Passing the River Zayin is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Zayin 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; 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 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. 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.