The caption assigns the figure to adversity and the repression of spiritual pride.
- Planetary group
- ♄ Saturn
- Mathers figure
- 12
- Printed plate
- II
- Text anchor
- Psalm 72:8
Mathers assigns black and lead 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 assigns the figure to adversity and the repression of spiritual pride.
Within the Saturn collection, this places figure 12 among themes of constraint, adversity, night work, protection, and destructive claims.
Inscription, names, and script
Psalm 72:8: His dominion shall be also from the one sea to the other, and from the flood unto the world’s end.
The central Latin word square reads SATOR / AREPO / TENET / OPERA / ROTAS.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is the five-by-five SATOR word square. Around it, a double circle isolates the square as a reversible letter construction. At the edge, a twenty-five-letter Hebrew verse surrounds it.
Mathers plate and witness differences
Mathers calls this a perfect double acrostic and develops a numerical argument around twenty-five and twenty-six. That derivation is his editorial analysis; the plate itself demonstrates the palindrome but does not prove the proposed history.
Plate II 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 12
Trace TENET across the middle and down the center before reading the other rows in reverse. The same letters survive each direction, so the diagram performs verbal enclosure; the surrounding dominion verse then scales a small closed grid to a world-bounding claim.
View this figure in sequence
The Saturn collection contains 7 figures, numbered 11–17 in the 1889 edition.