The caption combines answers in sleep with hostile and necromantic claims concerning enemies, night phantoms, and the dead.
- Planetary group
- ☽ Moon
- Mathers figure
- 53
- Printed plate
- XII
- Text anchor
- Psalm 68:1
Mathers assigns silver and silver 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 combines answers in sleep with hostile and necromantic claims concerning enemies, night phantoms, and the dead.
Within the Moon collection, this places figure 53 among themes of opening, water, night journeys, herbs and stones, dreams, and rain.
Inscription, names, and script
Psalm 68:1: Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered; let them also who hate him flee before him.
IHVH, Elohim, a lunar character, Iachadiel, and Azarel fill the inner field.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a pointing hand beside stacked names. Around it, divine names, one planetary character, and two angels share the gesture’s target. At the edge, the scattering-enemies verse rings the composition.
Mathers plate and witness differences
This figure’s caption accumulates several purposes that the plate does not individually label. The editor can name its textual components, but assigning one line to dreams and another to the dead would go beyond the printed evidence.
Plate XII 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 53
Inventory the components before choosing a theme: hand, two divine names, lunar mark, and two angels. The hostile psalm explains only part of the broad caption, revealing how a single diagram can carry several asserted uses without visually separating them.
View this figure in sequence
The Moon collection contains 6 figures, numbered 49–54 in the 1889 edition.