A Cipher Among Ceremonial Magic's Working Tools

Along with Celestial and Theban, Malachim continued to circulate through the grimoire tradition for centuries after Agrippa's original publication, appearing in later magical manuals and, from the nineteenth century onward, in the working documents of ceremonial magic orders that drew heavily on Renaissance occult sources for their own ritual apparatus. Its use in these later contexts generally followed the same logic as the other cipher alphabets: writing a name, a word of power, or an instruction in Malachim rather than in plain Latin letters, on the reasoning that the encoded form carried a more fitting solemnity or a measure of privacy for material considered sensitive.

Because Malachim, Celestial and Theban all perform the identical structural function, ciphering an existing language letter for letter rather than constituting a separate language, choosing among them in practice has generally come down to aesthetic preference, the specific tradition a practitioner works within, or simple familiarity, rather than to any claimed difference in magical potency between the three; Agrippa himself presents all three as roughly equivalent forms of angelic writing rather than ranking them.