Azazel the Exiled

What made Azazel famous was not the descent, which he shared with a hundred and ninety-nine others, but the catalogue. The First Book of Enoch sets it out with the precision of an inventory: he taught men to make swords, knives, shields and breastplates; he showed them the metals of the earth and the art of working them; and to the women, bracelets and ornaments, antimony for painting the eyelids, precious stones and dyeing tinctures. Metallurgy and cosmetics: arming the body and painting it.

The distribution is carefully made, for the other teachings of the Watchers go to different names: Semyaza enchantments and the cutting of roots, Armaros the undoing of a spell, Baraqel astrology, Kokabiel the signs of the stars, Sariel the course of the moon. Azazel's is the only one that is not occult lore but a technique, and the only one that keeps working without invoking anybody.

Then comes the sentence. Men cry out, the archangels carry the cry upward, and the order comes down with a name and an address: Raphael binds Azazel hand and foot and casts him into the darkness, in the desert of Dudael, upon rough stones and beneath a rock; let him see no light, and on the day of the great judgement let him be cast into the fire. The same voice adds the line that cost him his whole biography: the whole earth has been corrupted by what Azazel taught, ascribe to him all sin. He was not the chief of the two hundred, yet from that verse on he carries what all of them did.

The only detailed ancient description of the fallen Azazel is in the Apocalypse of Abraham, a Jewish text of around the first and second centuries. He appears there twice, and neither appearance is human. First he is an unclean bird that swoops down on the victims of Abraham's sacrifice and speaks to him, and whom the angel Iaoel drives off. Later, in the vision of the abyss, he is seen with hands and feet like a man's, and on his back six wings on the right and six on the left: twelve wings for a body that is no longer quite an angel's.

The goat arrives by another route, that of etymology. Reading the name in Leviticus as the goat that goes away, the figure inherits the horns of the animal of the rite, and from there, and from no ancient source, come the medieval and modern caprine images. The inverted pentagram sometimes assigned to him is later still: it belongs to nineteenth-century French occultism and has nothing to do with Enoch.

The rest is not a shape but a posture. Enoch leaves him bound hand and foot, covered in darkness with his face veiled, laid face down on the stones. Every later portrait of an Azazel standing, winged and free is describing the moment before the sentence, not the state in which the text left him.

The rite of Leviticus and the sentence of the Book of Enoch point to the same desert, and that coincidence sustains the whole later tradition. On the Day of Atonement lots were cast over two goats: one was sacrificed, and over the other the high priest confessed the guilt of Israel before sending it away. The Mishnah, in tractate Yoma, describes how it was done in the time of the Second Temple: an appointed man led it to a cliff called Soq and pushed it over; a band of scarlet wool was also tied, and tradition held that it turned white when forgiveness had been granted.

Neither Leviticus nor the Mishnah says that Azazel is an angel, and neither speaks of chains. It is Enoch who welds the two together: the desert that receives the sin and the desert that holds the prisoner. From then on the scapegoat no longer goes to a place, it goes to someone.

The ending was fixed from the start and has not changed: the binding is not the punishment, it is the custody. Enoch says he will remain so until the day of the great judgement, and that then he will be cast into the fire; in the parables of the same book it is announced that the angels of punishment will prepare the instruments of Azazel and his hosts, to throw them into the burning furnace. Dudael is a holding cell, not a destination.

Two false doors should be closed. Azazel does not appear in the Ars Goetia or in any catalogue of the seventy-two spirits, so there is no Goetic seal by which to call him. And the sphere of Golachab, in the inverted tree of the Kabbalah, is usually attributed to Asmodeus, not to him.