The last Mercury caption says the figure opens closed doors and overcomes barriers.
- Planetary group
- ☿ Mercury
- Mathers figure
- 48
- Printed plate
- XI
- Text anchor
- Psalm 24:7
Mathers assigns mixed colors and a mixture of metals 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 last Mercury caption says the figure opens closed doors and overcomes barriers.
Within the Mercury collection, this places figure 48 among themes of spirit invocation, unusual requests, knowledge, messages, and opening barriers.
Inscription, names, and script
Psalm 24:7: Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.
El Ab and IHVH occupy the quartered field.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a crossing of two name axes. Around it, a circle divided into four compartments. At the edge, the gate verse turns the ring into a verbal threshold.
Mathers plate and witness differences
The editor’s two-name reading is secure enough to describe the quarters, while the caption’s door claim is supplied by the psalm rather than a drawn door. The following lunar figure makes that contrast especially useful.
Plate XI 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 48
Compare this abstract four-part circle with Moon 1’s literal gate diagram. Both use opening language, but Mercury 5 encodes the threshold through Psalm 24 and crossed names; Moon 1 pictures bars and posts.
View this figure in sequence
The Mercury collection contains 5 figures, numbered 44–48 in the 1889 edition.