Mastema

Classification: Virtue

Meaning "hostility," Mastema is a holy angel with the role of punisher.

The ("good") chief of evil spirits (see Satanael as the "bad" chief of evil spirits). Barely considered good in human terms, Mastema is responsible for carrying out God's most destructive wills and enacting judgment. Though satan can perform similiar deeds, Mastema is unlike satan and does not tempt man. His deeds are for justice and warning only.

Nephilim: Requested that 10% of the Nephilim souls stay on Earth to serve as demons that haunt the living.

Mastema does visit the Islands of the In-Between, to enact punishment occasionally on those in their purgatorial state. (TODO flesh this out: only punishes those acting out not everyone there like in catholic purgatory).

parent: Holy Angels, Angels

[1] In Jubilees, where Mastema, an angel tasked with the tempting of mortals into sin and iniquity, requests that God give him a tenth of the spirits of the children of the watchers, demons, in order to aid the process. These demons are passed into Mastema's authority, where once again, an angel is in charge of demonic spirits. [ref]

[2] [The author of Jubliee] credits the more unsavory deeds of God to a malicious, evil being. For example, when the author of Jubilees relates the terrifying events of Genesis 22 (the demand from God that Abraham sacrifice his only son Isaac, and offer him as a sacrifice to the LORD), it is Mastema, not God, in the Jubilees version ( Jub 17:15–18) who issues the appalling decree. [The Birth of Satan]