Angel Manakel: The 66th Angel of Inner Order and Healing

“Before there was language for what we were feeling, there was Manakel — the angel who tends the inner order when the world outside has gone dark.”

In the Kabbalistic tradition, the 66th angel of the Shem HaMephorash carries a name that means The God Who Nurtures Everything. The wisdom Manakel holds — of restoring calm from chaos, of protecting the dreaming mind, of redirecting destructive cycles toward truth — has neighbours in other cosmologies. Where Manakel steadies the inner order, the Yorùbá Orisha Ọya clears the path. Two traditions, each whole, each doing its own work. The ancestors held both. So do we.

A Note on Gender

The 72 names of the Shem HaMephorash are built by adding the divine suffixes -el or -yah to three-letter triads drawn from Exodus 14:19–21. In Hebrew these forms are grammatically masculine — but Hebrew has no neuter, and grammatical gender does not assign a body. The commentators who carried these names to us were almost entirely men, and they rendered the angels he/him as a matter of course. That is a habit of transmission, not a revelation about the beings themselves — and the tradition is less settled than the habit suggests. Feminine angels were entirely conceivable to ancient Jews: in rabbinic literature, in liturgical poetry, in synagogue art.

Ubuntu Village assigns pronouns editorially, guided by Afro-diasporic resonance. We name Manakel she/her as an act of ancestral alignment — not a doctrinal claim, and not a correction of a tradition we hold in respect. She is the 66th name, and she keeps the nocturnal hours; the figure who holds her ground in our own lineage — Ọya, who clears the path with wind — is a mother of storms. The pronoun follows the work.

Who Is Angel Manakel? (#66 Shem HaMephorash)

Manakel is the 66th angel of the Shem HaMephorash — the 72 divine names derived from three verses in Exodus, each holding a specific vibrational frequency and angelic intelligence. Her name in Hebrew, מְנַקֵּאֵל (Mem-Nun-Kof), translates as The God Who Nurtures Everything, and her domain reflects that name completely.

She is associated with the sphere of Yesod on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life — the sphere governing dreams, the subconscious, the emotional body, and the bridge between the physical and spiritual worlds. Her regency hours are 21:40–22:00 — a nocturnal regency — and her dates of influence include February 8–12, May 24, August 6, October 18, January 2, and March 14. Her sign is Aquarius, and her element is Air.

Manakel’s gifts are specific and needed: she dissolves cycles of fear, anxiety, guilt, and shame. She protects the sleeping mind from nightmares, guiding souls toward restorative rest. She carries the energy of divine justice and karmic redirection — helping those who have been pulled off-center by grief, trauma, or moral confusion to find their way back to truth. Her crystals are rose quartz, amethyst, turquoise, and silver.

She is not a distant force. She is a presence as close as breath, as intimate as the moment before sleep.

The Choir of Angels: What the Tradition Actually Says

Manakel belongs to the choir of Angels — and in the Shem HaMephorash, that word is not a loose synonym for “celestial being.” It is a rank. The 72 names are ordered into nine choirs of eight, and Manakel sits in the last of them: numbers 65 through 72, the sphere of Yesod, under the archangel Gabriel. Of every order in the system, the choir of Angels stands closest to human life. It is the ground floor of heaven.

It is worth saying plainly where the confusion comes from, because it is an honest one. In the Golden Dawn’s sephirotic table, the angelic order assigned to Yesod is the Kerubim — the Cherubim. A writer who knew Manakel was Yesod could arrive at “Cherub” by a route that looks entirely legitimate. But the Shem HaMephorash carries its own choir structure, and that is the system we are working in the moment we say “the 66th angel.” You cannot number an angel by one table and rank her by another. Manakel is 66. Sixty-five through seventy-two are Angels. That is the whole of it.

What the choir of Angels does is unglamorous by the standards of the throne. The Seraphim burn. The Ophanim turn — wheels within wheels, their rims covered in eyes, moving in every direction at once without turning. The Chayot HaKodesh of Ezekiel’s vision move in fire and lightning and the tumult of an army, and the ground beneath them blazes. The Angels do none of this. They work at the height of a sleeping person’s shoulder. They are assigned to individual lives — to this dream, this fear, this night, this one person in the dark. The tradition places them last precisely because they are nearest.

Manakel’s dignity, then, is not that she is high. It is that she is close. She is not a distant force. She is a presence as close as breath — and the choir she actually belongs to is the one the tradition built for exactly that. To be of the Angels is to be the last rung of the ladder, the rung that touches the floor. It is the rung a person can actually reach.

So the healing of the individual soul is cosmic work — but not because it belongs to the highest orders of creation. It is cosmic work because the lowest order of creation is the one that shows up for it. The tradition did not send its grandest beings to tend a nightmare. It sent the ones who were near enough to hear it.

“Where Manakel tends the dreaming soul from within the Kabbalistic tradition, Ọya clears the path from within the Yorùbá cosmos. Neither becomes the other. Both keep the night.”

— Ubuntu Village

Ọya and Manakel: Where Yorùbá and Kabbalah Meet

In the Yorùbá spiritual tradition, the Orisha Ọya governs transformation, the storm, and the liminal passage between the living and the ancestral realms. She is the wind that arrives before the rain — clearing what has grown stagnant, breaking open what has become rigid, making way for what is ready to emerge. She guards the egúngún — the ancestral masquerades — and walks with the dead as they cross into the next realm.

She is also a river. The Niger is Odò Ọya — Ọya’s river — and she carries the praise name Iyansan, Mother of Nine, for its nine tributaries. Wind and water both, storm and current: she is not an element tidily assigned. But it is the wind we follow here, because Air is what Manakel keeps.

Where Manakel tends the dreaming soul from within the Kabbalistic tradition, Ọya clears the path from within the Yorùbá cosmos. Both work at a threshold; neither works at the other’s. Manakel steadies what has come loose in the night mind. Ọya moves what has stayed too long. The resemblance is real — and it is a resemblance, not an identity. We offer it as a correspondence our community may find useful, not as a claim about what either being is.

A note on our own bookkeeping. Ọya appears elsewhere in this series: we have also set her beside Angel Yelahiah, whose work is karmic alignment and protection. That is not an oversight, and it is not evidence that Manakel and Yelahiah are the same. It is what happens when a large, many-sided orisha is set next to a system of seventy-two specialists: she touches more than one of them, and not one of them contains her. Ọya is not the match for an angel. She is a neighbour to several.

Holding two names at once is not something Ubuntu Village invented. It has a documented history. In the Yorùbá religions carried across the Atlantic — Candomblé in Brazil, Lucumí in Cuba — enslaved practitioners set their orisha alongside Catholic saints, and Ọya was placed with St. Teresa (in some houses, St. Catherine, or Our Lady of Candelaria). That was not comparison for its own sake. It was survival under a regime that forbade the orisha by name, and it produced a living tradition of carrying two names without letting either dissolve. We work inside that inheritance, and we try to keep its discipline.

At Ubuntu Village, we hold both. We do not ask our community to choose between ancestral spiritual inheritance and the wisdom of other traditions. We ask: what does this teach us about the nature of healing, and how do we carry it forward together?

Aquarius, Yesod, and the Element of Air

Manakel governs Aquarius, and Aquarius is an Air sign. The water-bearer carries a vessel in the iconography, but the element the tradition assigns is Air — one of the oldest traps in the correspondence tables, and an easy one to fall into. Yesod sets the same trap. Yesod is the lunar sphere, and the moon pulls tides, so water feels right. It is not. In the Golden Dawn’s attributions Yesod’s element is Air; its grade, Theoricus, is the Air temple. Air in the sign, Air in the sphere, Air in the angel. Manakel is an Air angel three times over.

This is the better fit, and not only the more accurate one. Air is what you cannot see and cannot stop. It is the medium of the voice — the thing that carries a word from one mouth to another ear. It is breath: the last thing a person does before sleep and the first thing on waking. And Yesod is the sphere through which everything must pass on its way from the divine to the physical. Not a reservoir — a passage. Not a depth to dive into — a current to be carried on. Manakel does not fetch anything up from below. She keeps a channel open.

This is where the Yorùbá correspondence stops being decorative and becomes exact. Ọya is wind. Not a metaphor of wind — wind: the gust ahead of the storm, the pressure drop, the thing that moves through a place, leaves it changed, and cannot be held. Where Manakel keeps the channel open, Ọya moves through it. Air is what the two of them have in common, and it is the only claim about them we need to make. It is enough.

In communities that have survived the severing of ancestral connection — through enslavement, colonization, forced migration — the healing of the dream life is not a luxury. It is the work of reclaiming the self that the trauma tried to erase. What was cut was a line of transmission: breath to breath, name to name, one generation telling the next who they were. To keep the dreaming channel open is to keep that line open. Manakel does it in the night. Ọya does it at the threshold. The village does it out loud, in the day, together.

Dream Theology: What African Traditions Have Always Known

In Western frameworks, dreams are psychological — products of the sleeping brain processing the day’s experience. Manakel’s tradition proposes something far older and more precise: that the dreaming state is a realm, not a byproduct, and that it is populated by intelligences who can be called upon, communicated with, and asked for guidance.

African spiritual traditions have held this understanding for millennia. In ancient Kemetic tradition, dreams were called rswt — a word that shares its root with the verb “to wake” — because the Kemetic understanding was precisely the inverse of the modern one: the waking state was the limited experience, and the dreaming state was the awakened one, in which the soul was freed from physical constraint and able to receive direct communication from the neteru. Dream incubation — sleeping in sacred spaces to receive divine guidance — was practiced at temples throughout Kemet, most famously at the Serapeum of Memphis.

In Yoruba tradition, the ori — the personal spiritual intuition, the inner head, the seed of individual destiny — travels during sleep. It is during the dreaming state that the ori communicates most directly with the Orisha, that ancestral guidance is received, and that the alignment between a person’s earthly path and their divine destiny (ayanmo) can be restored or confirmed. A recurring nightmare in Yoruba understanding is not merely a psychological symptom. It is a message from the ori or from the ancestors — something unresolved, something requiring attention, something that must be addressed through ritual, prayer, or community counsel.

This is precisely why Manakel’s protection of the dreaming mind matters so deeply from an Ubuntu lens. When she dissolves nightmares and restores restful sleep, she is not simply improving sleep hygiene. She is protecting the channel through which the divine communicates with the human soul. She is keeping the line open. And in a tradition that understands the dream as the place where the ori meets the ancestors, that protection is among the most sacred gifts an angel can offer.

Working With Manakel’s Energy

Those who work with Manakel do so in moments of emotional instability, recurring nightmares, cycles of self-sabotage, or spiritual confusion. She is particularly called upon during the dark night of the soul — that necessary passage when everything we have relied upon stops working and we are left, in the dark, without a clear path forward.

To invite Manakel’s presence: meditate on her Hebrew letters — Mem, Nun, Kof — either visualized in gold or spoken aloud as a mantra before sleep. Hold rose quartz or amethyst. Wear or visualize the colors green (growth, healing) and yellow (clarity, discernment). Speak her name as a simple acknowledgment: Manakel, I receive your order. I receive your peace.

If you carry Yorùbá spiritual practice, you may also call on Ọya before sleep — thanking her for clearing the path through the night and asking for safe passage through your dreaming. The two streams of invocation are not contradictory. They are braided.

A Note on How We Hold This

Herbal and spiritual knowledge — hoodoo, rootwork, Santería, Vodoun, or any other lineage carried down through generations — is cultural memory and historical record, offered here for its cultural, historical, and educational significance, not as instruction toward harm. A tool does not choose what it is used for. Ubuntu Village does not support or endorse using any tool, herbal or otherwise, toward ill intent against another person. When harm is done, it is done by the practitioner’s choice, not by the practice or tradition itself — the same way a blade is not blamed for a wound.

What the Village Knows: The Ubuntu Lens

In Ubuntu philosophy — Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, I am because we are — inner order is never private. When one person in the community is consumed by fear, shame, or recurring cycles of self-destruction, the whole community feels it. When one person finds their way back to clarity, the whole community is restored.

Manakel’s work is therefore communal work. The healing she facilitates in the individual dreaming mind ripples outward. The ancestral spiritual traditions that carry this same work — Yoruba, Kemetic, Ethiopian, Kabbalistic — all understood this. None of them conceived of inner healing as something that happened in isolation. It always happened in relationship: to the divine, to the ancestors, to the living community.

This is what Ubuntu Village carries forward: the understanding that healing the inner life and healing the collective are never separate. The work Manakel does in the night — the work Ọya does at the threshold — is the same work we try to do together, from our East Harlem home base to Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, and every community that knows what it means to hold each other through the dark.

I Am Because We Are. And Together, We Heal.

Village Question

What cycle in your own life has Manakel’s energy — or Ọya’s — helped you interrupt? Share your journey with us.

References and Further Reading

• Burkle, W. S. (2015). The Seventy-Two Angels of the Shemhamphorash. SRICF.
• Maimonides. Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 2:7 — the ranks of the angels. Sefaria.
• Angelorum. Manakel: 66th Shem HaMephorash Angel.
• Ashby, M. (1999). Egyptian Yoga: The Philosophy of Enlightenment. Cruzian Mystic Books.
• Abimbola, W. (1997). Ifa Will Mend Our Broken World. Aims of Mudra.
• Epega, A. A. (1931). The Sacred Ifa Oracle. HarperCollins.
• Davidson, G. (1967). A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels. Free Press.
• Ubuntu Village. The Ancient Creation Story of Angels: From Before Humans Existed
• Ubuntu Village. Angels Across Cultures: Introducing Our Angelology Series

Community is the medicine.

The work Manakel does in the night — tending the dreaming mind, restoring inner order, redirecting what has gone dark toward light — is the same work Ubuntu Village does in community. Because healing the inner life and healing the collective are never separate. Your gift sustains that work.

Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine. Read more about Michele, or connect with her on LinkedIn.