The fourth Mars caption promises victory in war.
- Planetary group
- ♂ Mars
- Mathers figure
- 28
- Printed plate
- VI
- Text anchor
- Psalm 110:5
Mathers assigns red and iron to this planetary group. The crop documents his printed linework; it does not reproduce the color or material described elsewhere in the edition.
What Mathers’s caption claims
The fourth Mars caption promises victory in war.
Within the Mars collection, this places figure 28 among themes of conflict, healing, defense, coercion, and weather.
Inscription, names, and script
Psalm 110:5: The Lord at thy right hand shall wound even kings in the day of his wrath.
AGLA occupies the center; IHVH lies right and left, with El above and below.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is the name AGLA at the crossing. Around it, a four-way division balances IHVH and El. At the edge, the royal-wounding verse supplies the martial perimeter.
Mathers plate and witness differences
The editor’s note is a positional transcription: center, sides, above, and below. Preserving those relations is as important as preserving the letter strings, because a plain text list would erase the diagram’s argument.
Plate VI is an artifact of Mathers’s 1889 arrangement. His preface and final note say that he compared differing manuscripts and restored difficult Hebrew and magical characters. Sloane 2731 and Lansdowne 1203 remain distinct manuscript objects; this printed crop should not stand in for either one.
WORKED EXAMPLE
A diagram reading of figure 28
Read the figure as a coordinate sentence. AGLA fixes the middle, paired names control the horizontal and vertical axes, and the verse introduces a right-hand blow at the rim. The victory claim is built through position as much as vocabulary.
View this figure in sequence
The Mars collection contains 7 figures, numbered 25–31 in the 1889 edition.