Book III uses the language of celestial time, but its two arrangements differ. The title invokes Paul; the English text contains clues to its much later assembly.
Hours and zodiac degrees
The first division of the Lemegeton’s Ars Paulina organizes figures by planetary hours; the second moves to each degree of the zodiac. A reader searching “Pauline angels” may find an hourly chart, a zodiac table, or a sigil illustration and assume they belong to one uniform ancient table. They do not answer the same question. An hour changes with the interval between sunrise and sunset, while a zodiac degree is a position along the ecliptic. The manuscript employs both as symbolic filing systems. Neither becomes a measured astronomical claim about an angel. The two divisions preserve related but distinct celestial classifications.
The title does not date the text
The apostle Paul is an authority invoked by the name, not a securely identified author of this English book. Peterson distinguishes this Lemegeton Ars Paulina from a separate older Latin Pauline Art. The English text mentions 1641 and guns; its source relationships also point to later printed works. Such features cannot be reconciled with a first-century composition of the present form. They do not prove that every name in it was first invented in the seventeenth century. A compilation can borrow older vocabulary and still take shape much later. The dates of its inherited vocabulary, surviving manuscript, and modern edition are different points in the book’s history.
Two source trails
Peterson relates the hourly series to Book II of Trithemius’s Steganographia, while the zodiac-degree series has a different trail through later printed material associated with Beloit and Saunders. A diagram of the seven planetary characters also has comparanda in early modern magical calendars. These observations support a picture of assembly rather than a single inherited chart. Similar astrological terms alone cannot show direct borrowing. Planet and sign names were widely available to early modern authors; distinctive sequences and shared errors offer stronger evidence of textual dependence.
Worked reading: one planetary-hour record and one zodiac-degree record
The first-hour record begins with a clock that resets at sunrise. Ars Paulina names Samael as ruler of the first hour and lists eight chief dukes, each said to have 444 servants. The office is not fixed to Samael alone: the text says it takes the quality of the planet ruling that weekday. Its own examples make the switch explicit. At sunrise on Monday the first hour is lunar; at sunrise on Tuesday it is martial. A reader therefore needs the weekday and local division of daylight before the first row can be interpreted.
The sample seal fixes that moving system to 10 March 1641, a Wednesday under the old English calendar. It combines the lord of the ascendant, the Moon, the other planets, and the sign on the twelfth house. The seal is then placed on the part of the practice table marked by the ascendant’s planetary ruler. This is more than a name list. It turns one dated sky into a ritual record, so copying the example as a timeless emblem would discard the very conditions that produced it.
The worked date also tells us how to read the diagrams that follow. They are not twenty-four permanent signatures placed beside stable biographies. Each figure is an example calculated for the same day, and the prose repeatedly tells the reader to make another seal suitable to the actual year, day, and hour. The recurring instruction makes variability part of the design. What remains stable is the hourly ruler and its retinue; what changes is the astrological configuration written into the working seal.
The second division answers a different question. Its zodiac table begins the first degree of Aries with Biael, then advances through Gesiel and the remaining degree angels. That position does not reset at sunrise. It is a fixed address within the 360-degree zodiac, used in the text to identify a guardian connected with a natal degree. Sign, degree, elemental ruler, and any planet occupying the degree supply the interpretive frame. Unlike the first-hour seal, a degree entry starts from a birth position rather than the current weekday hour.
Putting the two records side by side exposes the book’s composite logic. Samael’s row asks when an operation occurs and changes its planetary office with the day; Biael’s row asks where a degree falls in a natal zodiac and stays first in Aries. Both use astrology, but they cannot be merged into one table without losing their rules. Their source trails differ as well: the hourly names follow material related to Trithemius, while the degree sequence has been linked to the seventeenth-century chain from Beloit through Saunders. The juxtaposition is evidence of compilation, not a single ancient Pauline system.