Malachim was an
alphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a s ...
published by
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (; ; 14 September 1486 – 18 February 1535) was a German polymath, physician, legal scholar, soldier, theologian, and occult writer. Agrippa's ''Three Books of Occult Philosophy'' published in 1533 drew ...
in the 16th century. Other alphabets with a similar origin are the
Celestial Alphabet and
Transitus Fluvii
Transitus Fluvii ("passing through the river" in Latin) or ''Passage Du Fleuve'' (in French) is an occult alphabet consisting of 22 characters described by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in his '' Third Book of Occult Philosophy'' (Cologne, 1533, bu ...
.
"Malachim" is a plural form from Hebrew (מלאך, mal'ach) and means "angels" or "messengers", see
Angels in Judaism
In Judaism, angels ( he, ''mal’āḵ'', plural: ''mal’āḵīm'', literally "messenger") are supernatural beings that appear throughout the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), rabbinic literature, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and traditional Jewish ...
.
History
The Malachim alphabet is derived from the
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
and
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
alphabets. It was created by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in the 16th century.
[De occulta philosophia (version première en 1510, 1re éd. 1531 en 2 livres, 2e éd. 1533 en 3 livres). Trad. fr. A. Levasseur 1727, revue par F. Gaboriau 1910. Trad. fr. Jean Servier : Les trois livres de la philosophie occulte ou magie, Paris, Berg International, 1981–1982.] It is still used by high degree
Freemasons
Freemasonry or Masonry refers to fraternal organisations that trace their origins to the local guilds of stonemasons that, from the end of the 13th century, regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their interaction with authorities ...
to a limited extent.
Alphabet
This version of the alphabet is from Agrippa's ''Of Occult Philosophy'', 1651 edition.
References
Artificial scripts used in mysticism
Language and mysticism
Writing systems introduced in the 16th century
1510 in Europe
1510 beginnings
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