Mathers identifies the face as a solar image of Shaddai’s authority before which creatures and spirits bow.
- Planetary group
- ☉ Sun
- Mathers figure
- 32
- Printed plate
- VII
- Text anchor
- Latin perimeter, not a biblical citation
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 identifies the face as a solar image of Shaddai’s authority before which creatures and spirits bow.
Within the Sun collection, this places figure 32 among themes of authority, visibility, movement, concealment, and release.
Inscription, names, and script
Latin perimeter, not a biblical citation: The border says that all things were made through the one depicted and obey that figure.
El Shaddai appears on both sides of the face.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a frontal bearded face identified by Mathers as Metatron. Around it, the face fills the inner disk without a geometric lattice. At the edge, Latin text and the paired name El Shaddai surround the portrait.
Mathers plate and witness differences
The identification as Metatron and the paired comparison with Sandalphon come from Mathers’s note. The plate supplies a face and names; it does not label the portrait with a manuscript provenance.
Plate VII 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 32
Begin with what can be seen, a face and surrounding letters, before applying the editor’s Metatron label. Unlike the neighboring radial figures, this one makes personhood the center; the Latin band converts the portrait into a claim of universal obedience.
View this figure in sequence
The Sun collection contains 7 figures, numbered 32–38 in the 1889 edition.