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Celestial Nun's Sefer Yetzirah Classification

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Celestial Nun's Sefer Yetzirah Classification

Celestial Nun is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Nun 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; Nun'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, Nun is assigned to the zodiac sign Scorpio and the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, and, in the same classical scheme, to the faculty of movement.

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 Nun's meaning, fish, belongs to the underlying Hebrew letter rather than to this particular Renaissance glyph-set, which simply reproduces it in a different hand.

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