Secret Alphabets: Theban, the Celestial Scripts and the Grimoires

Many grimoires contain pages written in characters unknown to the ordinary reader: signs that resemble distorted Hebrew letters, hieroglyphs or mere flourishes. These secret alphabets had several functions. They protected the content from prying eyes, gave the book an aura of antiquity and, according to tradition, made it possible to write names and prayers in a language closer to the celestial world. Their history can be followed with good precision in the printed books of the sixteenth century.

The Theban alphabet and Abbot Trithemius

The best known is the so-called Theban alphabet, or alphabet of Honorius. It first appears in print in the Polygraphia of the Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius, published in 1518, two years after his death. Trithemius presented it as transmitted by Peter of Abano and going back to one Honorius of Thebes, a legendary figure to whom the Sworn Book was also attributed. None of these attributions can be proved, but the alphabet enjoyed enormous success.

Trithemius was a scholar fascinated by cryptography. His Steganographia, composed around 1500 and printed only in 1606, seemed to be a manual for employing angels able to carry messages over distances. Modern studies have shown that at least in part it was a refined cipher system hidden beneath angelic language. The work was nonetheless condemned by the Church and long remained a symbol of forbidden books.

Agrippa's celestial scripts

In the third book of De occulta philosophia, Cornelius Agrippa collected several alphabets of this kind: besides the Theban, the celestial script, the one called Malachim and the one known as Passing of the River. Almost all were derived from the Hebrew alphabet, whose order and number of letters they preserved. Thanks to the wide circulation of Agrippa's book, these tables passed into hundreds of later magical manuscripts, often recopied with variants and misunderstandings.

From the language of angels to the scribes

In the 1580s John Dee and Edward Kelley recorded in their diaries a language they said had been dictated by angels, with its own alphabet of twenty-one letters. Today it is called Enochian. Dee's notebooks, partly kept in the British Library, show how these characters were carefully noted down, together with tables of letters and figures. At the end of the nineteenth century the Enochian alphabet was taken up by the English order of the Golden Dawn.

For scribes, however, secret alphabets were above all a practical problem. Anyone copying a grimoire without knowing the original tended to distort the signs, confuse similar letters or invent new ones. This is why the same tables look so different from one manuscript to another, and why historians are sometimes able to establish which copy derives from which.

Secret alphabets remind us that the magical book was also a graphic object, in which the shape of the letters mattered as much as their meaning. Born of erudition, cryptography and devotion, these characters have survived to our own day, passing from manuscripts to printed editions and then to modern reproductions, without losing their fascination as forbidden writing.