Demonic · Chief Princes · c. 1180 CE
Samael
Also called Sammael, Samil, The Venom of God, The Blind God · also recorded as Venom of God, Blind God, God of the Blind, Poison of God, Severity of God (per Wikidata)
Both an archangel and an adversary. Jewish tradition makes him the accusing angel, the angel of death and the guardian prince of Rome; all three are offices he was assigned, not verdicts on his character.
Narrow source base
Rabbinic and midrashic material calls him an archangel of enormous stature — chief of the satans and yet a functionary within the divine order, whose accusing and death-dealing are jobs he was assigned. Later Kabbalistic writing pairs him with Lilith and places him at the head of the qliphoth, which reads as unambiguous evil. The name is usually etymologised as 'venom of God' or 'blindness of God'. Any hierarchy that files him under one side loses half the record.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
What the name means
Klein (1987) compounds the name from *sam*, drug or poison, and *el*, God; Jastrow files him as the name of an accuser and angel of death. Neither is the derivation usually repeated. Blindness of God, from the root *sama*, is a different proposal and not the one the etymological dictionary gives, so the corpus follows Klein and names him — which under this project's rule is the whole of the claim. The popular gloss is recorded here as popular rather than as wrong.
Where it was actually worshipped
None. He is named in the Talmud, the Zohar and the magical papyri, all of them texts rather than places.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah · c. 1180
- Rank
- Prince of Accusers
- Order
- Chief Princes
- Base of operations
- None. He is named in the Talmud, the Zohar and the magical papyri, all of them texts rather than places.
- Era
- c. 1180 CE
- Traditions
- Jewish, Folk & Demonological
- Placed in
- The Infernal CourtThe Ten Shells
Traits
- Domain
- Accusation, death, the guardian angel of Rome/Edom
- Traditional form
- Twelve-winged, or a serpent
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to Samael, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- martial1
- malefic2
- transformation1
martial
- Executes Judgmentno text cited
malefic
- Deceives & Temptsno text cited
- Tormentsno text cited
transformation
- Conducts Soulsno text cited
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Samael, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 683 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Samael, Samaël
Absent from the rationalist ten ranks; belongs to the midrashic and mystical streams.
Listed among the demons of the infernal court, the ambiguity of the Jewish material stripped away.
“Samaël, prince des démons, selon les rabbins. Ce fut lui qui, monté sur le serpent, séduisit Ève.”Samael, prince of the demons according to the rabbis. It was he who, mounted upon the serpent, seduced Eve. — translated for ColossiansOne
Connections
What is it connected to?
Identified with Lilith
Paired as consorts at the head of the qliphoth in later Kabbalistic writing.
Thwarted by Michael
Later Jewish tradition sets Michael as Israel's advocate against Samael as its accuser — a courtroom pairing rather than a battlefield one.
Commanded by The Qliphoth
Samael and Lilith are placed at the head of the shells in later Kabbalistic writing.
Identified with Camael
Recorded to mark a persistent confusion: the names are close enough that lists repeatedly merge the angel of severity with the prince of accusers.
Identified with Lucifer
Identified in later Jewish and Christian demonology, not in the texts either name comes from. Recorded by Wikidata (P460); not asserted by a text this corpus carries.
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Samael?
Is Samael the same as Lilith?
What rank is Samael?
How else is Samael spelled?
What is Samael said to do?
How old is Samael?
Nearest in the corpus
If Samael is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Asherah
Mother of the Gods · Deliverance tradition
Consort of El at Ugarit and mother of the gods, whose cult objects stood in the Jerusalem temple itself for long stretches — and who disappears from English Bibles behind the word 'grove'.
Azazel
Chief Watcher · The Watchers
The scapegoat's destination in Leviticus, and the Watcher who taught weapons and cosmetics in 1 Enoch. Translators cannot even agree whether the word is a name, a place or an abstraction.
The Etemmu
The Dead Who Return · Mesopotamian
The Mesopotamian ghost of a person, and a problem of neglect rather than of malice: the etemmu that troubles the living is usually a spirit nobody buried and nobody remembers.
Abaddon
Angel of the Abyss · Infernal Court
A place-name in the Hebrew Bible — 'destruction', a synonym for the grave — that Revelation personifies as the king of the locusts of the pit.
Behemoth
Beast of the Land · Infernal Court
Job's land-beast, paired with Leviathan — presented there as a creature of God, not an enemy of him.
The Ifrit
Class of Jinn · Jinn
A powerful class of jinn — and jinn, crucially, have free will, so an ifrit may be Muslim, hostile, or neither.
The books behind Samael
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah
Moses Maimonides · c. 1180 · Hebrew
Read Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Blaisio Ugolino · Wikimedia file page
Dictionnaire Infernal
Jacques Collin de Plancy · 1818; illustrated ed. 1863 · French
Read Dictionnaire Infernal in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Collin de Plancy · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.