The Texts — close reading

The 72 Names

The seventy-two names circulate as a finished list — a table you are handed, to be used. Almost nowhere does the list show the one thing that matters most about it: it is not a list at all. It is a derivation, and you can carry it out yourself in ten minutes with a Hebrew Bible and a pencil.

The construction

Three consecutive verses — Exodus 14:19, 20 and 21 — each contain exactly seventy-two letters. That equality is the whole basis of the thing, and it is the first claim you should check rather than accept. Take the first verse forwards, the second backwards, the third forwards; read one letter from each in turn. Seventy-two triads fall out.

The reversal of the middle verse is not decoration. Read in sequence the three verses describe the pillar moving between two camps and the sea dividing — a passage about separation. The boustrophedon weave makes the reading itself turn back on the text.

Each verse above is counted at build time. If any one of them stopped being exactly seventy-two letters, this page would not be published.

What this is not

It is not a Hermetic text. The Shem ha-Mephorash belongs to Jewish tradition; the seventy-two-fold derivation is set out in the medieval Kabbalistic literature, centuries before anyone in Europe read the Corpus Hermeticum. It enters what we now call the Hermetic tradition in the Renaissance, when Christian scholars folded Kabbalah into their Hermetic reading — Pico, then Agrippa, then Kircher. The Golden Dawn inherited that fusion in the 1880s and passed it on as if it had always been one body of knowledge. It had not.

There is a third layer, and it is the youngest. The last column gives what each name is said to be for — healing, abundance, release from fear. These attributions are modern. In this form they were popularised by the Kabbalah Centre, above all through Yehuda Berg’s The 72 Names of God (2003), and from there they spread across the internet as though they were ancient. They are not in the medieval sources, they are not in Agrippa or Kircher, and nothing in the derivation produces them. We print them because they are what most readers will meet first — and because the whole use of this page is knowing which century you are reading.

The angel names are a middle layer. The Hebrew column is derived and checkable: run the weave and you get exactly those triads. The fourth column is not. Those names are the triads with a divine suffix attached — -el or -yah — and the assignment comes from tradition, not from the text. Latin spellings vary between sources, and the correspondences with degrees, hours, psalms and planets vary far more. Treat that column as a reference to compare against, never as evidence.

The seventy-two

Letters that would normally take their final form (ך ם ן ף ץ) are written here in their ordinary form, since the weave cuts across words and lands them mid-triad. The transliteration is plain, not scholarly: it is there so you can follow the letters, not to be pronounced.

Why it is worth knowing

Most of what circulates under “hermetic” is handed over as a result: a list, a correspondence, a table to be trusted. This one happens to keep its working. You can take three verses, count them, weave them, and arrive at the same seventy-two triads that Kircher printed in 1652 — which tells you something true about the tradition, and nothing at all about whether the names do anything.

Fair questions

Where do the 72 names come from?

From Exodus 14:19–21. Each of those three verses contains exactly seventy-two Hebrew letters. Reading the first forwards, the second backwards and the third forwards, one letter from each in turn, produces seventy-two three-letter groups.

Are the 72 names Hermetic?

No. They belong to Jewish Kabbalah and are set out in medieval Kabbalistic literature. They were absorbed into the Western Hermetic current during the Renaissance — through Pico della Mirandola, Agrippa and later Kircher — and passed on by the Golden Dawn in the 1880s as though the two traditions had always been one.

Why do the angel names differ between sources?

Because they are a later layer. The three-letter groups are derived from the text; the angel names add a divine suffix (-el or -yah) by tradition, and their Latin spellings were fixed by different authors at different times. The associated hours, degrees and psalms vary even more widely.

Can I verify the list myself?

Yes, and that is the point. Take a Hebrew text of Exodus 14:19–21, count the letters of each verse — you should get seventy-two each time — and carry out the weave. The table on this page is computed from those verses each time the site is built.

Sources & further reading

• Exodus 14:19–21, Masoretic text — the source of the derivation. Any critical edition of the Hebrew Bible (e.g. Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1977) serves; the consonantal text is stable here.
• Agrippa, H. C., De occulta philosophia libri tres (Cologne, 1533), Book III — the channel through which the seventy-two-fold division reached Renaissance Europe as part of a Hermetic-Kabbalistic synthesis.
• Kircher, A., Oedipus Aegyptiacus (Rome, 1652–54) — prints the names with the angelic attributions that most later lists follow.
• Scholem, G., Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Jerusalem: Schocken, 1941; 3rd rev. ed. New York: Schocken, 1954) — on the Jewish setting of the divine names, and on how badly the Christian Kabbalists read it.
• Dan, J., Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) — concise account of the transmission into Christian Kabbalah.