Chamuel

Chamuel is one of the spellings of the Hebrew name also written Camael or Kamael, usually glossed as "he who sees God" or "he who seeks God". Before the twentieth century there are not two angels with that name: there are two ways of writing one.

What the older sources ascribe to him is not love. In the Sefer Raziel and in the lists of names derived from it, and above all in Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, the name is aligned with Mars, with martial force and with Gevurah, the sefirah of severity. That is, with rigour, which is exactly the opposite of what today's angelology assigns him.

The split is recent and can be dated. It was theosophy first, and then the Ascended Masters currents that begin in the nineteen-thirties, that separated the name into two distinct figures, gave one strength and the other love, and assigned them their own rays and colours. Chamuel was left with the pink ray. That division is real and has its own literature, still being written, but it belongs to the last century and not to Kabbalah or the grimoires.

Knowing this takes nothing from the figure. It dates him, which is the only thing an encyclopaedia can honestly do with an angel who appears in no ancient text with that office.

Chamuel's iconography is entirely modern: light in pink tones, warmth, serenity, an angel who consoles rather than one who commands. His stone is rose quartz, and it should be said that the association of rose quartz with love is not ancient either. The stone was carved from antiquity for beads and seals, but nothing links it to affection before the twentieth-century crystal trade. The Ascended Masters tradition also gives him a female counterpart, Charity, with whom he forms a pair or "twin flame" governing love and gratitude.

There is a detail almost never told that puts everything else in order. Modern angelology places Chamuel in Chesed, the sefirah of mercy, and that fits beautifully with the unconditional love ascribed to him. But in classical Kabbalah the angel who governs Chesed is usually Zadkiel, and the name Camael belongs to Gevurah, the opposite sefirah, that of rigour. The transfer did not follow the sources: it followed the attribute. First it was decided that this angel was the angel of love, and afterwards a place was found for him on the Tree of Life.

On that logic everything now asked of him has been built: self-love, the healing of wounds of the heart, forgiveness, reconciliation after a break, inner peace, and the reappearance of what has been lost.

The commission of making lost things reappear has in Western Christianity an old and very popular holder: Saint Anthony of Padua, prayed to for exactly that since the Middle Ages. That this office was transferred to Chamuel is a matter of the angelic literature of the last few decades, and it is a good example of how devotion distributes and redistributes the same competences among different figures as religious taste changes.

On the ecclesial side, his situation is that of every angel who is not one of three. It is not that the Catholic Church stopped recognising him: it never recognised him. In the year 745 a synod gathered in Rome under Pope Zachary condemned a preacher named Aldebert who invoked eight angels by name, and established that only Michael, Gabriel and Raphael have authority. The Directory on Popular Piety published in 2001 did no more than repeat it.

He is often compared with the love gods of other traditions, with Eros or Cupid, and the comparison needs qualifying: those are gods of desire, whereas what is ascribed to Chamuel is an affection without object or demand, closer to what Christian Greek called agape. With Raphael he shares the ground of healing, with a clear division: one heals the body and this other, the heart.

He is kept here as an entry of his own alongside Camael because the modern split exists, has its literature and is lived by many people, not because the ancient sources distinguish anything.