Azazel and Samael in the Kabbalah: who they are and where they come from

Two names, two origins

Azazel and Samael appear together in a great deal of occult literature, as if they were two generals of the same army. In fact they come from different places. Azazel is born of a Temple ritual and an apocalyptic book. Samael is born of rabbinic writing about death and sin. It was the medieval Kabbalah that gave both a place on a single map of evil.

Azazel: the goat and the Watcher

The first text is Leviticus 16. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest cast lots between two goats: one was sacrificed to the Lord; the other bore the sins of the people and was sent into the wilderness, "for Azazel". Nobody knows for certain whether Azazel was a place, the animal itself or a desert being. Ancient interpreters were already arguing about it.

The Book of Enoch, written centuries before Christ and preserved in Ethiopic, settles the question in its own way. In the Book of the Watchers, Azazel is one of the angels who came down to earth, joined with human women and taught people to make weapons, work metals and use cosmetics. For this he is bound and thrown into a pit in the desert, at Dudael, to await judgement. The wilderness of Leviticus and the prison of Enoch meet: Azazel becomes the angel who corrupted the world with forbidden knowledge.

Samael: the angel of death

Samael appears in the Talmud and the Midrash as the angel of death, the accuser and the tempter, sometimes identified with Satan. The Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, a midrash from the Islamic period, tells how Samael, the greatest of the angels, came down to Eden riding the serpent to seduce Eve. The name is often read as "poison of God" or "blindness of God", though the etymology is uncertain.

Here Samael is still a servant: he carries out death on divine orders. His rebellion is ambiguous and he has no kingdom of his own.

The Kabbalah and the Other Side

The shift happens in 13th-century Castile. Isaac ha-Kohen, in the Treatise on the Left Emanation, describes a hierarchy of impure powers that mirrors the holy emanations. There Samael is given a consort, Lilith, and the two form a couple that imitates, on the impure side, the divine union. Gershom Scholem showed how this idea passed into the Zohar and became central to later Kabbalah.

The Zohar calls this realm the Sitra Achra, "the Other Side", and its powers qliphoth, husks. Evil is not an independent force: it is the husk wrapped around sparks of holiness, living off them. Samael is the prince of that husk. Azazel enters the scheme as an inheritance from Enoch and is sometimes associated with Samael or with the fallen angels Uzza and Azael.

How the occultists read it

Western magic from the 19th century onwards took this material second-hand. The Golden Dawn and Crowley mapped the qliphoth as an inverted "tree of death", each sphere with its demon. Samael came to be associated with the sphere of Hod or of Chokmah, depending on the author, and Lilith with Malkuth. In contemporary Draconian magic and Luciferianism, both became figures of liberation, not condemnation.

That is a modern inversion. In Jewish Kabbalah, the aim is to rescue the sparks and dissolve the husks, not to worship them.

In short

• Azazel: the scapegoat of Leviticus, the Watcher angel of 1 Enoch, teacher of weapons and adornment.
• Samael: angel of death and tempter in rabbinic literature; prince of the Other Side in the Kabbalah.
• The couple: Samael and Lilith are a creation of 13th-century Castilian Kabbalah.
• The magical reading: the qliphoth as a working map is a modern invention.

Continue with Lilith and Samael and the guide to the Kabbalah.