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Correspondences of Jupiter

the classical correspondences of Jupiter: day, metal, colour, incense, angel and deva

What the tradition reads

The grimoire tradition gives Jupiter Thursday as its day and tin as its metal, correspondences Agrippa's Scale of the Number Seven records, and gives the planet, in a separate chapter on the colours proper to each planet, sapphire and airy colours together with green, clear, purple, dark and golden shot with silver, and, in a further chapter on the fumes proper to each planet, a suffumigation of ash seed, lignum aloes, storax and gum benjamin, with nutmeg and cloves among its wider incense, all read as fitting a planet the tradition holds governs expansion, luck, judgement and the office of the teacher. Agrippa's own Scale of the Number Seven names Zadkiel as Jupiter's angel, an attribution the Heptameron does not repeat, giving Sachiel to Thursday instead, so that Jupiter is one of the planets where the two grimoire traditions name different angels for the same day without either name being a corruption of the other, both Zadkiel and Sachiel appearing independently across later ceremonial sources as Jupiter's intelligence. The Vedic tradition names its own office for the same planet, Brihaspati, whom Wikipedia's account calls the Guru of the Devas, so revered for his knowledge and character that all the gods take him as their teacher, his icon given a golden body and a halo of moon and stars, and Thursday named as his dedicated day exactly as the Western tradition keeps Thursday for Jupiter, the two traditions agreeing on the day even where they differ on every other name attached to it.

The story

Jupiter's correspondences travel the same route as every other planet's, through Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and its Scale of the Number Seven, compiled in the early sixteenth century from a much older stock of astrological, alchemical and Kabbalistic material that Agrippa organised, planet by planet, into a single systematic table others could simply consult rather than reconstruct from scattered older sources. The planet's name itself preserves an older layer of the same tradition: Jupiter is the Roman sky father, inherited from the Greek Zeus, and the astrological planet takes the god's own reputation for rule, expansion and justice directly into its correspondences, tin as a metal prized but softer and less permanent than gold, and, in Agrippa's own later chapter on the colours proper to each planet, sapphire and airy colours for the open sky the god was said to command. The Heptameron of Peter de Abano, working the same planetary material into a day by day system of practical magic rather than Agrippa's more theoretical scale, assigned its own angel to Thursday, and later practitioners, finding two respectable grimoire sources in disagreement, generally recorded both rather than adjudicate between authorities neither of which had any obvious claim to override the other.

Written from

Corpus key correspondence:Jupiter.