Agiel

Thrones — in Hebrew the Aralim, literally 'the thrones'. The received planetary tables put the Thrones over Saturn, and Agrippa's own scale of ten supports that reading: he sets the Aralim in the column of Binah, and Binah is the sphere to which he assigns Saturn in the same table.

A traced character, not a figure. The four letters of Agial are placed by their values — 1, 3, 10, 1, 30 — in the cells of Saturn's three-by-three square and joined in order, which gives a short trace, since the aleph stands twice at the same value and the line revisits the cell it started in. The square holds no 10, so the yod is folded into the cell of the aleph by Aiq Bekar and the sigil is drawn through that substitution. Agrippa prints the character in the plates that follow his chapter on the planetary tables; Barrett's Magus and the modern redrawings copy it from there and inherit its corruptions.

Agrippa gives it no office beyond the single line that stands over all seven planets: the intelligence is the spirit of the sphere 'to good', the channel through which the planet's virtue is drawn down into matter. What it therefore does is what Saturn does — it names, measures, binds, sets limits, and presides over endings and over the foundations laid after them. The task-lists that later handbooks give it are readings of the planet, not statements of the spirit's own text, and no classical source assigns it a court, a legion or a familiar.