The Aralim (אראלים) are a choir of angels whose name is most commonly rendered as “the Mighty Ones” or “the Thrones.” The root ארא”ל appears in Isaiah 33:7, where the Masoretic text reads “their valiant ones” or “their angels,” and the singular ארא”ל is sometimes interpreted as “lion of God” (אריאל). In later Hekhalot and Merkabah traditions, however, the term becomes a fixed designation for a specific angelic rank—one associated with stability, foundation, and the material completion of the divine emanations.

Position on the Tree of Life

The Aralim occupy the tenth and lowest position within the Choirs of Angels in Briah, corresponding to the Sephirah Malkuth (the Kingdom). On the Tree of Life, Malkuth is the final Sephirah, the receiver and container of all the energies that flow from Kether down through the nine upper spheres. As the Briatic choir of Malkuth, the Aralim therefore embody the most condensed, structured, and “earthy” expression of the creative world of Briah—the angels who administer the boundary between the divine archetypes and the material universe.

Historical context

Unlike the Seraphim and Kerubim, whose names are woven into the Hebrew Bible itself, the Aralim emerge chiefly in post-biblical angelological catalogs. The Talmud (Chagigah 12b) and the Zohar (e.g., III:105a) mention them among the orders that stand before the Throne of Glory, often in lists that conflate or distinguish them from the Thrones (Ophanim). Early medieval Jewish mystics, particularly the German Pietists of the Kalonymos family, systematized the angelic hierarchy in works such as the Berit Menuchah and the Sodei Razaya, where the Aralim are regularly placed in the vicinity of the Shekhinah, the indwelling divine Presence.

In the Christian Kabbalah of the Renaissance, Johann Reuchlin’s De Arte Cabalistica (1517) and later the compilations of Athanasius Kircher and Cornelius Agrippa reproduce lists of ten angelic choirs matched to the ten Sephiroth. Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy (Book III, ch. 18) assigns the Aralim to the Sephirah Malkuth, describing them as “the Angels of the Kingdom,” a title that echoes their Hebrew etymology. This identification was taken up by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and, through it, by Aleister Crowley in the construction of Liber 777.

It is important to note that earlier authorities sometimes differed: the Zoharic tradition occasionally places the Ishim (the “Souls” or “Holy Beings”) as the lowest choir, but in the Briatic arrangement that 777 follows, the Ishim are assigned to Yesod, and the Aralim are reserved for Malkuth. This shift reflects a particular exegetical emphasis on Malkuth as the Sephirah of the Shekhinah, whose angels are “mighty” precisely because they uphold the most fragile and material interface between divinity and creation.

In table 777, column 86 (scale step 10), the Aralim appear as the single angelic order for Malkuth in the world of Briah. Their presence there completes the series of ten choirs—from Seraphim at Kether to Aralim at Malkuth—each one translating the abstract divine light into progressively more defined and instrumental forms, until the Aralim bring it to the threshold of physical manifestation.