable function attached to a sparse biography. The traditions that named him disagreed about nearly everything else in the heavens; they tended to agree that the office of the angel who heals belonged to him.

→ In the library: Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912)

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