Mars

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The seal of the planet Mars, set beside its table of numbers

The character of Mars is drawn for Coven members.

Everything written here is yours to read. The characters themselves open with The Coven, and the first thirty days cost nothing.

In orderNo. 3 of 7
TableA square of five
Numbers1 to 25
Each row65
All together325
✦

The second book of Agrippa’s Occult Philosophy sets a table of numbers over each of the seven planets. The table of Mars is a square of five, holding the numbers 1 to 25, laid out so that every row, every column and both diagonals come to 65. All 25 of them together make 325.

Beside the table the book prints three figures: the seal of the planet, and a character apiece for the intelligence and the spirit set over it. The seal is the figure shown here.

It is worth saying what the seal is not. It is printed as a figure in its own right, and it is not produced by joining the numbers of the square in order — draw that path and you get something else entirely. Anything that explains the seal that way has worked backwards from the picture.

Where this comes from

Agrippa finished the three books of De occulta philosophia around 1510 and they were printed at Cologne in 1533. The second book is the one about number, and in it each of the seven planets is given a table of numbers, a seal, and two further figures for the intelligence and the spirit set over it. The figures here are traced from the English translation printed at London in 1651.

Henry Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia libri tres, Book II (Cologne, 1533), in the English translation printed at London in 1651. The text and the characters are in the public domain.

Traced from the plate, not redrawn. The broken strokes and thickened corners are the press and the paper; straightening them would change the figure.

Agrippa’s figures were recopied from edition to edition, and the later copies take liberties — Francis Barrett’s of 1801 redraws them with a free hand. Nothing here is taken from a redrawing.

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