Raphael

Raphael introduces himself, and only at the end: «I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand before the glory of the Lord» (Tobit 12:15). The name, rāfāʼ-ʼēl, says «God has healed», and the whole book is the demonstration of that sentence. He is sent by two prayers that rise to heaven on the same day from different places: that of Tobit, blind in Nineveh, and that of Sarah, in Ecbatana, whose seven husbands a demon has killed on the wedding night. Raphael comes down disguised as a kinsman, calls himself Azariah son of Ananias, and hires himself out as guide to young Tobias for a wage. On the road he has him pull from the Tigris a fish that was trying to bite his foot, and tells him to keep the heart, the liver and the gall. Smoke from the heart and liver drives off Asmodeus, who flees to upper Egypt, where the angel binds him; the gall, rubbed on Tobit's eyes, lifts the white films and gives him back his sight.

Art tells him apart by what he carries, not by what he looks like. His three attributes are the pilgrim's staff, the fish and the flask: the staff because the whole book is a journey, the fish because of the one from the Tigris, and the flask or vial because the gall becomes a remedy. He usually wears a traveller's dress, the clothing belted and sandals on, and often has the boy with him: the pair has its own name in painting, «Tobias and the Angel». The lily sometimes put in his hand is not his but Gabriel's, where it marks Mary's purity at the Annunciation; when it turns up in a Raphael it is workshop contagion. Nor do the texts describe him, and they say so on purpose: nobody notices anything strange about Azariah for the whole journey, and on revealing himself the angel warns that he neither ate nor drank, but that those present «were seeing a vision» (Tobit 12:19).

His feast was kept on 24 October until the calendar reform of 1969, which gathered the three archangels named in Scripture into a single day, 29 September. He is patron of the sick and of those who tend them, of the blind, of travellers and of those seeking a spouse, and all five patronages come out of the same book, with nothing needing to be added. Eastern tradition counts him among the seven venerated by name; in the West, the Roman council of 745 cut the list to the three biblical ones and he stayed in. Beyond all this runs a much more recent layer worth dating: the correspondences tying him to the planet Mercury, to the sefirah Tiferet of the Tree of Life or to the element air belong to modern ceremonial magic, above all to the Golden Dawn of the late nineteenth century, and not to medieval Kabbalah nor to the grimoires they claim to cite.

There is a Raphael earlier than the one of the journey, and his office is harsher. In the Book of the Watchers, the first part of 1 Enoch, the blood of the earth cries out because of the angels who have mingled with women, and God shares out the punishment among four archangels. Raphael gets the physical part: «bind Azazel hand and foot, and cast him into the darkness: and make an opening in the desert, which is in Dudael, and cast him therein», covering him with rough and jagged rocks and with darkness until the day of judgement (1 Enoch 10:4-6). The scene explains his speciality better than any treatise, because in that book healing and binding are the same operation: illness comes from the spirits the Watchers loosed upon the world, and to cure is to shut them up again. The same book confirms it later, when it names him among the four who stand before the Lord and describes him as «set over all the diseases and all the wounds of the children of men» (1 Enoch 40:9).

The first is of namesakes. The painter Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) was named after the archangel, not the other way round, and his pictures are no source for anything about him; that works by one Raphael get cited to illustrate the other is mere coincidence of name. The second is Israfil, the angel who in Islamic tradition blows the trumpet of judgement. He has been paired with Raphael in comparative literature for likeness of name and of rank, but his office is not to heal but to announce the end, and the Qur'an does not name him: the form Israfil appears in the hadith and in later commentary. The third is Asclepius. That two figures carry a staff and heal does not mean one derives from the other: the parallel belongs to a modern handbook of symbolism, not to ancient syncretism, and Raphael's staff is a walker's, with no serpent coiled about it.