· The Ancestor · — Ὑγρομαντεία · the greek book the clavicvla was made from
The other rooms are plates. This one runs. An hour here is not sixty minutes: the daylight is cut into twelve and the night into twelve, so the day hours are long in summer and short in winter and the two are equal only at the equinox. The first hour belongs to the planet that owns the day, and the rest follow in the order below. The day turns at sunrise, not at midnight — before dawn you are still in yesterday's.
| Hora | Rvler | From | To |
|---|
The seven set in order of apparent speed, slowest first. Walk this ring one step per hour and the week builds itself: twenty-four hours is three whole turns of seven with three left over, so each dawn lands three places on, and after seven days the ring closes exactly where it began. The names of the days are the residue of that arithmetic.
| Sphere | In the Shams | Metal | Its day | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saturn | Κρόνος | Zuḥal | lead | Saturday |
| Jupiter | Ζεύς | al-Mushtarī | tin | Thursday |
| Mars | Ἄρης | al-Mirrīkh | iron | Tuesday |
| Sun | Ἥλιος | al-Shams | gold | Sunday |
| Venus | Ἀφροδίτη | al-Zuhara | copper | Friday |
| Mercury | Ἑρμῆς | ʿUṭārid | quicksilver | Wednesday |
| Moon | Σελήνη | al-Qamar | silver | Monday |
Greek counts with its letters too, and it is the same count. The first twenty-two signs carry exactly the values of the Hebrew in the Clavicula and of the abǧad in the Shams — three alphabets out of one Phoenician order, agreeing to the last unit from one to four hundred. Greek then runs on to nine hundred where the Arabic goes to a thousand. Three of these signs are not letters at all any more: stigma, koppa and sampi dropped out of the writing and stayed in the counting. The small marks under each are its Hebrew and Arabic cousins.
ΑΒΡΑΣΑΞ 1 + 2 + 100 + 1 + 200 + 1 + 60 = 365 — the Great Archon of the three hundred and sixty-five spheres, and the days of the solar year
This is the book the Clavicula was made from. It went out of Constantinople as the city fell, into Italy, and was put into Latin and Italian there; abridged copies circulated as Clavicula Salomonis and became the Key as it is read next door. Which settles an old claim: the Key was not translated from a Hebrew original. Its Hebrew is ornament laid over a Greek frame — and the frame is mostly tables of hours, which is why this room keeps a clock.