Daniel

The fiftieth of the seventy-two is Daniel, written in Hebrew exactly as the name of the biblical figure is written. As with Michael at forty-two, the coincidence is genuine rather than an artefact of English.

Daniel is a human being in the book that bears his name: a Judean at the Babylonian and Persian courts, an interpreter of dreams and visions, and the recipient of the apocalyptic material in the book's second half. He is not an angel; the angels in the book are Gabriel and Michael, who appear to him. The name itself means something like God is my judge and occurs elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible as an ordinary personal name.

Its appearance among the seventy-two is a consequence of the derivation rather than a reference to the prophet. The procedure yields three consonants; the suffix rule adds -el; the result is a name that already existed. Given how many Hebrew personal names are built on exactly this pattern, some of the seventy-two were bound to coincide with them.

This has one further implication worth drawing out. The seventy-two are not, in origin, characters. They have no stories, no biblical episodes, no dealings with anyone. They are positions in a sequence with names attached, and everything that makes them feel like individuals, an office, a virtue, a psalm, a birth-date window, a tarot card, was supplied later and supplied systematically, to all seventy-two at once.

That is the opposite of how Michael, Gabriel and Raphael acquired their identities, which came from narratives in which they act. The two kinds of angel are routinely tabulated together, and they are not the same kind of thing.

The fiftieth is assigned eloquence and communication. Following how that assignment relates to the rest of its position is a useful exercise, because it shows the machinery.

The fiftieth angel holds five degrees of Aquarius, within a decan with a planetary ruler in the Chaldean order, corresponding to a minor arcanum in the Golden Dawn tarot attribution, within the octad assigned to a sephirah and its archangel and choir. That is five independent coordinate systems, all fixed once the position is fixed.

The office is the only element with no derivation at all. It is not entailed by the sign, the decan, the planet, the card, the sephirah or the name. It was assigned, and the assignment reaches modern lists through the nineteenth-century French tabulations.

Once assigned, however, it tends to be rationalised against the other coordinates, an office of communication read as fitting an airy sign, or a sephirah of foundation, or a particular card. Those readings are constructed after the fact and are not difficult to construct, because with five coordinate systems available something will always fit.

That is the general shape of correspondence systems, and it is not a criticism peculiar to this one. The Golden Dawn's tables work the same way, as do most of the tabulations in the wider literature: a large grid, many columns, and a strong presumption that any two entries in the same row must be related.

The presumption is what makes such systems generative and interesting to work with. It is also what makes them unfalsifiable, and a reader should be clear which of those two properties is doing the work when a correspondence seems particularly apt.