Mathers says the named spirits answer requests outside the other categories, though they are difficult to see.
- Planetary group
- ☿ Mercury
- Mathers figure
- 45
- Printed plate
- X
- Text anchor
- No biblical verse is identified
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 says the named spirits answer requests outside the other categories, though they are difficult to see.
Within the Mercury collection, this places figure 45 among themes of spirit invocation, unusual requests, knowledge, messages, and opening barriers.
Inscription, names, and script
No biblical verse is identified: No separate verse is printed around this figure.
Mathers identifies Boel and unspecified other spirit names.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a horizontal lettered bar. Around it, two parallel strokes create a narrow central register. At the edge, a plain double circle surrounds the bar without a verse.
Mathers plate and witness differences
The editor names Boel but leaves the remaining spirits undescribed. The asymmetry between a fully named figure and a partly named one is evidence about the limits of his decipherment.
Plate X 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 45
Read the horizontal register from left to right, then notice how much unused space remains inside the circle. Unlike the radial Mercury figures, this one makes a single band carry the identifying work; the caption supplies complexity that the geometry withholds.
View this figure in sequence
The Mercury collection contains 5 figures, numbered 44–48 in the 1889 edition.