Yod Y

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 Yod, whose name means 'hand' and whose gematria value is 10. 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, Yod is one of the twelve simple letters, assigned in the text's scheme to a zodiac sign, a month and a bodily faculty, though which sign fits which letter is not recorded and the order is disputed.

Celestial Yod is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Yod 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; Yod's own sound and classification, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, belong to the underlying Hebrew tradition. As one of the Sefer Yetzirah's twelve simple letters, Yod is assigned to the zodiac sign Virgo and the Hebrew month of Elul, and, in the same classical scheme, to the faculty of the reproductive faculty.

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. That zodiacal and monthly assignment, like Yod's meaning, hand, belongs to the underlying Hebrew letter rather than to this particular Renaissance glyph-set, which simply reproduces it in a different hand.