Lazare Lenain

La Science Cabalistique, published in 1823, sets out a procedure for producing the names and seals of angelic intelligences. The names are generated from Hebrew letters according to fixed rules and distributed among the planets and the divisions of the zodiac; the seals are drawn by tracing the numerical values of a name across the magic square associated with the relevant planet, so that a figure emerges from the path the pen takes between the numbered cells. The result is a complete apparatus: a spirit for every division of time and heaven, a name, a sigil and a set of attributions.

None of it is new with him. The technique of deriving sigils from planetary squares, the tables of correspondences, the division of the zodiac and the derivation of angelic names from combinations of scriptural letters are all set out in Renaissance sources, above all in the compendium of occult philosophy compiled under the name of Agrippa, and behind those lie medieval Jewish and Latin materials. What the book supplies is a single, orderly, French language presentation of a body of material that was otherwise scattered across Latin folios and manuscripts.

The planetary squares deserve a note of their own. Each planet is assigned a square of numbers, from a three by three square for Saturn up to a nine by nine for the moon, in which every row and column adds to the same total. These are genuine mathematical objects with a long history in Arabic and earlier sources, studied for their own sake. Attaching them to planets and using them as a grid on which to draw a sigil is a later application laid over that mathematics, and the two should not be confused.

That is exactly why it matters. The nineteenth century occult revival in France did not proceed by manuscript research. It proceeded through a small number of accessible compendia, and a writer who wanted angelic names and seals reached for a book that had them arranged, rather than for the Renaissance sources those tables had been extracted from. Eliphas Levi and the authors who followed him drew on this material, and from Paris it passed into the English speaking orders later in the century, so that a modern practitioner using a planetary sigil is often several removes from anything they could name.

Two cautions belong with the entry. Very little is documented about the man himself, and the atlas holds him essentially as the author of one book, which is a thin biographical base that should not be padded out. And a compilation of this kind flattens its material: procedures from different centuries and different intellectual settings are presented side by side as though they formed one coherent system, and the appearance of coherence is the compiler doing. Reading back from such a book to what any earlier tradition actually held is a step that has to be taken deliberately, not assumed.