Michael

“Who is like God?” — the question that is also a name, and also a sword.

The Archangel

Michael is the prince of the heavenly host, the captain of the armies of light, and in most traditions the first among the archangels. His name is not a statement but a challenge — a rhetorical question flung across the void: Mi-ka-El, “Who is like God?” It is the war-cry raised against the pride of the adversary, the rebuke that casts the rebel star down from heaven. To speak the name is to answer it, for the only reply the name permits is silence, and in that silence the usurper falls. He is depicted as a radiant warrior in gleaming mail, wings outspread, the point of his spear pressed to the throat of the dragon beneath his heel. In one hand the sword of discrimination; in the other, often, the scales in which souls are weighed.

His fire is solar fire — not the smoky violence of the battlefield but the clean, unbearable brightness of the noonday sun. Michael governs the will made incandescent, the force that says no to what must be refused. In the older schemes he presides over the intellectual splendour and the disciplined mind, the marshalling of thought into ordered ranks. Where there is confusion he brings clear division; where there is corruption he brings the cauterising flame. He is the guardian of thresholds and the psychopomp of the last day, standing at the boundary between what is and what is passing away, ensuring that the accounts are true.

Scripture and Tradition

Of all the angels, Michael is the most fully named in scripture. In the Book of Daniel he is “the great prince who stands guard over the sons of your people,” the celestial patron of Israel who contends with the princes of Persia and Greece for the fate of nations. In the Epistle of Jude he disputes with the devil over the body of Moses, and in the Revelation of John it is Michael and his angels who make war upon the dragon and cast him down: “that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan.” The apocryphal and rabbinic literature multiplies his offices — he is the weigher of souls at the judgement, the advocate who pleads for the repentant, the angel who stayed Abraham’s hand and led Israel through the wilderness. Christian devotion made him the patron of soldiers, of the sick and the dying, and of the Church militant itself; his shrines crown high places from Monte Gargano to Mont-Saint-Michel, for the warrior of heaven belongs to the summit and the height.

In the Kabbalistic scheme Michael is most often assigned to Hod, the sphere of glory and splendour beneath Mercury, where intellect is marshalled into ordered form — though a strong older tradition attaches his solar fire to the Sun and the heart of the Tree. His day is Sunday, his direction the South, the place of the sun at its zenith, and his element fire in its purest and most disciplined expression. He is robed in red and gold, the colours of flame and majesty, and bears the sword, the spear, and the balance. To invoke him is to call upon the faculty that discriminates, that separates the true from the false and the living from the dead, and that has the courage to act upon the difference.

Correspondences

Related

Archangels — Gabriel · Raphael · Uriel · Haniel · Sandalphon · Metatron Choirs — Seraphim · Cherubim · Thrones · Dominions · Virtues · Powers · Principalities · Archangels · Angels

• Hod · Kabbalah · Tree of Life
• Biblical Angels
• Angels & Demons