VI.1919.12–18 — The Seven Seals of the Gates

Seven discs, black stone with gold-filled engraving, each c. 240 mm diameter, engraved with a composite figure: interlaced triangles within concentric rings, planetary characters, and bordering scripts. English, c. 1850–1890.

Provenance: The Order's “Table of the Gates” (reconstructed in the present display); the 1919 Deposit.

Seven engraved black stone discs with gold-filled figures, arrayed in an arc within a glass museum case. — The Seals as presently cased.

A reconstruction of the Table of the Gates: a faceted black prism at centre, surrounded by engraved discs and tablets, with the Vigil Book. — The Table of the Gates, as reconstructed in the present display; VI.1919.19 at centre.

A black stone disc engraved in gold: the character of Jupiter above a square of sigils, with two smaller squares beside it lettered VERUS and FACTUS, and the accession VI.1919.14. — VI.1919.14, the seal of Jupiter, photographed for “On the deviations in the Seals of the Gates”: the exemplar square (VERUS) beside the seal's own (FACTUS). The deviation is systematic; the rule has not been recovered.

Note. The figures derive from the planetary pentacles of the Clavicula Salomonis tradition, of which the British Library's Sloane manuscripts preserve the best-known exemplars. They are not, however, copies. Each seal departs from its exemplar systematically — in the cell-order of the inscribed squares and in the track of the sigil lines — and the deviations are consistent across all seven, as though executed to a rule the Institute has not recovered. A study, “On the deviations in the Seals of the Gates,” appeared in Cygnus and reached no conclusion.

One nineteenth-century reader pencilled against the Sun's square that “the burnt cells still count” — the annotation is not explained.

The deviation, in the one case the Institute has reduced to arithmetic, is an ordering: the exemplar's letters re-entered in the walk of the planet's own square. A pencilled demonstration survives on the study's flyleaf — the word SACRAMENT, nine letters, re-entered by the square of three: RTA / CAE / NSM.