Lauviah II

The seventeenth of the seventy-two shares its name with the eleventh, and the lists distinguish them by a numeral appended in print. It is a small anomaly with a disproportionate amount to say about how the system works.

A list of angelic names composed by an author would not contain a repeat. A list generated by a fixed procedure over a fixed text might, and this one does. The duplication is therefore evidence that the seventy-two really are the output of the Exodus derivation rather than a name-list retrospectively fitted to it.

That is a genuine point in the system's favour, and it is one of the very few internal tests available. The procedure and its result can be checked against each other.

But the same anomaly indicts the layers built on top. The two share a name and, in the standard presentations, differ in nearly everything else, suffix, sign, decan, planetary ruler, tarot card, choir, sephirah, verse and attribute. Every one of those differences comes from the position in the sequence. None comes from the name.

Which settles a question that is otherwise easy to muddle. In the system as it now stands, the name is a label and the position is the content. An angel of the seventy-two is defined by where it falls on the zodiac and in the ninefold division, and its name is what the counting happened to produce at that point.

That is a coherent way for such a system to work, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is simply the opposite of the impression given by most presentations, in which the name is treated as the carrier of meaning and the correspondences as elaborations of it.

The eleventh of the seventy-two is given the ending -yah in the standard lists; the seventeenth, with the same three-letter root, is given -el. That is difficult to account for on any stated rule.

The received explanation is theological. In the Kabbalistic reading, -el refers the name to the side of judgement and severity, and -yah to the side of mercy, so the choice of suffix places the angel on one or other of the outer pillars of the Tree of Life. Applied to a pair of identical roots, this means the same divine syllable stands on both pillars at once, in two places, according to nothing in the syllable itself.

There are two ways to take that.

One is that the position is doing the work, as it does everywhere else in this system: the eleventh falls in the octad of Chokmah and the seventeenth in the octad of Binah, and the suffix follows from the sephirah rather than the sephirah from the suffix. That is consistent, and it is probably right.

The other is that the suffixes were fixed early on phonetic or scribal grounds and the pillar interpretation was applied later to whatever distribution had already settled. That is also consistent with the evidence and would mean the theological reading is a gloss.

The sources do not decide between them, and no source states a generative rule. What can be said is that the suffixes are not random, they are stable across the tradition, and lists agree on which name takes which, and that no primary text explains them.

An unexplained but stable feature is worth more attention than an explained one. This is where the system's construction is most visible and least discussed.