If there's one thing I regret about Hand of Mercy, it's that all the research I did can't appear on the page. There'd simply be no room for plot or character, and the whole novel would morph into a rather dry occult treatise.

Still, like an Easter egg on a DVD, I'm going to show you a fun little extra: How to calculate Clem's angelic sigil.

The trick is using a Kamea, or Magic Square. For this sigil, we're going to use Jupiter's square. Why Jupiter's square? Firstly, because he's got all the numbers we need, and secondly because in the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah, Jupiter is the planet/god associated with Chesed, the sephiroth or sphere of universal Mercy.

Now, we run into a bit of a problem here. Making sigils out of the squares involves using the numerical values of the Hebrew alphabet. However, because Clem's name is a Latin-Hebrew linguistic sandwich written by an English speaker, we're going to make it easier. We'll use a simple substitution- A=1, B=2, that sort of thing.

C=3
L=12
E=5
M=13
A=5
E=1
L=12

So plotted on a Jupiter square, we end up with this...



Well, that's the icon for this blog sorted out then!