Divinity Atlas

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What a Duplicate Implies

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What a Duplicate Implies

The seventeenth of the seventy-two shares its name with the eleventh, and the lists distinguish them by a numeral appended in print. It is a small anomaly with a disproportionate amount to say about how the system works.

A list of angelic names composed by an author would not contain a repeat. A list generated by a fixed procedure over a fixed text might, and this one does. The duplication is therefore evidence that the seventy-two really are the output of the Exodus derivation rather than a name-list retrospectively fitted to it.

That is a genuine point in the system's favour, and it is one of the very few internal tests available. The procedure and its result can be checked against each other.

But the same anomaly indicts the layers built on top. The two share a name and, in the standard presentations, differ in nearly everything else, suffix, sign, decan, planetary ruler, tarot card, choir, sephirah, verse and attribute. Every one of those differences comes from the position in the sequence. None comes from the name.

Which settles a question that is otherwise easy to muddle. In the system as it now stands, the name is a label and the position is the content. An angel of the seventy-two is defined by where it falls on the zodiac and in the ninefold division, and its name is what the counting happened to produce at that point.

That is a coherent way for such a system to work, and there is nothing wrong with it. It is simply the opposite of the impression given by most presentations, in which the name is treated as the carrier of meaning and the correspondences as elaborations of it.

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