Ariel (angel)

Ariel (Hebrew: אריאל, Ari'el, Arael or Ariael‎‎) is an archangel found primarily in Jewish and Christian mysticism and Apocrypha. The name Ariel, "Lion of God" or "Hearth of God," occurs in the Hebrew Bible but as the name of an angel the earliest source is unclear.

Harris Fletcher (1930) found the name Ariel in a copy of the Syncellus fragments of the Book of Enoch, and suggested that the text was known to John Milton and may be the source for Milton's use of the name for a minor angel in Paradise Lost. However, the presence of the name in the Syncellus fragments has not been verified (1938), and in any case since the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls', earlier versions of the Book of Enoch are now known to not contain the name Ariel. In Paradise Lost, Ariel is a rebel angel, overcome by the seraph Abdiel in the first day of the War of Heaven.

In the Coptic Pistis Sophia (MS. Add. 5114.), Jesus bids the apostles preach that they "be delivered from the rivers of smoke of Ariel." Because of the association of Jerusalem with the name "Ariel", it is likely that this is an allusion to the fires of Gehenna or Gehinnom, a valley near Jerusalem deemed cursed because of its association with early pagan religions (Ba'als and Caananite gods, including Moloch) where children were sacrificed by immolation. In later Jewish, Christian and Islamic scripture, Gehenna is a destination of the wicked and often translated in English biblical versions as "Hell." According to tradition, fires located in this valley were kept burning perpetually to consume the filth and cadavers thrown into it.

According to the German occultist Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535): "Ariel is the name of an angel, sometimes also of a demon, and of a city, whence called Ariopolis, where the idol is worshipped."

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