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Mercy, and the Vocabulary of the Attributes

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Mercy, and the Vocabulary of the Attributes

Haziel is assigned forgiveness and mercy. Reading across all seventy-two attributions, the vocabulary they are drawn from turns out to be narrow and revealing.

The attributes cluster into a small number of fields. There is healing and health. There is protection and defence. There is knowledge, memory and learning. There is love, friendship, loyalty and reconciliation. There is justice, truth and integrity. There is prosperity, abundance and success. There is courage, strength and resilience. There is spiritual growth, elevation and enlightenment. Between them these cover almost the whole list, and several attributions differ from one another only in wording.

That narrowness is informative. A set of seventy-two distinct offices, if independently derived, would be expected to include specific and odd ones, the Goetia's catalogue, by contrast, offers understanding the speech of birds, making waters stormy and building towers. The Shem attributions have nothing of that kind. They are uniformly benign, uniformly abstract, and phrased in a register that would not be out of place in a modern book of daily affirmations.

The reason is the transmission. The attributes reach English through nineteenth and twentieth-century French occult writing, itself working within a devotional idiom, and then through late twentieth-century popular publishing that smoothed them further. Each stage moved the vocabulary toward the general and the positive.

A reader who wants to know what the seventy-two were originally for will not learn it from the attribute list. That list describes what the system has become. Its earlier layers, a technique for dividing the divine name, and a Renaissance angelology built on it, had different concerns entirely.

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