The 72 Names in the Deck: The Shem Angels and the Decans of the Small Cards

Most tarot books hand you a list of 72 angel names and tell you they "come from" the Golden Dawn. Few show you the arithmetic that produced them, or where the list actually began. The agrippa 72 names tarot tradition rests on a very specific mechanism: the Golden Dawn took the 72 angels of the Shem ha-Mephorash, gave them to the 36 decans of the zodiac, and thereby assigned two angels to each small card from the 2 to the 10. The court cards are left out on purpose. This article traces that chain, step by step, and shows where Agrippa's own list disagrees with the one most decks inherit.

What the 72 names actually are

The Shem ha-Mephorash, "the explicit name," was originally a Tannaitic word for the four-letter Tetragrammaton. Over time the term widened. In the Rishonic period it came to denote a 42-letter name. In Kabbalah it also covers a 22-letter and a 72-letter name, the last being the one that matters here. The 72-fold name is derived by reading Exodus 14:19–21 boustrophedon, that is, back and forth across the three lines, to produce 72 words of three letters each.

Rashi already noted the method. The Bahir, written around the twelfth century, does too. Kabbalist legends hold that Moses used the 72-fold name to cross the Red Sea, and that later holy men used it to cast out demons, heal the sick, and avert disaster. What is not in the legends is a playing card. The card arrives six hundred years later. (See Shem HaMephorash, Wikipedia.)

Reuchlin, Agrippa, and the angels

Johann Reuchlin, in De Arte Cabalistica of 1517, made a decisive move. He read the 72 three-letter names as the names of 72 angels. He gave them pronounceable forms by adding suffixes such as "El" or "Yah." For Reuchlin these angels were individuated products of God's will, substantially based on the Tetragrammaton, and through that connection they drew the soul back toward God.

Agrippa inherited Reuchlin's cosmology. In the Three Books of Occult Philosophy he organized the angels by sphere and by decan. This is the crucial step for a deck. Agrippa did not scatter the angels evenly across the 22 letters. He tied them to the 36 decans, the 10-degree segments of the zodiac. That choice is what later lets a tarot builder land two angels on each pip card.

The route to the Golden Dawn runs through de Vigenere and then Mathers. De Vigenere, following Reuchlin, featured the 72 angels in his own writings. Thomas Rudd later copied and expanded that material, and proposed the Shem as a balancing force against the spirits of the Ars Goetia. Mathers, assembling the manuscripts for the order, described the descent of power from the Tetragrammaton through 24 thrones of the Elders of the Apocalypse, each with a crown of three rays. Four times three makes twelve, and the number 24 of the thrones multiplied by the three rays of the crown gives 72, the number of the God-name of 72 letters. That arithmetic is the bridge between the mystical name and the ordered list the order actually used.

The 36 decans are the key

A decan is a 10-degree stretch of the ecliptic. The 36 of them divide the 360 degrees of the zodiac into thirds, with three per sign. The idea is ancient Egyptian. The decans divided the night and the year, each one marking a new decanal hour as it rose on the horizon.

The Golden Dawn kept that structure. Each of the 36 decans receives two of the 72 names. Since every sign holds three decans, and every suit holds nine pips, the two angels per decan fall on the small cards. That is the whole trick. The 72 angels are distributed by decan, and the pips are the only cards that sit under a decan.

Two angels on every card from 2 to 10

Work through a single suit and the pattern is visible. The ace is set apart as the root of the elemental power, so it carries no angel. From the 2 to the 10 there are nine pips. Each pip falls under a decan, and each decan carries two angels. So the two of wands, the three of wands, and so on each receive a pair of Shem names.

Take the wands, the suit of fire. The pips run from the two of wands to the ten of wands. Each one is a small card, and each one sits in a decan. The two angels of that decan are the ones attached to it in the list. A court card in the same suit, such as the queen of wands, sits outside that logic. It is attributed by element and planet, not by the Shem. That is why the minor arcana of a Golden Dawn deck reads as two different systems stitched together, one for the pips and one for the courts.

This is why the court cards, the page, knight, queen, and king, are not on the list. They are not placed under a decan in this system. If a deck hands you angels for the kings and queens, it is using another scheme, not the one Agrippa and the Golden Dawn describe.

Where Agrippa's list differs

The chain from Reuchlin to Agrippa to the Golden Dawn is clean, but the actual names are not stable across the sources. Agrippa's assignment of the 72 to the decans does not match, in every position, the order in the Shem texts. Different Latin editions reorder the list. The Liber Semamphoras, a Latin translation of a Jewish magical text attributed to Solomon, was already attested by 1260, and Roger Bacon complained about the corruption that had entered it in the Hebrew to Latin pass. Every subsequent edition inherited that drift.

Mathers, working the manuscripts for the Golden Dawn, followed de Vigenere, who followed Reuchlin, and each hop changed the sequence. The result is that two decks that both claim the "72 names of Agrippa" can give two different angels to the same card. The difference is not a typo. It is a different edition of the list, one that was already drifting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When a source names a specific angel for a specific card, it is worth asking which of the 72 it is quoting, and from which hand.

A concrete example helps. The first three names of the 72-fold name, read from Exodus 14:19, are the letters that form the opening triliteral group. Depending on the edition, that group is spelled slightly differently, and the angel attached to it in one deck may be the second name in another. The reader who wants a specific attribution should check the source line, not the printed card.

What a reader of Thoth actually gets

Crowley's Book of Thoth inherits the Golden Dawn decan structure. The pips of the Thoth minor arcana carry the Shem names in the decan order. That is a real, traceable claim, not a folk tradition. It connects the small cards to the same 72 names that Agrippa and Reuchlin argued over.

The point for an expert reader is the mechanism, not the magic. The 72 names reach the deck through exactly one door: the 36 decans. No decan, no angels. That is why the aces and the courts are clean, and why every card from the 2 to the 10 wears a pair. Once you see the door, you can tell a genuine agrippa 72 names tarot attribution from a list that was simply copied off a list.

A fair test

Take any minor-arcana card a deck claims carries Shem angels. Ask three questions. Is it a pip from 2 to 10, or an ace or a court? Which decan does it sit under? And which edition of the 72 does the source quote? If the deck answers all three, the attribution is traceable back to Reuchlin, Agrippa, and the decans. If it cannot, the angels are decoration, not inheritance.

This test also separates the 72 from the 42. The 42-letter name is a different object entirely. It is the one Rashi called unknown, the one the Ana b'Koach poem uses as its acrostic, the one that has fourteen three-letter words in the Ashkenazi tradition and seven six-letter words in the Spanish one. The 42 do not map onto the 36 decans. They have no home in the minor arcana of a Golden Dawn deck. A deck that mixes the 42 and the 72 is conflating two separate names of God, and the reader should notice.

The 72 names are one of the few parts of a tarot deck that has a real source in the Jewish magical tradition and a real mechanism for getting onto the cards. The mechanism is the decans. Hold onto that, and the rest of the minor arcana falls into place.

How this fits the rest of the deck

The 72 names on the pips sit alongside the 22 letters on the trumps, a subject this series has already covered in Mother, Double, Simple: The 22 Letters Before They Became Cards (Mother, Double, Simple: The 22 Letters Before They Became Cards) and in What a Reader of Thoth Inherits: The Letter on Each Trump (What a Reader of Thoth Inherits: The Letter on Each Trump). The letters come from the Sefer Yetzirah and its competing trees. The 72 come from the Shem ha-Mephorash and its 36 decans. Two different sources, two different mechanisms, two different sets of cards. A reader who sees both layers at once can tell, for any given card, which tradition it belongs to and which source it descends from.

That is the practical payoff. The deck is not one system. It is a composite, and each layer has its own history. The 72 on the pips are the layer with the cleanest provenance and the most specific mechanism. Knowing that lets you read the minor arcana with a source in hand, not just a symbol.