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Rudd's Arrangement: An Angel for Every Spirit

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Rudd's Arrangement: An Angel for Every Spirit

The single most consequential thing ever done with the Goetia was to pair it, one for one, with the angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash. The arrangement is associated with Thomas Rudd, whose manuscripts set out the scheme, and it is the reason the two lists are today almost impossible to discuss separately.

The logic is straightforward. Both lists number seventy-two. The Shem list had long been distributed around the zodiac, five degrees to a name, seventy-two names to the full circle of three hundred and sixty. Placing the spirits on the same grid gives every degree of the ecliptic an angel and a demon, and the relation between them is stated as constraint: the angel of a given degree holds the spirit of that degree in check, and is invoked to bind it.

Two observations follow, and both cut against how the pairing is usually presented.

The first is that the pairing is not a discovery of a hidden correspondence. It is a construction, made possible only because the demon list had already been brought up to seventy-two. Had the Lemegeton kept Weyer's sixty-nine, no such scheme could exist.

The second is that the arrangement is not in the Lemegeton itself. The Goetia's manuscripts give the seventy-two spirits without angels. Rudd's material is a separate body of work, transmitted in its own manuscripts, and modern editions that print the angel alongside the spirit are combining two seventeenth-century sources rather than reproducing one.

The pairing is genuinely interesting and genuinely old. It is also an editorial act, and it should be labelled as one.

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