·Shams al-Maʿārif·

Abǧad·XXVIII litterae

The letters are numbers. The order is not the one children are taught but the old Phoenician one, and the first twenty-two values are identical to the Hebrew of the Clavicula, alif to tāʾ against aleph to tav. Six letters carry on where Hebrew stops, to a thousand. The fourteen in gold are the lucid letters, النورانية — exactly those that open the twenty-nine sūras of the disjoined letters.

ʾabǧad hawwaz ḥuṭṭī kalaman saʿfaṣ qarašat ṯaḫaḏ ḍaẓuġ — the eight words that hold the order

Sabʿa·the seven and their governors

Every sphere has a day, an angel over it, and a king of the ǧinn beneath it. The Clavicula gives the planets pentacles; this book gives them squares, names and hours.

Awfāq·VII quadrata

A wafḃ is a square in which every row, every column and both diagonals come to the same number, and each square is assigned to a sphere by its side: three for Saturn, rising to nine for the Moon. They are cut into metal on the day and in the hour of their planet.

Budūḥ·the square that became a word

Saturn's square written in letters instead of figures. Read the four corners — bāʾ dāl wāw ḥāʾ, 2 4 6 8 — and you have budūḥ, a name that outlived its own arithmetic: written on its own over doorways, on letters to speed them, on bowls against pain, by people who had long stopped counting.

Lo Shu·the same square, older

The square above is not an Arabic invention, and it is older than the name budūḥ by something like two thousand years. In China it is the Lo Shu, 洛書 — the writing of the river Lo, found on the shell of a turtle that came out of the water. Four nine two, three five seven, eight one six: the same nine numbers in the same nine places. It is drawn in counters rather than figures, the odd ones open and the even ones filled, which is the yang and the yin of it, and the reason the even numbers fall into two columns.

It travelled. Out of China into India, from India into the Arabic أوفاق, and out of the Islamic world into Europe, where Agrippa printed it in 1533 as the square of Saturn. So the three renderings on this page — the counters, the figures, and budūḥ in its letters — are one object, carried four times across the world and renamed at every stop.

Iter·how it reached the other rooms

This is not a translation of the Clavicula — it is upstream of it. A tenth-century Andalusī book of astral magic, Ġhāyat al-Ḥakīm, غاية الحكيم, was turned into Castilian and then Latin at the court of Alfonso X in 1256 and went through Europe under the name Picatrix. The planetary hours, the metals, the images cut in the hour of their star: the Latin grimoires inherited them. And the seventy-two spirits next door are bound by a king whom this tradition never stopped naming — Sulaymān, to whom the wind and the ǧinn were given.