Malachim Zayin is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Zayin 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; Zayin'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, Zayin is assigned to the zodiac sign Gemini and the Hebrew month of Sivan, and, in the same classical scheme, to the faculty of smell.
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. That zodiacal and monthly assignment, like Zayin's meaning, sword or weapon, belongs to the underlying Hebrew letter rather than to this particular Renaissance glyph-set, which simply reproduces it in a different hand.