THE characteristic and distinguishing feature of medieval Jewish magic was the function which it assigned to the angels, the agents of God. The magical use of angels was of course predicated upon the assumption that the world is very thickly populated with them, and that they play a unique rôle in nature. The figures vary from a mere few hundred thousand all the way up to 496,000 myriads—and these are only partial estimates.1 We may readily believe this when we learn that every single thing on earth, animate or inanimate, from man through all of creation, birds and beasts, trees and brooks, even to the last blade of grass, owns its angelic representative above. This is the heart of the angel-lore. Houses and cities, winds and seasons, months and hours and days, each star above, each speck of dust underfoot, no thing in nature or in fancy exists independently of its memuneh, its heavenly "deputy" (literally, "appointed one").2 These "deputies" are the agents through whom the universe operates3—in fact, the activities that go on in the world are nothing more than reflections of their acts. "It is a well-known 'mystery' that no nation is destroyed until its celestial 'prince' has first fallen." This belief was coupled with the conception of astrology that each man is accompanied by a star which governs his existence, so that we have sometimes the cumbersome duplication, the angel, or "deputy" of a man's star, both charged with guiding and guarding him, the ultimate responsibility residing with the angel. "Every affair in which a man is engaged here on earth is first indicated up above by the angel of his star."4 These angels are both representatives and defenders of their earthly charges in the heavenly courts, as well as motivators of action below. The "deputy angels" of birds or animals or men who have been wrongly dealt with plead their cause before God and see just punishment meted out to the malefactors. Similarly, the angels who This idea constitutes the main theoretical basis of medieval Jewish magic. Ubiquitous and all-powerful, the "deputy angels" were the perfect medium through which the sorcerer, when he had acquired the requisite secret knowledge and skill, could influence man and nature to obey him. His charms and operations were intended to bring under his sway the particular "deputies" who could effect his will at the moment. "There are incantations which work on water but not on land, and others, intended for the deputies who preside over the land which have no effect on water." The long lists in such a work as Sefer Raziel are proof of the arduous training that the novice in magic must undergo if he would learn how to direct all the memunim of air, wind, date, time, place, etc., which control a situation at a given moment. Further, since a deputy's province is prescribed by his very nature, the sorcerer must know how to substitute another, better suited to his designs, and thus effect a change in nature itself.6 We have some detailed, if sometimes not too clear, explanations of just how this "deputy" magic worked. In the case of a man who by an incantation had succeeded in discovering the identity and whereabouts of a thief, we are informed, the memuneh who had been invoked disclosed them not by appearing in person to convey the information, but by concentrating on the facts and "mingling" his thought with the thought of the magician. If the identity of the thief was known, but the hiding-place of the booty was not, then it This system was a singular translation of Platonic idealism into the theosophical lingo of the early Kabbalah, though to call it a "system" is to dignify it with an order and logic it made no claim to possess. It took shape through incidental attempts to rationalize on a single plane the effects of nature and magic, on the basis of those philosophical and mystical concepts which were current in medieval Jewish thought; one might say in thirteenth-century German-Jewish thought, for it was during this century and in this locale that the conception was elaborated and attained its greatest popularity. Sefer Ḥasidim and the works of Eleazar of Worms display the influence of this doctrine on almost every page. The unparalleled luxuriousness of invention that characterized thirteenth-century Jewish angelology, sired by this theory, seems at first glance to have been a striking departure from traditional Jewish belief. But a brief review of the development of Jewish angel-lore discloses its thoroughly orthodox mystical antecedents. Scripture knew the angels as ministers in the celestial court, serving and glorifying God, occasionally acting as messengers and agents to perform His will on earth. The writer of the late book of Daniel was the first to individualize angels and to endow them with names and titles. In the Talmudic period the Biblical angelology was elaborated and enriched in three directions: angelic ministration was frequently inferred in Biblical narratives which made no mention of it, thus broadening the concept of angels as intermediaries between man and God; the personality of the angels was more clearly delineated through an effort to describe them, to name the more important ones, and to accord them peculiar spheres of influence, Along with this elaboration of angelology went its practical corollary, the utilization of angels in magic. The Talmud, though speaking often of angelic apparitions, knew nothing of the conjuration of angels as distinguished from the conjuration of demons. At most, there appears to have existed during the Talmudic period the practice of calling upon, or praying to the angels, as intermediaries before God, to intercede in a crisis.9 Even Geonic mysticism was reserved on this point, but evidently during this later period, which saw so marked a development of angelology, the Talmudic prayer had been transformed into a magical invocation, as the Aramaic Incantation Texts, published by Montgomery, and such a work as the Sword of Moses, edited by Gaster, indicate. This was the foundation upon which thirteenth-century German-Jewish mysticism built an imposing structure of angel-magic. The earliest reference to angelic "deputies" that I have encountered in rabbinic sources occurs in the late Midrash to Psalms,10 composed probably during the tenth century in Southern Italy. This work undoubtedly embodied much older material, but the absence of this concept in the Talmudic literature, and the fact that eastern Jewish mysticism entered Europe through the south of Italy at about this time, stamp it as a product of Geonic mystical speculation. The expansion of the memuneh doctrine in Germany, where it was introduced by the Kalonymides, into a veritable theosophy, embracing and crowning all the elements of earlier Jewish angelology, was the historically logical consequence Despite this rich angelology northern Jewry raised few questions as to the origin of the angels, the elements of which they are constituted, their outward appearance—they were simply there, in the heaven above, clustered about the throne of glory, or all about one on earth, performing their heaven-ordained tasks, and no questions asked. The furthest that Eleazar of Worms would go in describing them was to say that they are "tenuous substance, as unsubstantial as the wind, which cannot be seen."11 This conception, however, created certain difficulties of a metaphysical and practical nature. If the angels are pure spirit, how can they be said to achieve the material effects which tradition ascribed to them, and magic demanded of them? Maimonides, the consistent and indomitable rationalist, denied altogether the possibility of the physical apparition of angels as well as the objective reality of the effects attributed to angel-magic, and dismissed them as self-delusion or optical illusions. So uncompromising a view, however, found few adherents. The Spanish philosophers Naḥmanides and Judah Halevi acknowledged the reality of angelic apparitions, but stipulated that they required a special perspicuity of vision on the part of the beholders. In the north of Europe even this last condition was excluded: angels possess the power to assume human (and animal) forms, and to appear in the society of man as completely physical beings, on a par with himself. In fact such transformations were common occurrences, the "prince of a man's star" frequently adopting the shape of his human charge and descending from on high to tread the earth. And if one demands an explanation of the process by which the transmutation of spirit into matter occurs, the One characteristic of the angels, in particular, merits attention both because of the frequency with which it was mentioned, and because of its practical consequences for religious and magical rites. Petitions were often addressed to heaven by way of the intervening angels. God, omniscient, comprehends all tongues, but the official language of the celestial court is Hebrew, and unfortunately the angels are monolingual (or, it may be, if they do have knowledge of foreign languages they choose to ignore communications addressed in them.) This principle was advanced in the Talmud, and since Aramaic was the spoken language of the people, the warning against praying in Aramaic was made especially emphatic. Only in the sickroom might one employ other tongues than Hebrew, for there the Shechina, the Presence of God, was believed to hover over the head of the invalid, and received the prayer directly. This belief persisted in the Middle Ages and was utilized to explain, if weakly, the Aramaic prayers that are to be found in the ritual, and in particular, certain Aramaic lines in the Kaddish: they were couched in this language so that they might be unintelligible to the angels, for their contents were such as might annoy them, or arouse their envy of the superlative piety of the Jews. It was this belief too that made necessary the bestowal of a Hebrew name upon every Jew, in addition to his secular name, and the use exclusively of the Hebrew name in the course of a religious rite, for the angels certainly could not be expected to recognize an individual by any other. Even in the grave this principle still obtained. The Kabbalistic doctrine of Ḥibbut ha-Kever, which was familiar in Northern Europe, envisaged a three-day period, immediately succeeding burial, of interrogations and beatings by the angel of death, during which the deceased must identify himself by his Hebrew name. Woe betide him if it had slipped his memory!13 Of course, this idea met with frequent objections, and the retort of certain medieval commentators to the original statement in the Talmud should have permanently demolished it: "You say that even the thought hidden in a man's heart they know, and yet the Aramaic language is beyond their comprehension!"14 But the sarcasm 15 "The angels are the messengers of God; He impresses His will upon them and sends them forth to do His bidding," wrote Eleazar of Worms, and he explained that this work keeps them constantly occupied, for so many new tasks continually await them that they must rush to complete the present one. They can do nothing of their own will, he said, but act only upon God's command—a view which, while true to the traditional belief, cannot be reconciled with the part the angels were forced to play in medieval magic, for this implied a considerable degree of independence of God's will. Much closer to the prevailing opinion was the statement found in a Geonic responsum: "There are many acts which angels can perform of their own accord, without a special order from above. Therefore amulets are written and names spoken, to aid the angels in these matters." But when they are acting as messengers of the Lord, they carry out only one mandate at a time. Many of them have specific functions or fields of activity, and the orders which fall within their scope are of course assigned to them.16 God's will opens up to them His entire domain. Medieval Jews believed in an especially vigilant Providence which presided over Viewed in this light the angels were the mechanism through which God maintained a close contact with His universe. But these angelic intermediaries could carry messages both ways, and the ancient practice of calling upon the angels rather than God directly in prayer became very widespread during this period. Indeed, the whole force of the mystical movement which stressed the secret values hidden in the letters and the words of the liturgy was directed toward bringing into rapport the angels who could most effectively reach the ear of the heavenly court. Finally, the position of the angels in heaven made accessible to them the founts of mystic lore; they were the source of that secret wisdom to which the mystic aspired. To them he turned for inspiration, and if his piety and learning—and sometimes his skill in magic—warranted it, his quest was not unrewarded. The book Raziel is supposed to have been transmitted to Adam by the angel of that name; Eleazar of Worms, who, incidentally, had a hand in the concoction of that work, boasted of his intimacy with various angels; a few centuries later we learn of a Kabbalist, Samson of Ostropol by name, who "was visited daily by an angel who taught him the mysteries of the Torah." Many a great mystic was reputed to have sat at the feet of such celestial mentors.18 Yet we learn little more concerning individual angels than their names and their functions; our authors were not interested in the angel but in his availability for magical ends. Occasionally some information culled from the mystical tradition is passed on, but with an air of pedantic scholarship. Metatron, the demiurge of classical Jewish mysticism, was important only because his name is the mathematical equivalent of Shaddai, one of God's names. Sandalfon is "taller than his comrades by a distance of five hundred years," it is true, but his significance lay in his intimate attendance upon the person of God Himself.19 Dumah, who presides over the realm of the dead, the angels of destruction, others familiar from Talmudic times make their appearance. The Angel of Death retains his especial rôle in human affairs. The archangels still people the pages ofTHE POWERS OF GOOD
DEPUTY ANGELS
