Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Reading the Kamea of Venus

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Reading the Kamea of Venus

The Venus table is a seven by seven square of the numbers one to forty nine, adding to one hundred and seventy five in each row, column and diagonal, and to one thousand two hundred and twenty five in total. Being odd ordered, it is one of the stable tables: the standard construction rule produces it directly, and copies across the manuscript tradition agree closely.

Agrippa gives Venus the intelligence Hagiel, the spirit Kedemel, and a name for the order of spirits of the planet, and as with the rest of the set the Hebrew letter values of these names return numbers belonging to the square. Venus is a good place to notice that the scheme has four numbers available to work with, not one: the order of the square, the count of its cells, the row sum and the grand total. Different names in the same planetary set draw on different ones of the four, which is why they do not all come to the same figure.

The metal, the day and the hour matter as much as the square in the practical literature. A Venus table was to be engraved on copper, on a Friday, in a planetary hour of Venus, and the completed object was a talisman rather than a diagram. The atlas records the instruction as documented practice and takes no position on the result.

None of the seven tables originates with Agrippa. They circulate in Arabic and Latin manuscripts before him, and his contribution was to print them together with a consistent scheme of names.

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