Mathers connects the final Saturn figure with earthquakes through the collective power of the angelic orders named inside it.
- Planetary group
- ♄ Saturn
- Mathers figure
- 17
- Printed plate
- III
- Text anchor
- Psalm 18:7
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
Mathers connects the final Saturn figure with earthquakes through the collective power of the angelic orders named inside it.
Within the Saturn collection, this places figure 17 among themes of constraint, adversity, night work, protection, and destructive claims.
Inscription, names, and script
Psalm 18:7: Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of the hills also moved and were shaken, because he was wroth.
Nine angelic orders are written partly in Hebrew and partly in the script called Passing of the River.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a divided triangular field. Around it, names of the nine orders fill separate internal zones. At the edge, the earthquake verse seals the circle.
Mathers plate and witness differences
Mathers explicitly reports two scripts and translates the nine ranks. A modern redraw that regularizes them into one alphabet would erase a feature his edition treats as meaningful.
Plate III 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 17
Count the internal name zones before following the outer verse. The figure turns a hierarchy of nine orders into a compact triangular assembly; the border then converts accumulated rank into the image of the earth shaking. The worked reading explains the caption without treating the claim as a measured event.
View this figure in sequence
The Saturn collection contains 7 figures, numbered 11–17 in the 1889 edition.