Mathers links this figure with spirits said to transport a person over a long distance quickly.
- Planetary group
- ☉ Sun
- Mathers figure
- 36
- Printed plate
- VIII
- Text anchor
- Psalm 91:11–12
Mathers assigns yellow or gold and gold 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 links this figure with spirits said to transport a person over a long distance quickly.
Within the Sun collection, this places figure 36 among themes of authority, visibility, movement, concealment, and release.
Inscription, names, and script
Psalm 91:11–12: He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways; they shall bear thee up in their hands.
The internal forms are spirit names written in Passing of the River characters.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a small squared central sign. Around it, a larger square and corner blocks organize the encoded names. At the edge, the angelic protection verse forms the round border.
Mathers plate and witness differences
No ordinary-letter transcription of the spirit names is supplied. The editor’s classification is therefore firmer than any modern attempt to name each internal group from this plate alone.
Plate VIII 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 36
Compare the square interior with the circular path of the verse. The rigid center fixes the encoded names while the border speaks of ways and being carried; movement is introduced by text around a visually anchored core.
View this figure in sequence
The Sun collection contains 7 figures, numbered 32–38 in the 1889 edition.