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Where the Offices Came From

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Where the Offices Came From

Every one of the seventy-two now carries a domain, healing, justice, memory, fertility, eloquence, prosperity, and a reader is entitled to ask on what basis.

The answer is that the domains are not in the Hebrew sources. The derivation gives three letters. The suffix gives a name. Neither gives an office. Rashi describes a technique for extracting names, not a directory of specialisations, and neither the Bahir nor the Zohar assigns spheres of influence to seventy-two individually named angels in the manner familiar today.

The attributes as they now circulate are traceable to nineteenth-century French occultism, and principally to Lazare Lenain, whose La Science Cabalistique appeared in 1823 and set out the seventy-two with their qualities, their governed periods, and their associated verses. That book is the immediate ancestor of nearly every modern list. Twentieth-century French authors elaborated it further and English translations followed, which is why the wording of the attributes in circulation today often reads like a translation from French, because it is one.

There is a partial rationale in the tradition. The three-letter groups can be read as Hebrew roots, and a root can be given a meaning; several of the attributions look like attempts to do that. But the readings are strained in many cases, the roots are often not words at all, and no source sets out a rule that generates the whole set.

The honest description is that the offices are a nineteenth-century assignment, made systematically, applied to a medieval list, and now reported almost everywhere without a date. They are what the system means to most of its users. They are also its most recent layer.

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