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 {{Writingsystem-stub