Magical Alphabets

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Magical Alphabets gathers six scripts occultists have used to write hidden or sacred words, and four of the six form one close family while the other two stand apart entirely. Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River are three of the four Hebrew based ciphers Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa set out together in the third book of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy in 1533. None of the three is a language: each maps its own characters one for one onto the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in Hebrew order, so each simply writes Hebrew in a different dress, carrying over that letter's name, meaning, numeric value and position with nothing added but a new shape. Theban belongs to this same publishing moment without belonging to the same underlying system: a straightforward substitution cipher of the Latin alphabet, first printed by Johannes Trithemius in 1518 and carried into Agrippa's book alongside the Hebrew ciphers, with no vocabulary or sounds of its own.

Armanen Runes and Enochian are the group's genuine outliers, unrelated to the Agrippa family and to each other. Armanen Runes is a modern construction, the eighteen character row the Austrian occultist Guido von List published in 1906 and 1908, adding two invented characters to the historical Younger Futhark and reinterpreting the set under a doctrine he said had come to him during a period of blindness. Enochian is different again, the only member presented as an actual language rather than a disguise for one: the twenty one letter script John Dee and Edward Kelley received in their spirit conferences from 1582, with its own vocabulary and sound, running right to left. What the six share is only their use, marking sacred or hidden names, not a common origin or any relationship to a spoken language.