Mathers describes defense from harmful sorcery and injury, and links Sophiel with knowledge of herbs and stones.
- Planetary group
- ☽ Moon
- Mathers figure
- 52
- Printed plate
- XII
- Text anchor
- Unidentified versicle in Mathers
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
Mathers describes defense from harmful sorcery and injury, and links Sophiel with knowledge of herbs and stones.
Within the Moon collection, this places figure 52 among themes of opening, water, night journeys, herbs and stones, dreams, and rain.
Inscription, names, and script
Unidentified versicle in Mathers: Let them be confounded who persecute me, and let me not be confounded; let them fear, and not I.
Eheieh Asher Eheieh appears with the angels Yahel and Sophiel.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a hand pointing toward a dense name cluster. Around it, three named groups share the inner field. At the edge, the defensive sentence forms the circular boundary.
Mathers plate and witness differences
The editor identifies the names but does not supply a chapter-and-verse reference for the perimeter. The knowledge of herbs and stones belongs to the prose account of Sophiel, not to the wording of the border.
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 52
Track the finger to Sophiel, then separate the angel’s prose office from the defensive perimeter sentence. The diagram joins knowledge and protection by placement, but the two ideas come from different textual layers.
View this figure in sequence
The Moon collection contains 6 figures, numbered 49–54 in the 1889 edition.