Nith-Haiah

The seventy-two angels acquired, in the seventeenth century, a shadow list. The arrangement associated with Thomas Rudd pairs each angel of the Shem ha-Mephorash with a spirit of the Goetia holding the same position, and states the relation as constraint: the angel binds the demon of that degree.

The scheme only became possible because of an editorial act. The Goetia's ancestor, Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, lists sixty-nine spirits. The Lemegeton brought the count to seventy-two by dropping one entry and adding four. Whatever the compiler's reasons, the effect was to make a one-to-one pairing with the angels arithmetically possible for the first time.

The direction of the adjustment is the interesting part. The Shem list is older, is generated by a fixed procedure, and cannot be lengthened or shortened without abandoning the procedure. The demon list is a compilation with no fixed length and a known history of editing. When the two were brought into correspondence, the demon list moved.

Rudd's material is separate from the Lemegeton and is transmitted in its own manuscripts; the Goetia's own text does not name angels. Modern editions that print an angel beside each spirit are combining two seventeenth-century sources.

For the angels, the practical effect of the pairing has been that they are now rarely discussed on their own. A list generated from Exodus by a medieval Jewish technique and turned into an angelology by Renaissance Christian humanists is today most often met as one half of a diagram whose other half is a catalogue of demons descended from a sceptic's exhibit. That is a strange fate for it, and it is worth being aware of it as a fate rather than as the natural state of the material.

The twenty-fifth of the seventy-two is printed with a hyphen in most English lists. A few others carry one; the great majority do not. The distinction is typographic and has no basis in the Hebrew, which has neither hyphens nor spaces within a word.

It is a trivial detail that opens onto a real one. Almost every visual feature of the seventy-two as they are commonly presented is an artefact of print rather than of the tradition: the numbering, the table format, the columns of correspondences, the capitalisation, the Roman numeral distinguishing the two Lauviahs, the hyphens, the apostrophes that occasionally stand in for a Hebrew letter with no Latin equivalent.

The underlying material is a sequence of consonant groups. Everything that makes it look like a reference table was added by editors, and different editors made different choices, which is why lists disagree so freely on the appearance of names they agree on entirely as to position.

There is a specific trap here. Because the tables look authoritative, ruled, numbered, cross-referenced against zodiac, planet, tarot and psalm, they invite the assumption that each column has the same standing as the others. They do not. The name column derives from a medieval procedure. The zodiac column is early modern. The tarot column is from the 1880s. The attribute column is from the nineteenth century. The verse column is from the same place. Printed side by side in equal ruled boxes, they look like one dataset of one age.

That flattening is the single most common failure in presentations of the seventy-two, and it is caused by the format rather than by any intention to mislead.