72 Angels

What is this?

In Christian Kabbalah, Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) considered the 72 names - made pronounceable by adding the suffixes "El" or "Yah" - to be the names of angels: individuated products of God's will. He lists these "72 Angels of the Shem HaMephorash" in his De Arte Cabbalistica (1517), which greatly influenced later Hermetic works including those of the Golden Dawn. More info on the Shem HaMephorash wikipedia page.

Important note on sources used.

The material here is taken from La Science Cabalistique by Lazare Lenain (1823; digitized by Google Books), or, as his title page has it in full, the Cabalistic Science, or the Art of Knowing the Good Genii who influence the destiny of men. It is read from the scan itself, page by page, rather than from an OCR of it: that OCR could not read Lenain's Hebrew at all, and read many of his digits as letters. The whole book is here as a reading edition, footnotes, tables and all, and as Markdown.

The French beside each translation is what he printed, so you can read what the English was made from. The English is translated from that French and from nothing else.

Lenain makes mistakes, and where he does the text keeps his words and a note says what is wrong — an impossible 31 April, a genius numbered 36 in the middle of the forties, five revolutions of 72 days called 260. The tables on this page use the corrected value. Most of those notes found themselves: his own four tables say what each entry should contain, so a disagreement is arithmetic rather than opinion.

The Hebrew was the hard part. He dots his letters above rather than within, and a machine reading those dots as vowel points loses letters or invents them. Forty-seven names are given here because two independent readings of the scan agree on them; the other twenty-five were read by a person who reads Hebrew. Each name is given both as Lenain points it and as its bare letters.

The scan is not of the 1823 printing but of a later reissue, which reproduces Lenain's title page — A Amiens, chez l'Auteur, au Cabinet de lecture, place Saint-Firmin, N. 1. 1823 — 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. The reading, the translation and the arrangement are CC BY 4.0 with the rest of the data, and no rights are claimed where none subsist. This was done in an effort to provide a Copyright-free version of this material, however, a much better translation exists:

We highly recommend the translation by Piers A. Vaughan (Amazon link), who has not only provided an outstanding work, but also provided free, high quality images of the sigils on his blog, in this post and this post. Nothing here is derived from his translation; it was consulted only to check names against Lenain's own first table, whose fold-out leaf this scan photographed folded.

The sigils will be added at a later time.


Magick.ly is open-source. You can see the code used to generate this page here. Additionally, see the data file and the full reading edition of the book.