Aleph A

The Celestial alphabet (Alphabetum Coeleste, also called the 'Celestial writing' or angelic script) is one of three magical alphabets published by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Book III of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533). Its letters, drawn as strokes tipped with small circles in imitation of star-charts, correspond one-to-one to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and Renaissance ceremonial magicians used the script to inscribe divine and angelic names on talismans and amulets. This letter is the Celestial form of the Hebrew letter Aleph, whose name means 'ox' and whose gematria value is 1. Its meaning and numerical value are inherited from that Hebrew correspondence; the script is a set of glyph-forms for the Hebrew letters, not an independent alphabet with its own separate symbolism.

Agrippa printed Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River together in Book III of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Cologne 1533, without naming a source, and no earlier witness to any of the three survives; historians read them as a Christian kabbalist's own reworking of Hebrew letters, most likely Agrippa's, following Reuchlin's Rhineland work opening Hebrew letter mysticism to Christian scholars a generation before. Occultism today largely sets the three scripts aside as a documented ancient language, treating them as a Renaissance invention. In the Sefer Yetzirah's own threefold division of the alphabet, Aleph is one of the three mother letters, assigned to air, the breath held in balance between Shin's fire and Mem's water.

Celestial Aleph is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Aleph in the Alphabetum Coeleste, one of three magical scripts Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published in 1533, its strokes tipped with small circles in imitation of star charts, rather than a script with independent letter meanings of its own; Aleph's own sound and classification, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, belong to the underlying Hebrew tradition.

As one of the Sefer Yetzirah's three mother letters, Aleph is paired with the element air and, in the same classical scheme, with the chest and a temperate climate, the chest being read as the seat of breath and voice, the medium every other sound depends on. Agrippa printed Celestial alongside Malachim and Passing the River in Book III of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Cologne 1533, without citing a source for any of the three, and no earlier witness to any of them survives; historians generally read the scripts as a Christian Kabbalist's own reworking of Hebrew letters into star-chart-like glyphs for use on talismans and amulets, most likely Agrippa's own invention following Johannes Reuchlin's earlier Christian engagement with Hebrew letter mysticism a generation before. Of the other two mother letters, Mem is paired with water and Shin with fire, the three together forming the elemental triad the Sefer Yetzirah builds its whole cosmology upon.