A Link in the Chain of Transmission

The interest of the book lies less in what it says than in where it sits. It was published in 1823, at the point where the older Latin and Hebrew angelological literature was passing into a French occult culture that would shortly become the dominant force in Western esotericism, exporting its vocabulary to Britain and then to the whole modern revival. Books of this kind are how the earlier material crossed that gap, and the crossing changed it: what had been scattered through learned Latin compilations arrived in French as a usable table. That is why the atlas keeps the entry despite the work being derivative. A tradition is transmitted by its intermediaries as much as by its sources, and the intermediaries are usually the part nobody records. When a modern text lists the seventy two angels with planetary hours attached, the arrangement it is using has come down a chain, and this is one of the links.

What Lenain himself drew on is not established. He compiles without consistently naming his authorities, and identifying them would require comparing his tables against the earlier printed and manuscript sources one by one, a piece of work nobody appears to have done. The atlas notes the gap rather than filling it with a guess, and records the book as a witness to a stage of transmission rather than as evidence for the antiquity of anything in it.