Etteilla's 72 Geniuses

The cover of my translation of Etteilla's Philosophy of the High Sciences.

Philosophy of the High Sciences 1 Year Anniversary 🎂🥳

A little over a year ago I put out a straight English translation of Etteilla's Philosophie des Hautes Sciences. Since then, slowly (it's going to take a LOT of time to do it right so please bear with me!), in between my other projects, I've been working on an expanded edition with the intention to go beyond just the translation and to actually break down his entire system (and to try not to lose my mind in the process! 😅) Backed by research rather than interpretation, this won't be my take on what he meant or intended; it'll be what the research actually shows.

The expanded edition will go step by step and will cover his whole system breaking it down along with citing his influences in a way that (hopefully) makes it easier to follow and to put into practice. Its a lot of material to cover (as you will soon see just from this post alone), wayy too much to post it all here in detail but I will try to touch on some of it at least, perhaps in parts, while also saving a good portion of it for the book.

NERD ALERT My engraved gold charm from the NYPL featuring Etteilla's divination key: The Four Columns of the Wisdom, Science & Art of the Magician-Diviner

With that said, let's get into Etteilla's 72 Geniuses.

Etteilla's list of the 72 Geniuses from his Philosophy of the High Sciences

Etteilla's 72 Geniuses

This post is going to focus specifically on Etteilla's angel system: the 72 Geniuses laid out in his Philosophie des Hautes Sciences with an overview of the system, why it matters historically, and details into some of the puzzles that lead me into this deep dive (and maybe sometimes off the deep end too when the research became really difficult😆) in the first place.

Lazare Lenain's La Science Cabalistique from 1823

Lazare Lenain

Lazare Lenain's La Science Cabalistique from 1823 has been hugely influential up until modern day. It is often credited as the first work in French to treat the 72 angels in real detail, laying out each one's specific attributes, the hours of the day and days of the week they govern, their planetary associations, how to identify which of them is your own personal Genius, etc..

In that book, Lenain cites Etteilla's Philosophie des Hautes Sciences directly, multiple times, as one of his sources. While I LOVE Lenain, it is clear that Etteilla was writing on this material nearly forty years earlier than him and yet he seems to only tend to be known for his contributions to tarot and cartomancy and rarely ever (nowadays) given credit or acknowledged for the important historic contributions that he has made in other branches of the high sciences (as he would call it).

I think perhaps Etteilla's angel system may be misunderstood since it doesn't follow the usual structure one may be accustomed to and this is a big reason why I would like to endeavor to explore it more in depth and to attempt to shed more light on it starting with one of his sources and then diving a bit into his structure.

Table of Geniuses following the Philosopher Palingène from page 63 of Etteilla's Philosophy of the High Sciences

Palingène

Etteilla attributes his table of 72 Geniuses to "the Philosopher Palingène."

That name refers to Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus — a pen name, most likely belonging to the Neapolitan poet Marcello Stellato (c. 1500 – before 1551), author of a long Latin philosophical poem called the Zodiacus Vitae, moral and cosmological in nature, built around the zodiac (one chapter for each sign). It is nothing like an angel-magic manual and nowhere in Palingenius's own 16th-century Latin poem is there a table of 72 named angels with elements, or anything even close to resembling what Etteilla presents.

So where does the table Etteilla is pointing to actually come from?

A French translation of this poem was first published in 1731, translated by J.B.C. de La Monnerie. That original 1731 edition is just the poem itself in French, no 72-angel table, no Cabbalistic material, again none of the material resembling what Etteilla presents..

My personal copy of Le Zodiaque de la Vie Humaine from 1733

A second edition then came out in 1733, titled as a "new edition, revised, corrected, and augmented with notes." This is the one that matters. The "augmented with notes" part is key: this edition adds a substantial layer of editorial material that isn't in the 1731 printing at all — footnotes, commentary, and appended sections that go well beyond a straight translation of Palingenius's poem.

La Monnerie himself, in his own "Avis au Lecteur" (Notice to the Reader) for this edition, explains that after finishing the translation, he left it in the hands of a Mr. Rousset in the Hague, who took on the role of editor for the book and who wrote its Preface.

Not much is known about La Monnerie unfortunately, he doesn't have much of a documented biography beyond being credited as this work's translator, which is such a shame because as a translator myself, I fell IN LOVE with this book and became such a huge fan of him as a translator, I really would have loved to know more about him and plan to continue to try to look deeper into him. I promise to update with any new findings.

Portrait of Jean Rousset de Missy from 1747

Rousset, on the other hand, is Jean Rousset de Missy (1686–1762). He was a Huguenot writer who fled to the Netherlands as a teenager, later became a well-known historian and journalist based in The Hague, writing on figures like Peter the Great and Catherine of Russia, and was active in Dutch political and intellectual circles through the 1720s-40s.

Who wrote the notes and why do they matter?

In the "Avis au Lecteur," La Monnerie establishes that he had a translator's role and that an editor (Rousset) came on afterward and wrote the Preface — but who actually wrote the footnotes scattered throughout the poem itself is never directly credited to either of them.

There is a real clue though to make an educated guess: some of the footnotes in this edition are clearly explanations of specific translation decisions, some written in the first person, the kind of notes only the person doing the translating would have reason to write, not an outside editor. That makes it more likely than not that La Monnerie himself was responsible for the footnotes, annotating his own translation as he went, rather than Rousset supplying them as part of his editorial role. Since La Monnerie never says this outright, I suppose it isn't something that can be stated as settled fact, but as a translator myself, this is what makes the most sense to me as I cannot imagine someone else writing my footnotes to explain my translation choices.

And it's in one of those footnotes — a long one attached to Book XII of the poem, discussing Cabala, that the angel material actually appears. Sitting inside it is a table listing all 72 of the traditional angelic names laid out in a specific column arrangement.

The footnote in the 1733 augmented French translation edition of Palingéne containing the table of the 72 Geniuses that Etteilla draws upon in his Philosophy of the High Sciences

And this is why translators are so cool 😎

So when Etteilla says his table of Geniuses comes from "Palingène," where he actually took it from was this specific 1733 edition's added footnote appended to the translation of Palingenius's poem by the translator nearly two centuries after Palingenius died, and not from anything Palingenius himself ever actually wrote.

The 72 Angel Table from the 1727 French translation of Agrippa's Occult Philosophy on the left compared to the Table from the 1733 augmented French translation of Palingéne on the right. Note the arrangement and how neither table has the angels numbered.

Agrippa's influence

When the 72-angel table from the 1733 Palingène footnote is compared against the one in the French translation of Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia — A. Levasseur's 1727 translation, titled La Philosophie Occulte de Henri Corneille Agrippa, divisée en trois livres, et traduite du latin, published at The Hague — the two are nearly identical. The relevant material sits in Book III, chapter 25, where Agrippa lays out the 72 names derived from the three 72-letter verses of Exodus. Same 72 names, same underlying arrangement. This isn't a coincidence or two traditions independently landing on the same list, the footnote's table is definitely drawing directly from the one in the French translation of Agrippa.

Levasseur's 1727 French translation of Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia

Worth noting: Levasseur's 1727 translation was the only French translation of Agrippa's work in existence for well over a century — no new French translation appeared until 1910. So this wasn't an obscure or unusual choice on the part of whoever compiled that footnote as it was, at the time, the one and only way to read Agrippa in French at all.

So the real chain of transmission looks like this:

Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia, Book III → translated into French by Levasseur, 1727 → copied into the footnote of the 1733 French Palingène translation edition (either by the editor Jean Rousset de Missy or most likely by the translator J.B.C. de La Monnerie) → cited by Etteilla simply as coming from "Palingène."

Same comparison as above but with some spelling discrepancies noted.

Comparing the names

Comparing all the tables name by name also turns up some small but telling details. For example, at row 5 in the shared column structure, the Levasseur French translation of Agrippa names the angel Hahahel. The Palingène footnote's table has it instead as Bahahel — a one-letter copying slip among some other spelling discrepancies.

Etteilla's table also has Bahahel matching the spelling error from the Palingène footnote.

Etteilla's table, at the corresponding position (#51), also has Bahahel. Since this is an error introduced in the Palingène footnote and not present in the Levasseur translation, it confirms the specific link in the chain already laid out above: Etteilla's table is indeed following the Palingène footnote's copy (exactly as he claims), errors and all, not a separate or independent reading of Levasseur's Agrippa translation (although he was surely familiar with it).

All 3 Tables compared to show Etteilla's name change

Angel 67

Separately, at position 67, both the Levasseur translation and the Palingène footnote agree on Michaël but Etteilla's table has Mismahel at that position instead — a change Etteilla made himself, on top of the material he otherwise carried over as-is.

There's a further wrinkle specifically tied to this same angel, position 67 — the one Etteilla renamed from Michaël to Mismahel. When it comes to the actual attributes Etteilla assigns further into the text — what each Genius loves and hates — the sequence runs cleanly from 1 through 72, but position 67 has two separate entries attached to it. One (p. 91 in the original book) has this Genius devoted to Science and Wisdom, with its opposing bad Genius promoting ignorance and disorder. The other (p. 92) instead governs the peace of provincial towns, boroughs, villages..

That means there are 73 total attribute entries for a system that's only supposed to have 72 Geniuses - nothing was skipped, something extra was added and this extra entry lands on exactly the same Genius whose name Etteilla had already changed from the standard Michaël to Mismahel.. There's a LOT more to unpack here and it'll definitely all be covered in the expanded book. 😉

Etteilla's Numbering System

Here's something worth noting before getting into how Etteilla numbered his 72 Geniuses: neither his source (the table in the 1733 Palingène translation's footnote) nor his source's source (the table in the 1727 French translation of Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia) numbers the Geniuses at all. Both just list the 72 names, laid out in a grid, with no numbers attached to any of them.

That matters because it's an indication that the specific numbering Etteilla uses for each of the 72 angels may not be something he copied from another source. It may be entirely his own invention, and it follows a very deliberate and complicated mathematical rule rather than just running down the table in whatever order it happened to be printed in which is a very Etteilla thing to do, as a self-proclaimed professor of algebra.

I am hoping this chart can help to visualize the elemental structure.

The Elements

To best visualize this, start by taking the four columns of the Palingène table and assigning each one to an element, in this order: Fire, Air, Water, Earth. This is the same order Etteilla lists his elements in. This part is simple enough — whichever column a name sits in tells you its element.

Where things get more complicated (because of course he can never just be simple) is the order Etteilla reads those columns in to arrive at his final numbering. Rather than reading straight down a column top to bottom, he works through the names by alternating — taking every other name instead of reading straight through in sequence.

For example, in the Fire column you'd think the order should just be Vehuiah, Jeliel, Silael.

NOPE😆. It's Vehuiah, Silael, Mahasiah — every other name, alternating. Got it? Great — so now you'd think Vehuiah is 1, Silael is 2, Mahasiah is 3.

NOPE again😅. The numbering climbs by 24 each time, making it Vehuiah = 1, Silael = 25, Mahasiah = 49.

The core of it all is this: Etteilla took a source table that never numbered anything, assigned elements by column, and then built an entirely original numbering system on top rather than reading them plainly turning an unordered list into a structured, deliberately patterned one of his own design.

Palingéne again for reference

The first half of Etteilla's system to help visualize the walk through

Walk Through

Let's set the actual numbers aside for a moment, since jumping straight to "1, 25, 49" makes this harder to follow than it needs to be. Look instead at just the order of the names themselves, by Element column.

Here's the Fire column, listed in the sequence Etteilla actually uses: skipping every other (Palingene table) name as you go down:

Vehuiah, Silael, Mahasiah, Achaiah, Haziel, Laviah, Jesalel, Hariel, Leviah

That's the first half of the Fire column (every odd position: 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, 15th, 17th).

The remaining names — Jeliel, Elemiah, Lelahel, Cahethel, Aladiah, Hahaiah, Mebahel, Hakamiah, Caliel — are the ones skipped over on this first pass; they'd come after, once Etteilla finishes this first run through.

That makes the second pass: Jeliel, Elemiah, Lelahel, Cahethel, Aladiah, Hahaiah, Mebahel, Hakamiah, Caliel

Here's the same walk-through for Air, Water, and Earth, using each column's own name list:

Air: Leuviah, Nelchael, Melahel, Nithhaiah, Jerathel, Reyel, Lecabel, Jehuiah, Chavakiah

second pass: Pahaliah, Jejazel, Hahiviah, Haaiah, Sechiah, Omael, Vasaviah, Lehaiah, Manadel

Water: Aniel, Rehahel, Bahaiel, Vevaliah, Sealiah, Azaliah, Vehuel, Hahasiah, Nanael

second pass: Haamiah, Jejazel, Michael, Jelahiah, Ariel, Michael, Daniel, Imamiah, Nithael

Earth: Mebahiah, Nemamiah, Mizrahel, Umabel, Mehiel, Damabiah, Ejael, Rochel, Hajajel

second pass: Pojel, Jejalel, Umabel, Jahhel, Annavel, Manakel, Habujah, Jabaniah, Mumiah

Same logic as Fire: each list is the odd positions (1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th, 11th, 13th, 15th, 17th) within that element's column, in order. The skipped names — the even positions — would be the second pass through each column.

Now let's add the numbers back in

Fire: Vehuiah (1) +24= Silael (25) +24= Mahasiah (49)

Air: Leuviah (2) +24= Nelchael (26) +24= Melahel (50)

Water: Aniel (3) +24= Rehahel (27) +24= Bahahel (51)

Earth: Mebahiah (4) +24= Nemamiah (28) +24= Harabel (52)

Note how the first 4 go in a pattern Fire 1, Air 2, Water 3, Earth 4

Now we circle back to Fire again for 5 and so on.

Fire: Achaiah (5) +24= Haziel (29) +24= Laviah (53)

I won't list them all but I'm sure you've got it down now.

The first half of Etteilla's Table again to help visualize the communication of the elements

The Geniuses Communicate Their Element to One Another

Etteilla actually attempts to explain this himself (in his usual overcomplicated, hard-to-follow way):

"A very essential observation, is to recognize the Geniuses who communicate their Element to each other; they are in this sort: 1, 26, 51, 4: 25, 50, 3, 28: 49, 2, 27, 52, which makes six legions or divisions of twelve by twelve Geniuses, which form between them twelve, a spiral line, which one divides into 360, as also 360 x 6 = 2160."

The Geniuses who communicate their Element to each other are in this sort:

1 (First Fire Genius), 26 (Second Air Genius), 51 (Third Water Genius), 4 (First Earth Genius)

which then takes us to 25 (Second Fire Genius), 50 (Third Air Genius), 3 (First Water Genius), 28 (Second Earth Genius)...

The 360 in that quote is the number of degrees in a full circle of the zodiac. With 72 Geniuses dividing that circle evenly between them, each one governs a neat 5-degree slice (72 × 5 = 360).

The 2160 is just that same 360 multiplied by his six legions (360 × 6 = 2160). It's a number that shows up elsewhere in astrology too, most notably as the traditional length in years of a single astrological age (the Age of Pisces, the Age of Aquarius, and so on are each said to span roughly 2160 years).

Page 196 of Buy de Mornas's Cosmographie méthodique et élémentaire (1770)

The Rays

Beyond a number and an element, each Genius is also said to govern a specific "ray" — a directional slice of the lower world and this is important because its something that Lenain definitely borrowed and worked into his system.

Etteilla spends a lot of effort describing everything without ever actually giving the reader something to look at but when it comes to the rays specifically, he does something different: rather than leaving it purely abstract, he points the reader to an actual visual aid.

"To have a notion of the rays that the Geniuses govern, I see no more sensible demonstration than that which offers itself under my eyes in the Treatise of Methodical Cosmography, very elementary, of Buy de Mornas, in-8°. Lacombe, Bookseller, 1770, page & figure 196."

Buy de Mornas's Cosmographie méthodique et élémentaire (1770) is exactly what it sounds like: a geography and astronomy primer, not an occult text at all.

Etteilla never actually reproduces this diagram in his own book, he just points to it and expects the reader to go look it up. So while the 72-name table comes from the Palingène footnote (by way of Agrippa), the idea of "rays" governing different zones of the world is demonstrated with an entirely separate, seemingly mundane source: a cosmography textbook.

That's all for now

I'll leave it here, as this was already a lot to go over, and I'm only just scratching the surface. I haven't even gone fully in-depth yet and this is a fraction of the actual system, and it's only the angels.

But even from just this much, one thing should be clear: this wasn't some slapped-together nonsense that deserved to be waved off or forgotten. There was a real, coherent system here that took real thought and real work to build. I think it's just complex and difficult to follow and understand but my hope is that if I can break this down and explain it well, and make it more accessible, maybe more people can gain an appreciation for it and it can get some of the recognition that it deserves, especially because of its historic importance.

For those interested in exploring the complete system—including all 72 Geniuses with their specific loves, hates, and domains; the full numerical and cabalistic alphabet; detailed color interpretations for dozens of shades; and Etteilla's philosophical framework —the full translation of Philosophy of the High Sciences, or The Key Given to the Children of Art of Science & of Wisdom  is available on Amazon.

Expanded edition planned but no ETA as of now (sorry!).

Click here to check out my English Language Petit Etteilla book and card set!

with another surprise Etteilla related card deck on the way very soon! 😉

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Thanks so much for taking the time to read this and for supporting my dreams

With all my love and gratitude,

Heather Diane Lauvia ❤️✨