Mathers assigns this figure to broad knowledge, hidden things, and messenger spirits called Allatori.
- Planetary group
- ☿ Mercury
- Mathers figure
- 47
- Printed plate
- XI
- Text anchor
- Unidentified versicle in Mathers
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
Mathers assigns this figure to broad knowledge, hidden things, and messenger spirits called Allatori.
Within the Mercury collection, this places figure 47 among themes of spirit invocation, unusual requests, knowledge, messages, and opening barriers.
Inscription, names, and script
Unidentified versicle in Mathers: Wisdom and virtue are in his house, and the knowledge of all things remaineth with him for ever.
El occupies the center; surrounding Hebrew asks IHVH to fix the volatile and restrict the void.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is the divine name El at the center. Around it, a twelve-pointed star layers letter groups and angular paths. At the edge, the wisdom sentence forms the rim.
Mathers plate and witness differences
Mathers translates the inner sentence but gives no biblical chapter for the outer versicle. The correct record is therefore “unidentified in this edition,” not a guessed citation.
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 47
Read El as the fixed point, then follow the many-pointed star as a visual answer to volatility. The inner sentence asks for fixation while the border promises enduring knowledge; geometry and text share a contrast between motion and stability.
View this figure in sequence
The Mercury collection contains 5 figures, numbered 44–48 in the 1889 edition.