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.

Tradition · Kabbalistic
A note on this entry

Agrippa prints the English form Agiel against the Hebrew transliteration Agial, and gives the name's numerical sum as 45, the total of Saturn's square. The choir is not disputed for Saturn, but the reasoning is: Agrippa assigns the choirs to the sephiroth in the scale of ten (Book II, ch. 13) and only sets the planets beside them there, so 'the Thrones of Saturn' is a reading of his table rather than a sentence of his text. The theurgic etymologies that modern writers give the name ('the power of God', 'the hand of God') appear in no source earlier than the nineteenth-century handbooks and are not Agrippa's. The Arbatel's Aratron is a separate figure from a separate book; olympian_spirits.json records that the identification of the two is modern.

Correspondences

Planet
Saturn
Color
Black
Rank
Planetary intelligence

Sacred timing

Hour planet
Saturn

Symbols and forms

Alternate Names
Agial

Practice

Magical Uses
BindingBanishingGroundingEndingsProtectionLongevity

Nature and meaning

Kind
Intelligence
Office

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.

Details

Order of angels

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.

Archangel
Tzaphkiel
Alternate archangel
Cassiel
Metal
Lead
Stone
Onyx
Sigil

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.

Keywords
SaturnThronesAralimLeadBindingTimeLimitation

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