72

The Shem HaMephorash, the explicit or distinguished Name, is in later Jewish mysticism a divine name of seventy-two three-letter groups, and its derivation is exact.

Exodus 14:19, 14:20 and 14:21, the verses describing the pillar of cloud moving behind Israel at the sea, each contain exactly seventy-two letters in Hebrew. Written one above another, with the first read right to left, the second left to right and the third right to left again, the three rows give seventy-two vertical columns of three letters each. Those columns are the seventy-two names.

The letter counts are checkable and correct, and the alternating reading is what makes the columns work. It is a real construction, not a vague claim.

Its age is often overstated. The Talmud knows divine names of twelve and forty-two letters, at Kiddushin 71a, but not this one. The seventy-two-part derivation is explained by Rashi in the eleventh century, appears in the Sefer HaBahir around 1150 to 1200, and is central to Sefer Raziel HaMalakh. It is therefore medieval, and describing it as ancient or Mosaic is a claim the sources do not support.

From Hebrew it passed into Latin Christian magic. Roger Bacon complains in 1260 about corrupt versions of the Liber Semamphoras circulating in the West. Johann Reuchlin, in De Arte Cabalistica of 1517, listed the seventy-two names with the suffixes -el and -yah attached, converting them into seventy-two angels, and that list, not anything Jewish, is the direct ancestor of the seventy-two angels of modern Western occultism and of the Shemhamphorash tables printed in nineteenth-century grimoires.

The Ars Goetia, the first part of the Lesser Key of Solomon, catalogues seventy-two spirits with names, ranks, seals and offices. It is the single most influential demonological list in Western occultism and it is not old.

The compilation, Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis, is anonymous and seventeenth-century, assembling earlier material of varying dates. Its principal source for the spirit list is Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, printed as an appendix to De Praestigiis Daemonum in 1577. Weyer, a physician who was arguing against witch trials, and who published the list partly to demonstrate the absurdity of the material, gives sixty-nine spirits, in a different order.

The move from sixty-nine to seventy-two is the interesting part. The compiler of the Ars Goetia added three and rearranged, producing a count that matches the seventy-two names of the Shem HaMephorash. That matching is deliberate: later Western magical practice pairs each of the seventy-two angels with one of the seventy-two spirits, in a scheme of opposed hierarchies. The number was harmonised to fit a Kabbalistic figure that had itself only been Christianised in the previous century.

So the seventy-two of the Goetia is not a datum received from antiquity. It is an editorial decision, made in the seventeenth century, on a list published in the sixteenth, adjusted to agree with a derivation set out in the eleventh and popularised in Latin in 1517. The chain is documented at every step, which makes it an unusually clean example of how an occult number acquires the appearance of age. Everything in it is real; none of it is ancient.

The claim recurs constantly in esoteric writing: the equinox precesses one degree every seventy-two years, the ancients knew it, and seventy-two is encoded in myth and monument as a marker of that knowledge. Two of those three statements need correcting.

The arithmetic is roughly right. The full precessional cycle is about 25,772 years, which gives one degree in about 71.6 years. Seventy-two is a rounding, and 72 x 360 gives 25,920 years, the figure usually called the Great Year in this literature. It is a tidy number rather than the measured one.

The ancient knowledge is not there. Precession is first described by Hipparchus in the second century BCE, who put it at not less than one degree per century, a rate implying a cycle of at most 36,000 years. Ptolemy adopted one degree per century in the Almagest, and that inferior figure remained standard in Western astronomy for a thousand years. No surviving ancient text gives seventy-two years per degree. Medieval Islamic astronomers improved the value substantially; the modern figure is a product of long-baseline observation.

The idea that pre-Hipparchan cultures encoded precessional numbers, 72, 432, 25,920, in myth comes from Hamlet's Mill, published by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in 1969. The book was severely criticised by historians of astronomy on publication for selective use of sources and for treating numerical resemblance as evidence, and it has never been accepted scholarship. It remains the ultimate source of most claims of this kind, usually at several removes and without attribution.

Seventy-two has genuine and interesting uses. Precession is not one of them.