Malachim Mem is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Mem in the Malachim, or writing of the angels, one of three magical scripts Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published in 1533, rather than a script with independent letter meanings of its own; Mem'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, Mem is paired with the element water and, in the same classical scheme, with the belly and a cold climate, the belly being read as the seat of silence and stillness, the passive counterpart to Aleph's breath and Shin's speech.
Agrippa printed Malachim alongside Celestial 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; the name Malachim, angels or messengers, and an alternative name recorded for the script, the writing of the kings, both point to the same Renaissance ambition of dressing Hebrew letters in a more overtly angelic or royal guise for use in ceremonial magic. Of the other two mother letters, Aleph is paired with air and Shin with fire, the three together forming the elemental triad the Sefer Yetzirah builds its whole cosmology upon.