Esaldaios Ἠσαλδαῖος

Esaldaios (Ἠσαλδαῖος) is the name the Naassene report gives to the craftsman of this creation, a fiery god, fourth in number, to whom souls are brought down and enslaved.

The name is El Shaddai carried into Greek — the divine title of Genesis 17:1 and of the Priestly source generally, which the Septuagint renders pantokratōr. The identification is standard and is not an observation of this edition; the figure is routinely read alongside Ialdabaoth in the scholarly literature.

Why it is left untranslated

Rendering Esaldaios as “Almighty” would do two kinds of damage at once. It would erase the evidence that a Greek heresiological report is transmitting a Hebrew divine name, and it would conceal what has been done with it: a title of the God of Israel has become the name of the being that imprisons.

The same discipline applies to naas in the same report, and for the same reason. Both are on the glossary’s forbidden-rendering list.

What it is not

“Fourth in number” is unexplained where it occurs, and the report promises the detail elsewhere. Whether the ordinal places him in a descending series or identifies him with the fourth element — fire, which the same clause names — is not settled by the passage, and this edition does not settle it.

Hekhal Editorial. "Esaldaios." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. Last modified May 2, 2026. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/esaldaios.

Hekhal Editorial. 2026. "Esaldaios." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/esaldaios.

Hekhal Editorial. "Esaldaios." Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition, May 2, 2026, hekhal.org/lexicon/esaldaios.

Hekhal Editorial. (2026). Esaldaios. Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition. https://hekhal.org/lexicon/esaldaios

@misc{hekhal-lexicon-esaldaios-2026,
  author       = {{Hekhal Editorial}},
  title        = {{Esaldaios}},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {{Hekhal: An Open Reference for Esoteric Tradition}},
  url          = {https://hekhal.org/lexicon/esaldaios},
  urldate      = {[date accessed]}
}