Castiel IS the angel of Thursday!
Castiel is commonly said in the fandom to not exist in angel mythology - he’s a version of Cassiel, who is the angel of Saturday. And maybe they made him angel of Thursday because the show was on Thursday or something.
Turns out, Castiel is an actual angel, and he is the angel of Thursday! The top image is from a scan I just made of The Encyclopedia of Angels by Constance Victoria Briggs, published in 1997 - definitely before the show. Note that Cassiel is referred to as a variation of Casziel, the angel of Saturday and tears, but Castiel is not. He’s his own thing, but the only thing he’s known for is Thursday.
Of course, I had to wonder where this lady got it. But this book lists over 70 sources, and doesn’t specify which information is taken from which. So I turned to Google Books, and started looking for references to Castiel before 1950.
(Note: The second hit given was Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, and no, the word “Castiel” does not appear in it, proving that Google Books is apparently an asshole.)
I only got one hit that actually refers to an angel named Castiel, but it’s a solid one! It’s from a 1665 translation of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy. (Note: According to Wikipedia, this book first appeared in 1559 and is likely not actually written by Agrippa, who wrote three Books of Occult Philosophy but died in 1535. But still. Old book.) As you can see above, it does list Castiel, not Cassiel, as one of the angels of Thursday. (It does list Cassiel separately under Saturday.)
Maybe whoever actually wrote this (or translated it) made him up, but at any rate he was made up in 1665 at the latest.
This is still the only information there seems to be about Castiel. So it’s possible that Kripke et al did base some of Cas’s traits on Cassiel, such as being assigned to watch over humanity from a distance. But they didn’t pull either the name or the Thursday thing out of thin air.
PG, why were you reading an Encyclopedia of Angels to begin with??
Haha, destiel reasons, of course. I was on the Cassiel wikipedia page recently and it said this:
“By many he is known to be the angel who fell in love with mankind, or rather the righteous man and began to feel human emotion.” With Briggs given as the source.
Of course, when I saw that I was like you are shitting me that can’t be real. So I ordered the book from my library.
Sadly, no, this is not real. I cannot find any reference to a/the “righteous man” at all in this book, nor does it say anything about Cassiel/Casziel falling in love or feeling human emotion. It does talk about the Grigori as having fallen in love with humans and taken human wives (which is why they were permanently cast out of heaven), but while Cassiel did watch over humanity like the Grigori, I can’t find any source referring to him as one.
Looks like a shipper thought they were clever and could slip this in to make it look like destiel is in the folklore. If only.
I’ve edited this statement out of the Cassiel Wikipedia article, although Wikipedians are assholes so even though I put in the edit summary that the book cited says no such thing, chances are somebody will revert my edit just because I haven’t edited much.
But I did find the actual Castiel reference, so the book wasn’t a total waste of time. :)
