La Science Cabalistique

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.

The interest of the book lies less in what it says than in where it sits. It was published in 1823, at the point where the older Latin and Hebrew angelological literature was passing into a French occult culture that would shortly become the dominant force in Western esotericism, exporting its vocabulary to Britain and then to the whole modern revival. Books of this kind are how the earlier material crossed that gap, and the crossing changed it: what had been scattered through learned Latin compilations arrived in French as a usable table. That is why the atlas keeps the entry despite the work being derivative. A tradition is transmitted by its intermediaries as much as by its sources, and the intermediaries are usually the part nobody records. When a modern text lists the seventy two angels with planetary hours attached, the arrangement it is using has come down a chain, and this is one of the links.

What Lenain himself drew on is not established. He compiles without consistently naming his authorities, and identifying them would require comparing his tables against the earlier printed and manuscript sources one by one, a piece of work nobody appears to have done. The atlas notes the gap rather than filling it with a guess, and records the book as a witness to a stage of transmission rather than as evidence for the antiquity of anything in it.