The sixth solar caption claims an operation of invisibility.
- Planetary group
- ☉ Sun
- Mathers figure
- 37
- Printed plate
- VIII
- Text anchor
- Genesis 1:1 with Psalms 69:23 and 135:16
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
The sixth solar caption claims an operation of invisibility.
Within the Sun collection, this places figure 37 among themes of authority, visibility, movement, concealment, and release.
Inscription, names, and script
Genesis 1:1 with Psalms 69:23 and 135:16: The inner words may begin “In the beginning Elohim created”; the border says that eyes be darkened and that they see not.
A Celestial-alphabet Yod occupies the center, with Shaddai distributed at the triangle.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a Celestial-alphabet Yod at the center. Around it, a triangle sets three Shaddai letters around the central Yod. At the edge, mangled Passing of the River text and a blindness verse surround the triangle.
Mathers plate and witness differences
Mathers openly says the manuscript characters are “sadly mangled” and offers his Genesis reading as an opinion. This is the clearest case in the atlas where uncertainty is part of the source evidence.
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 37
Work from certainty to conjecture: identify the central Yod, reconstruct Shaddai from three corners, then mark the Genesis line as Mathers’s proposal. The blindness verse is clearer than the inner sentence, reversing the usual expectation that a center is easiest to read.
View this figure in sequence
The Sun collection contains 7 figures, numbered 32–38 in the 1889 edition.