Passing the River Shin is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Shin in the Transitus Fluvii, or Passing the River, one of three magical scripts Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published in 1533, its name recalling a symbolic crossing of the Euphrates, rather than a script with independent letter meanings of its own; Shin'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, Shin is paired with the element fire and, in the same classical scheme, with the head and a hot climate, the head being read as the seat of speech itself, the active counterpart to Aleph's breath and Mem's silence. Agrippa printed Transitus Fluvii alongside Celestial and Malachim 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, recalling the crossing of the Euphrates, is generally read as a reference to the exodus of Abraham's household out of Mesopotamia, a symbolic passage from an older world into the one Hebrew tradition claims for itself. Of the other two mother letters, Aleph is paired with air and Mem with water, the three together forming the elemental triad the Sefer Yetzirah builds its whole cosmology upon.