The caption makes an aggressive claim that pronouncing the figure against someone brings demonic obsession.
- Planetary group
- ♄ Saturn
- Mathers figure
- 16
- Printed plate
- III
- Text anchor
- Psalm 109:6
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 makes an aggressive claim that pronouncing the figure against someone brings demonic obsession.
Within the Saturn collection, this places figure 16 among themes of constraint, adversity, night work, protection, and destructive claims.
Inscription, names, and script
Psalm 109:6: Set thou a wicked one to be ruler over him, and let Satan stand at his right hand.
Mathers describes the internal marks as mystical characters of Saturn.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a central junction in a radial character wheel. Around it, eight radii end in non-alphabetic Saturn marks. At the edge, the hostile verse creates the circular boundary.
Mathers plate and witness differences
Mathers translates the perimeter but does not provide a letter-by-letter reading of the internal characters. The difference between transcribed text and identified planetary script is therefore visible inside the same figure.
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 16
Read the perimeter first to establish the adversarial sentence, then compare it with the silent spokes. The verse supplies explicit language while the character wheel supplies visual Saturn identity; the caption’s claim depends on their combination, not on a readable center alone.
View this figure in sequence
The Saturn collection contains 7 figures, numbered 11–17 in the 1889 edition.