Celestial Alphabet

The Celestial Alphabet is an esoteric alphabet described by Henri-Corneille Agrippa of Nettesheim in his work De occulta philosophia (On Occult Philosophy), published in the 16th century.

In Book III, page 439, Agrippa presents this alphabet as a so-called angelic script, composed of symbols believed to possess mystical value. Here is an excerpt from the original manuscript:

Writing text with the Celestial script involves replacing each Hebrew letter with its corresponding Celestial glyph.

A transliteration is therefore necessary to encrypt a word or a sentence from the Latin alphabet (our usual alphabet).

Decoding a text written in Celestial involves replacing each Celestial glyph with the corresponding Hebrew letter, then transliterating the Hebrew into the Latin/English alphabet.

This process is not always straightforward: certain Hebrew characters do not have an equivalent in our Latin alphabet (such as ט or צ), and there are even letters Hebrew with several possible transliterations (like ג for C or G, י for I or J or even ו for F, V or U).

The characters of the Celestial alphabet are distinguished by geometric shapes composed of straight (sometimes curved) lines/sticks ending in solid circles reminiscent of stellar points/stars.

This graphic appearance evokes a constellation map, hence the name Celestial.

References to magic, angels, Kabbalah, or Renaissance esotericism are often clues to its presence.

Note: the Malachim and Passage du Fleuve (or Passing the River) alphabets are visually very similar and come from the same Kabbalistic tradition.

The publication of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's book dates from the 16th century.

The exact author of this alphabet is not known. It could be a creation of Agrippa himself or an adaptation of an older source.