La Science Cabalistique
ou l'art de connaître les bons génies qui influent sur la destinée des hommes
Lazare Lenain, Amiens, 1823. The first work in French to treat the 72 angels of the Kabbalah, printed in 500 copies and sold by the author from his reading room on the place Saint-Firmin.
Contents
- Préliminaires — Preliminaries
- CHAPITRE PREMIER — The Name of God and its Attributes
Du nom de Dieu et de ses attributs. - CHAPITRE II. — The Origin of the Divine Names
De l'origine des noms divins, leurs attributs, et leurs influences sur l'univers. - CHAPITRE III — The 72 Attributes of God
Qui contient l'explication des 72 attributs de Dieu, et des 72 anges qui dominent sur l'univers, et qui environnent le trône du grand Jehovah. - CHAPITRE IV. — The Four Cabalistic Tables
- CHAPITRE V. — The Sacred Calendar
Explication du Calendrier sacré. - CHAPITRE VI. — The 72 Genii
Qui explique les influences des 72 Génies, leurs attributs et leurs mystères. - CHAPITRE VII. — The Genii of the Third Class
Explication des Génies de la troisième classe, et leurs mystères. - CHAPITRE VIII — Cabalistic Astrology
Contenant l'Astrologie cabalistique, avec les influences favorables pour composer les talismans des Génies. - CHAPITRE IX — Composing the Talismans
Contenant l'explication des influences favorables pour composer les Talismans. - CHAPITRE X — The Name Jehovah
Contenant l'étymologie du nom JEHOVAH, avec l'explication des 12 havioth הויות de ce nom mystérieux.
About this edition
163 leaves, read page by page from the Google Books scan rather than from an OCR of it. Every page marker links to the facsimile of that leaf.
The scan is not of the 1823 printing but of a later reissue, which reproduces Lenain's title page and adds a preface by Papus for the Ordre Kabbalistique de la Rose-Croix. The volume does not date itself; the first reprint is recorded as Dujols and Thomas, 1909. Lenain died in 1877 and Papus in 1916, so both texts are public domain and no rights are asserted over either. This reading of them is CC BY 4.0.
Lenain is printed as he set it. Where he is wrong, the text keeps his words and an editorial note says what is wrong and what it should be.
- first cabalistic table — The table is a fold-out leaf, and the scan photographed it folded: only its last eleven rows were captured, and the page behind it is blank. Rows 1 to 61 are in no image of this copy. Every column it carries — name, nation, divine name — is also given in the entry for each genius, so nothing it held is lost, only its arrangement.
- first cabalistic table, rows 1-61 — Rows 62 to 72 are on the plate; 1 to 61 are in no image of this copy. They are put back from each genius's own entry, which carries the same three columns, and are marked as reconstructed wherever they are shown — never written into the transcription, which is what the page prints. The method can be checked against the eleven rows that survive: it recovers the divine name and the nation for ten of them and the genius's name for eight, the misses being places Lenain disagrees with himself, spelling Mogols, Eiael, Habuiah and Haiuiel in the table where his entries have Mongols, Eiael, Habuhiah and Haiaiel. He names his own sources under the table — Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus, tome 2, pages 273 and 287, and Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, book 3, pages 109 and 110, The Hague 1727 — both public domain, and neither yet consulted here.
- name.he — Lenain dots his Hebrew above the letter bodies, not within them and not beneath. Those dots are encoded here as U+05C4 HEBREW MARK UPPER DOT, which is what that position means; whether he intended the biblical punctum extraordinarium or a device of his own is not something the type can settle.
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