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.