Seventy Two Names and the Machinery Built Around Them

The scheme Lenain works with is much older than his book. Three consecutive verses in the fourteenth chapter of Exodus each contain seventy two letters, and reading them together in a fixed pattern yields seventy two groups of three letters. Adding a suffix meaning God to each group turns the groups into names, and the set has been treated as a roster of angels in Jewish and then in Christian sources since the Middle Ages. It circulated widely in Latin Europe through Renaissance compilations and was familiar long before the nineteenth century.

What Lenain supplies is arrangement. Each name is given its angel, its scriptural verse, its position in the zodiac by five degree division, its hours and its planetary attribution, so that a reader can locate a name for any moment or any question. The tabulation is the book's contribution and its appeal: it converts a list into an instrument. It is not, and does not claim to be, a recovery of a lost original. The correspondences are Lenain's arrangement of inherited material, and where his tables disagree with earlier ones the disagreement is his. The atlas records the book at that value, as a nineteenth century systematisation rather than as an ancient authority.