Passing the River

Passing the River is the one script among Agrippa's three angelic alphabets built specifically around Hebrew rather than around whichever language a practitioner happens to be writing: its twenty-two characters answer one for one to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph through Tav, in the traditional Hebrew order, so a text written in Passing the River is Hebrew rendered in an alternative letterform rather than Latin or a vernacular language written in disguise. This distinguishes it structurally from Celestial and Malachim, which both cipher the Latin alphabet and can therefore be used to write any language ordinarily set down in Roman letters.

The Latin name, Transitus Fluvii, crossing of the river, has no settled explanation in the surviving scholarship on the script; it may allude to a specific biblical crossing, most plausibly the Israelites' crossing of the Jordan, though Agrippa's own text does not spell out the connection explicitly enough for the reference to be treated as certain, and the honest position is that the name's precise meaning remains an open question rather than a documented fact.

Because Passing the River ciphers Hebrew rather than Latin, its practical use case differs from Celestial and Malachim's: a sixteenth century Christian occultist working with Hebrew divine names, angel names or scriptural phrases, all common material in Renaissance ritual magic drawing on Christian Kabbalah, could render that Hebrew content in Passing the River's alternative letterforms rather than in the standard Hebrew square script, a substitution that changes the visual presentation without changing the underlying Hebrew text or its gematria values, since the cipher maps directly onto the existing Hebrew letters rather than replacing their linguistic content.

The script's letterforms are generally described as bearing a family resemblance to Hebrew letters themselves, angular strokes echoing rather than wholly departing from the shapes a reader of Hebrew would recognise, in contrast to Celestial's rounded, unrelated forms, which may reflect a deliberate design choice on Agrippa's part, or on the part of whatever earlier source he compiled the script from, to keep the cipher visually anchored to the Hebrew original it exists to represent.