Ars Occulta / Shem HaMephorash / Mehiel

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Mehiel

«God who gives life»

Choir

Archangels

Archangel

Mikael

Dates

5–9 feb

Closing the choir of the Archangels is Mehiel, "God the life-giver", formed from three letters of the 72-letter name and the suffix -EL, proper to power. The Archangels, in Pseudo-Dionysius, transmit the messages of greatest gravity; Michael governs them, from 5 to 9 February. The tradition invokes him for the inspiration of writers, orators and printers, and against malign influences. Hauras, of the same number, discourses on creation and burns in flames when he appears: fire that consumes against breath that animates.

Rabies and those who write

Mehiel governs two things with nothing to do with each other: he protects against rabies and against wild beasts, and he shelters the learned, the professors, the orators and the authors. Lenain says whoever is born under his influence excels in literature.

The animal half overlaps with Sitael, who also protects from beasts. The difference that is actually written down is that Sitael gets weapons and adversity, and Mehiel the specific disease: rabies, which until Pasteur's vaccine in 1885 was a death sentence without exceptions.

The three genii and the clock

It is worth explaining here the system that orders the whole series, because it is what gives these records their dates. Lenain, in 1823, distributes the seventy-two angels into nine choirs of eight and assigns each person three: one for the five-day window of their birth, another for a series of five dates spread through the year, and a third for a twenty-minute stretch of the day. Three hundred and sixty degrees of zodiac divided by seventy-two gives exactly five degrees per angel, and that is where the five-day blocks come from.

Mehiel gets the fifth to the ninth of February, and his stretch of the clock is nine to nine twenty at night. None of this is biblical or medieval: it is a nineteenth-century calendar system built on top of a much older counting procedure. And the dates are not even stable, because two ways of counting them circulate and drift as much as five days apart in winter.

Whom he binds

The name is three letters — mem, chet, yod — plus the suffix -EL, and it reads «God who gives life to all things». The psalm given to him is the 33rd: «Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear him».

In Thomas Rudd's seventeenth-century system each angel holds down the demon of its own number. The sixty-fourth draws Haures, also called Flauros, who comes as a terrible leopard and who, according to the manuscript, lies about the creation of the world unless he is forced to speak inside the triangle.

Sources

• Éxodo 14:19-21 · Johann Reuchlin, De arte cabalistica, 1517
• Lazare Lenain, La science cabalistique, Amiens, 1823 — los tres genios, las fechas y el salmo 33
• Robert Ambelain, La Kabbale pratique, 1951
• Thomas Rudd, Harley MS 6483, British Library; ed. Skinner y Rankine, 2007

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Other angels of the Archangels choir

WarningHistorical and artistic content. We do not recommend performing any ritual, invocation or practice involving these entities. This is outreach about texts from the 15th to the 20th century, not an operative guide.