Lauviah

The eleventh and the seventeenth of the seventy-two carry the same name. In most printed lists they are distinguished only by a numeral: Lauviah, and Lauviah the second.

This is not a modern error. The duplication is present in the tradition, it survives in the standard lists, and it is handled by numbering rather than by correction. In the Hebrew as commonly printed the two are given identically, which means the coincidence is not merely an artefact of romanisation.

What it indicates is worth stating carefully. The seventy-two groups are produced mechanically, three letters at a time, from a fixed body of text. A mechanical procedure of that kind has no way to prevent a combination recurring, and in a set of seventy-two triples drawn from a Hebrew alphabet of twenty-two letters, a repeat is unremarkable. The duplication is evidence that the derivation is genuinely being carried out rather than composed, an invented list of seventy-two angelic names would be unlikely to include the same name twice.

That is a small point in favour of the system's internal consistency, and it is one of the few checks available. It cuts the other way against the attribute lists: the two Lauviahs are assigned quite different domains, inspiration and revelation for the eleventh, victory and success for the seventeenth, and they take different suffixes in the standard presentations. If the office followed from the name, identical names should not produce different offices.

They do, which confirms what the provenance already suggests: the offices were assigned to positions in a sequence rather than derived from the names occupying them.

Hebrew is written with consonants. The vowel points that fix pronunciation were developed by the Masoretes between roughly the sixth and tenth centuries and are absent from the consonantal text the seventy-two are cut from.

The consequence for this system is direct. Each name is three consonants plus a suffix. Nothing in the derivation supplies vowels, so every pronunciation of every one of the seventy-two is an interpolation, reasonable, conventional, and not given by the procedure.

That is why the Latin-letter forms vary so widely across sources. The same three letters appear as Lauviah, Laviah, Loviah, Lauiah, Levuiah. Others appear with or without an initial aspirate, with i or y or j, with v or u or w, with a hyphen or without. French sources, English sources and German sources each apply their own orthographic habits, and English lists are frequently transliterating a French transliteration of a Hebrew consonantal group.

Two practical consequences follow.

Cross-referencing between sources requires attention to position rather than to spelling. The eleventh of the seventy-two is stable; what it is called is not.

And arguments that depend on the sound or shape of a particular name, claims about its meaning, its root, its resemblance to some other word, are running on a form that somebody chose. Anyone making such an argument should be working from the Hebrew consonants, and most of the popular literature is not.

None of this is unusual. It is the ordinary condition of any Hebrew material transmitted through Latin-alphabet occultism, and the seventy-two are no worse served than most.