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The Zodiacal Kings, and the Sign Dee Never Assigned

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The Zodiacal Kings, and the Sign Dee Never Assigned

This is the most important provenance point in the whole set of ninety-one, and it is routinely missed.

Dee's table assigns each Part to one of twelve Zodiacal Kings: Alpudus, Hononol, Zarzilg, Gebabal, Olpaged, Cadaamp, Zarnaah, Arfaolg, Lavavot, Zurchol, Ziracah and Zinggen. Each King is associated in the received material with one of the twelve tribes of Israel. That much is Dee's, and it is in the manuscript.

The zodiac signs are not. The angels did not give Dee a list of zodiacal attributions for the Kings. They told him to derive the attributions from the associated tribe, which was a standard sort of exercise for a Renaissance scholar, since the arrangement of the tribes around the tabernacle in the second chapter of Numbers had long been read astrologically. So far as the record shows, Dee never did it.

Every zodiacal attribution now in circulation is therefore a reconstruction, made by someone else, at some later date, from the tribes. The reconstructions do not agree. The scheme Agrippa used, which Dee knew, differs from the Golden Dawn's, and both differ from the one Benjamin Rowe adopted in the 1990s after weighing the alternatives and settling the choice by divination. Rowe himself noted that the entities he encountered appeared to disregard the attributions freely.

The practical consequence is that when a source states that a given Part belongs to Scorpio or to Cancer, the honest form of that statement is: under the reconstruction this source is using, the Part's King is assigned to that sign. The King and the tribe are sixteenth-century. The sign is not, and the confidence with which it is usually asserted is not warranted by anything in Dee.

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