Selaphiel

Selaphiel, who also appears as Salathiel or Sealtiel, is in the Orthodox Christian tradition the archangel of prayer and intercession. His name comes from the Hebrew and means I have asked of God, and there is a detail there worth not skipping: that same word designates a man in the Bible. Shealtiel, son of Jeconiah and father of Zerubbabel, appears in Ezra and in the genealogy of Matthew's Gospel, and is no angel at all. The archangel bears a name Scripture gives to a person; the coincidence is nobody's mistake, but it explains much of the confusion the figure drags along.

And one attribution repeated everywhere should be cleared away, because it is false: Selaphiel does not appear in the Book of Enoch. Chapter twenty of the First Book of Enoch does list seven holy angels (Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraqael, Gabriel and Remiel) but Selaphiel is not among them. It is a different list, three or four centuries older, and confusing the two is the commonest error about him.

His real place lies in two other roots, and both are genuinely ancient. The book of Tobit puts a decisive sentence in Raphael's mouth: I am one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints. And Revelation describes the seven angels who stand before God, and one of them with a golden censer offering, with the smoke of the incense, the prayers of all the saints. There, and not in Enoch, lies the whole office of Selaphiel: the seven, the intercession and the censer.

Orthodox iconography distinguishes him from the other archangels by a trait visible at once: his posture. Michael goes armed, Gabriel carries the lily and the messenger's staff, Raphael holds the physician's flask and is accompanied by Tobias; Selaphiel, by contrast, appears with his head bowed, his eyes lowered and his arms crossed on his breast. In a frieze of seven figures looking straight ahead, he is the one looking at the ground.

That gesture is not decorative humility: it is the posture of someone praying, and what the image means to teach is how prayer should be made. The censer he usually carries comes straight from Revelation, where the smoke of the incense rises before God with the prayers of the saints, and from the psalm that asks that prayer rise like incense. It is the attribute that identifies him, as the sword identifies Michael.

He wears tunic and mantle, with no armour and no insignia of command, and that absence also says something. Against the archangels who fight or proclaim, Selaphiel embodies the contemplative side of the angelic: he neither battles nor announces, but holds up before God what is entrusted to him. His feast is the Synaxis of the Bodiless Powers, the eighth of November, where he is commemorated together with the other six.

Orthodox tradition counts seven archangels before the throne: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Selaphiel, Jehudiel and Barachiel, to whom some lists add an eighth, Jeremiel. The number is neither arbitrary nor late: it comes from the two sentences cited above, Tobit's on the seven who present the prayers and Revelation's on the seven who stand before God. What changed over the centuries was not the figure but which names fill it, and that is why the Jewish, Orthodox and Western lists do not agree.

Within that group the division is of offices, not of rank, and Selaphiel's is best understood by contrast. Gabriel comes down: he carries from God to men the messages entrusted to him. Selaphiel goes up: he takes what men say and sets it before the throne. One is the messenger, the other the intercessor, and between them they close the circuit in both directions.

His cult is above all Eastern. The Orthodox and Oriental Churches invoke him as patron of prayer and of the contemplative life, and his recollected image serves as a model of the attitude with which the believer should address God; in the West his name scarcely circulates, because the same Roman synod of 745 that condemned the invocation of non-canonical angels by name left him out along with the others. The Catholic Church keeps that line, and in the Directory on Popular Piety of 2001 again discouraged giving names to the angels Scripture does not name.