Samael

Samael (סמאל) is one of the few angels in Judaism whose name defines him entirely: the traditional reading breaks it into «sam», poison, and «El», God, yielding «the venom of God». It is not a name fallen from heaven but the description of a function. In the rabbinic world heaven has a court, and that court has a prosecutor; Samael holds the post. He accuses on commission, not out of rebellion, and that distinction is what separates the Jewish Samael from everything Christianity and occultism later made of him. There is a second etymology, less popular but consistent with later Kabbalah: «semol», the left, which is the side of severity and judgement as against that of mercy. Both readings point to the same office, that of a power which harms under licence.

The text that fixes his image is Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer, a midrash composed around the eighth or ninth century. In its chapter 13 Samael appears as a great prince of heaven endowed with twelve wings, whereas the seraphim have six, and that detail alone places him above the rest. Envious of Adam, he goes down to the garden and examines the creatures until he finds the one most fit for evil: the serpent, which then walked upright and had the bearing of a camel. He does not possess it nor supplant it, he rides it. From that mount he reckons it better to tempt Eve rather than Adam, because he judges the woman easier to persuade, and the deception unfolds in two steps: first he touches the tree in front of her to prove that it does not kill, then he promises her that the fruit will make her like God. The fall thus ends up with two authors, and the chapter closes with Samael cast down from heaven together with his host.

In 3 Enoch, the mystical treatise also called Sefer Hekhalot, Samael has a title and a jurisdiction. Chapter 14 calls him prince of the accusers and declares him greater than all the princes of the kingdoms on high; the same book hands him the heavenly patronage of Rome, that is, of the empire that razed the Temple, which makes Samael a political adversary as well as a spiritual one. That text, and it is worth underlining, expressly distinguishes him from Satan, whom it treats as another figure. The midrashim add to him the most dreaded office of all: he is the angel of death who comes to take the soul, with the sword from which hangs the drop the dying man swallows. Deuteronomy Rabbah tells the most quoted episode of that facet, when Samael presents himself to collect Moses and the prophet rebuffs and humiliates him, until it is God who ends up taking the soul in person.

Medieval Kabbalah turns the prosecutor into a sovereign. In the Zohar, Samael heads the sitra ahra, «the other side», the dark counterpart of the tree of the sefirot, a realm that works as a black mirror of the divine one and copies its structures in order to invert them. Every king needs a queen, and that queen is Lilith. From their union are born the lilin, the nocturnal offspring the Talmud already had prowling around houses, and the couple is drawn as the inverted image of the heavenly marriage between the Holy One and his presence. The kabbalistic tradition goes so far as to state that only the final redemption will manage to part them. It is in this stratum, and not before, that Samael stops being an official of heaven and becomes the prince of demons that European demonology inherited without asking where he came from. The very text that inaugurates this couple, the Treatise on the Left Emanation by Isaac ben Jacob ha-Cohen (1265), in fact distinguishes two Liliths: the elder, consort of Samael, and the younger, wife of Asmodeus, whom Samael covets. Hence the queen of demons appears bound to both princes at once, and hence there is a quarrel between them.

Almost everything that circulates about Samael today comes from late fusions, and pulling them apart restores the figure to its real size. He is not Satan: in Hebrew «satan» denotes an office, that of the adversary who accuses at the trial, and 3 Enoch treats the two as separate characters. He is not Lucifer, a name born of a Christian reading of Isaiah 14, where the passage actually speaks of the king of Babylon. He is not Azrael, because rabbinic Judaism gives no proper name to the one who gathers souls and calls that office malakh ha-mavet; Azrael is the Arabic form that nineteenth-century Western occultism fixed as a name. And he is not a grimoire demon, with a seal, a count of legions and a slot in a numbered infernal hierarchy: that belongs to European magic of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Stripping those layers away does not diminish him, it dates him, and it leaves in plain view what he actually is, an angel in the service of a court that Kabbalah ended up crowning.