The caption invokes Mercury spirits, especially the four angels written in the figure.
- Planetary group
- ☿ Mercury
- Mathers figure
- 46
- Printed plate
- XI
- 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
The caption invokes Mercury spirits, especially the four angels written in the figure.
Within the Mercury collection, this places figure 46 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.
Kokaviel, Ghedoriah, Savaniah, and Chokmahiel form the outer name set.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a small central hub. Around it, eight spokes end in Mercury characters. At the edge, four angel names surround the wheel.
Mathers plate and witness differences
Mathers classifies the inner forms as Mercury characters and transliterates the outer names. The figure uses the same wheel grammar seen for other planets, so script and caption do the classificatory work.
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 46
Compare one Mercury terminal with the visually similar wheels of Saturn, Jupiter, or Mars. The geometry alone says “ordered planetary field”; the Mercury sign, character forms, and four names narrow that general pattern to this sequence.
View this figure in sequence
The Mercury collection contains 5 figures, numbered 44–48 in the 1889 edition.