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Seventh of Ten, and the Sphere of Netzach

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Seventh of Ten, and the Sphere of Netzach

Maimonides ranks the elohim seventh of ten in the Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 2:7, and the Golden Dawn table assigns them to Netzach, the seventh sephirah, whose name means victory or endurance and which stands at the foot of the pillar of mercy.

Two things about this placement repay attention. The first is that it is low. A rank carrying a name of God sits seventh of ten, below ranks named for wheels and for a substance seen in a fire, and the sequence offers no reason for it. Hierarchies assembled out of existing vocabulary produce results like this, where the dignity of a name and the dignity of its position do not track each other, and that mismatch is a useful sign that the list was compiled rather than deduced.

The second is that the Dionysian scheme has nothing to set beside it. There is no Greek or Latin choir named from a divine name, so the equations that pair the Hebrew orders with the nine choirs run out at this point, and a table that supplies a match here is matching by position. The atlas records no such equation for this rank.

Netzach itself carries a large set of associations in Golden Dawn material, and none of them derive from the passages in which the word elohim actually occurs. Reading the rank through them is interpretation rather than transmission, and the pairing underneath remains a pairing of two sequences.

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