The last Venus caption claims that merely showing the figure excites love.
- Planetary group
- ♀ Venus
- Mathers figure
- 43
- Printed plate
- X
- Text anchor
- Psalm 22:14
Mathers assigns green and copper 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 last Venus caption claims that merely showing the figure excites love.
Within the Venus collection, this places figure 43 among themes of Venus spirits, favor, desire, attraction, and compelled presence.
Inscription, names, and script
Psalm 22:14: My heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.
Elohim and El Gebil are readable around the central square; two further names remain undeciphered in Mathers.
How the diagram is organized
The visible core is a lettered square at the center. Around it, a larger turned square and circular frame nest the names. At the edge, the melting-heart verse closes the design.
Mathers plate and witness differences
Mathers explicitly refuses to guess two names and reproduces the characters as he sees them in Passing of the River script. That restraint is an essential edition difference, not missing metadata to be filled speculatively.
Plate X 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 43
Begin with the two readable names, stop at the two unresolved groups, and only then read the melting-heart verse. The worked pause at uncertainty prevents the emotional border text from giving false confidence about the center.
View this figure in sequence
The Venus collection contains 5 figures, numbered 39–43 in the 1889 edition.