Sitael

The zodiacal placement of the seventy-two rests on one piece of arithmetic. The circle has three hundred and sixty degrees. Divided by seventy-two, that is exactly five degrees each. Every angel therefore holds a five-degree segment, and the seventy-two cover the whole ecliptic without remainder.

The fit is what makes the system attractive, and it is worth being clear that the fit is a coincidence of numbers rather than evidence of design. Seventy-two divides three hundred and sixty because both are highly composite; nothing about the Exodus derivation anticipates the zodiac.

The segments interlock with an older scheme. The decans are thirty-six divisions of ten degrees each, three to a sign, and they are genuinely ancient, Egyptian in origin, used for time-keeping by the rising of stars, absorbed into Hellenistic astrology and treated systematically by the second century. Each decan splits into two of the five-degree segments, so the seventy-two sit inside the thirty-six as halves.

Where the sub-division was first applied to the Shem angels is not something the primary sources make clear. What is clear is that once it was in place, everything else could be hung on it: the planetary ruler of each decan in the Chaldean order, the tarot minor arcana in the Golden Dawn arrangement, and, through the pairing associated with Thomas Rudd, a spirit of the Goetia for every angel.

Two things follow for a reader. The zodiacal attribution is not part of the derivation and is not implied by it. And the neatness of the whole edifice is a consequence of seventy-two being a convenient number, not a confirmation that the system was discovered rather than assembled.

A great deal of what is now printed alongside the seventy-two angels entered the tradition in the 1880s and 1890s.

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn built a comprehensive system of correspondences, in which every element of every subsystem it used was cross-referenced against every other: sephiroth, Hebrew letters, planets, zodiacal signs, decans, tarot cards, elements, colours, plants, stones. Aleister Crowley published the tabulation as Liber 777 in 1909, and Israel Regardie published the order's papers as The Golden Dawn from 1937, which is how the material reached the general public.

The relevant part here is the tarot attribution. The Golden Dawn assigned the thirty-six minor arcana from two to ten in each suit to the thirty-six decans, in a fixed sequence beginning at the first decan of Aries. Every Shem angel, holding half a decan, therefore inherits a card. That is where the card printed beside each of the seventy-two comes from.

The choir and sephirothic assignments, Seraphim under Metatron for Kether, Cherubim under Raziel for Chokmah, and so on down, in nine groups of eight, are older than the Golden Dawn but belong to the same enterprise of total correspondence. The nine choirs are from Pseudo-Dionysius, whose Celestial Hierarchy is a Greek Christian text of around the year 500. The sephiroth are Kabbalistic. The mapping of one onto the other, eight angels to each of nine rungs, is Christian Kabbalah doing what it did everywhere.

None of these layers is illegitimate. The problem is that they are usually presented without dates, so that a fifth-century Christian hierarchy, a medieval Jewish counting technique and a Victorian tarot scheme appear in one sentence with equal authority.