... baboon whom the Egyptians associated with the underworld, the spirits of the dead, and Thoth, the patron god of wisdom, magic, and writing. The common ground on which this unexpected association rests, is—yet again—the number seventy two. Moreover, the analogy does not immediately lend itself to perfect...

...The remarkably successful career of the Slavic amulet of seventy two divine names hinges on one central event in its history: its initial printed publication. The text first appeared in 1520 as part of a pioneering work of Cyrillic typography. The book, known as the Miscellany for Travelers...

...This book began its journey with two texts and two conjectures. The texts were chosen to represent two alternative models for listing the names of God: an open-ended list and a closed series of seventy-two names. Both lists presume to be exhaustive. Their respective understandings of “all,” however...

...The concept of seventy two diseases in man and its correlative notion of a human body made of seventy two parts harboring illness and decay belong to the domain of anthropological imagination. In the local cosmologies, these concepts relate directly to practices of faith healing...

...This chapter begins its exploration of the number seventy two from the Slavonic erotapocritical text “How many are the names of God”? It discusses that the idea that the Lord has seventy two names appears in the Slavic material in two seemingly independent contexts. The first is the erotapocritical...

... of the Name of seventy two, became known to the Christian world no earlier than the end of the fifteenth century. That period coincided with the Kabbalah's internal transformation from an esoteric system into an exoteric teaching, when, in the words of Moshe Idel, it “became more a lore that promoted...