Shem ha-Mephorash: The 72 Angels of the Divine Name

The Shem ha-Mephorash, Hebrew for "the Explicit" or "Distinguished Name", is a designation of the most holy name of God. In medieval Kabbalah it came to mean a name of seventy-two parts derived from three verses of Exodus, and by adding the suffixes -el or -iah to each part, Jewish and Christian Kabbalists produced seventy-two angel names. These angels became a fixture of Renaissance occult philosophy and modern ceremonial magic, where they are linked to the degrees of the zodiac, the tarot and the seventy-two spirits of the Goetia.

The Explicit Name in Rabbinic Tradition§

In rabbinic literature, ha-Shem ha-Meforash refers to the name of God pronounced as it is written, rather than replaced by a substitute such as Adonai. The Mishnah describes how, on the Day of Atonement, the people in the Temple court fell on their faces when they heard the High Priest utter the Explicit Name. After the destruction of the Temple the pronunciation was no longer used, and later Judaism forbade it; see the seven names of God.

The Talmud also knows of longer names of God, of twelve and forty-two letters, transmitted only to the discreet and pious. Medieval commentators, among them Rashi, mention a name of seventy-two letters or units, and the Sefer ha-Bahir, an early Kabbalistic work of the twelfth century, speaks of seventy-two names. In the German Pietist circles of the Rhineland and in the Spanish Kabbalah of the thirteenth century, these long names became objects of meditation and of magical use in amulets, under the general heading of practical Kabbalah.

Deriving the 72-Letter Name from Exodus 14§

The three consecutive verses of Exodus 14:19, 20 and 21, describing the angel of God moving behind Israel, the pillar of cloud dividing the camps and Moses stretching his hand over the Red Sea, each contain exactly seventy-two letters in the Hebrew text. Kabbalists saw this as a sign that the verses concealed a divine name connected with the miracle of the parting of the sea.

The usual method writes the three verses one above another, the first in its normal order, the second reversed, and the third again in normal order, a pattern that resembles the back-and-forth of an ox ploughing (boustrophedon). Reading down the columns gives seventy-two groups of three letters. Each triad is regarded as a name of God; together they form the "name of seventy-two". The calculation belongs to the wider Kabbalistic art of manipulating letters and numbers, related to gematria.

From Divine Name to Seventy-Two Angels§

By adding the theophoric endings -el ("God") or -iah ("Yah") to each triad, Kabbalists produced seventy-two angel names. The list begins Vehuiah, Ieliel, Sitael, Elemiah, Mahasiah and Lelahel, and ends with Haiaiel and Mumiah. A few of the names coincide with familiar angels or biblical names, such as Mikael, Daniel and Ariel, but most are known only from this system.

In Jewish tradition these angels, sometimes called the bearers or guardians of the name, belong to the world of divine names rather than to a popular angelology; they appear in Kabbalistic prayer intentions and on amulets more than as individual personalities. Many Jewish authorities regarded the practical use of such names as dangerous and reserved for the very pious. The idea that each angel has a personality, office and day of rule is largely a development of Christian Kabbalah and later occultism.

Christian Kabbalah: Reuchlin, Agrippa and Kircher§

From the late fifteenth century, Christian scholars adopted the Kabbalah as a hidden confirmation of Christian truth. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola praised its power in his 900 theses of 1486, and Johann Reuchlin's De verbo mirifico (1494) and De arte cabalistica (1517) discussed the divine names and the seventy-two angels at length. In this Christian Kabbalistic tradition each angel was paired with a verse of the Psalms containing a divine name, to be recited when calling on the angel.

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa printed the seventy-two names, the angels and their Psalm verses in the third book of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533), making them available to every later reader of magic. The Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher discussed the names in his Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–1654), and an elaborate radial diagram in that work, which surrounds the divine name with seventy-two names of God in many languages, became one of the most reproduced images of Christian Kabbalah. The catalogue entry for Kircher's Cabala of the Hebrews gives further detail.

The 72 Angels in Modern Magic: Quinances, Tarot and the Goetia§

Because seventy-two times five is 360, the angels were easily mapped onto the circle of the zodiac, each ruling a "quinance" of five degrees. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn developed this into a detailed scheme: each decan of ten degrees contains two angels, and since the thirty-six decans were assigned to the thirty-six small cards of the tarot's minor arcana, numbers two to ten, each card has a pair of Shem ha-Mephorash angels. These attributions appear in Golden Dawn papers and in Aleister Crowley's tables in 777 (1909); they are modern correspondences rather than ancient tradition. See the minor arcana.

The equal number of spirits in the Ars Goetia invited a further pairing. Some modern writers assign each goetic spirit to the same quinance as a Shem ha-Mephorash angel and treat the angel as the spirit's controlling counterpart, a reading that has no basis in the seventeenth-century Goetia itself but has become common in contemporary practice. The angels also appear on modern talismans and in Kabbalistic meditation practices that focus on the visual form of the Hebrew letters.

Devotional Uses and the Modern Angel Calendar§

In 1823 the French writer Lazare Lenain published La Science cabalistique, which assigned each of the seventy-two angels to five days of the year and presented them as the guardian geniuses of people born in those periods, with qualities and Psalm verses for each. This "angel of your birthday" scheme spread through French esotericism and, in the later twentieth century, into popular angelology and New Age literature in many languages.

Today the seventy-two names are also used in Jewish-inspired popular Kabbalah as subjects for meditation, in Christian esoteric prayer and in ceremonial magic. Historians stress the distance between these uses and the medieval Hebrew sources: what began as a sacred, rarely spoken name of God became, through Christian Kabbalah, a catalogue of individual angels with personalities and astrological rulerships. For the wider angelic hierarchy, see angels and spirits in ceremonial magic.

Frequently asked questions§

What does Shem ha-Mephorash mean?§

It is Hebrew for "the Explicit Name" or "the Distinguished Name". In early rabbinic usage it referred to the divine name pronounced as written, generally the Tetragrammaton; in medieval Kabbalah it came to denote the name of seventy-two parts derived from Exodus 14.

How are the 72 angels derived?§

The three verses Exodus 14:19–21 each have seventy-two Hebrew letters. Written in alternating directions and read in columns, they yield seventy-two three-letter names. Adding -el or -iah to each gives the seventy-two angel names.

Are the 72 angels connected to the 72 demons of the Goetia?§

Not in the original sources. The link was made by modern magicians, who assigned both sets to the seventy-two five-degree divisions of the zodiac and treated each angel as the counterpart of a goetic spirit.

Who are the first and last of the 72 angels?§

In the standard list the first is Vehuiah and the last is Mumiah. Spellings vary between sources because the names are transliterated from Hebrew in different ways.

Sources and further reading§

• Kabbalah — Gershom Scholem, 1974
• On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism — Gershom Scholem, 1960
• On the Art of the Kabbalah (De Arte Cabalistica) — Johann Reuchlin, 1517
• Three Books of Occult Philosophy — Henry Cornelius Agrippa, 1533
• Oedipus Aegyptiacus — Athanasius Kircher, 1652
• The Christian Kabbalah: Jewish Mystical Books and Their Christian Interpreters — Joseph Dan (ed.), 1997
• 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings — Aleister Crowley, 1909
• La Science cabalistique — Lazare Lenain, 1823