Occult Alphabets
Sacred, secret and ciphered scripts
Runes and Ogham
20 articlesЖEsoteric alphabets
20 articlesאSacred scripts
20 articlesΨCiphers and codes
20 articles∴Numbers and letters
20 articlesAlberti's wheel
Type a sentence and move the key: this is the Caesar cipher, the oldest substitution cipher.
ᚠ-01The origins of the runes: where Germanic writing began
Runes and Ogham
Ж-01The Theban alphabet: the letters attributed to Honorius of Thebes
Esoteric alphabets
א-01Egyptian hieroglyphs: the «words of the god» carved in stone
Sacred scripts
Ψ-01The Spartan scytale: the staff that concealed messages
Ciphers and codes
∴-01Hebrew gematria: when letters become numbers
Numbers and letters
ᚠ-07Thurisaz, the rune of the giant and the thorn
Runes and Ogham
Ж-07The Enochian language and the Angelic Keys of Kraków
Esoteric alphabets
א-07The Phoenician alphabet: twenty-two letters that travelled by sea
Sacred scripts
Ψ-07The Steganographia of Trithemius: angels, spirits and hidden messages
Ciphers and codes
Occult and magical alphabets: runes, sacred scripts, ciphers
Occult Alphabets is devoted to the scripts that, throughout history, have been regarded as sacred, secret or endowed with special power. For many civilisations writing was not a neutral act: hieroglyphs were «words of the god», the twenty-two Hebrew letters were thought of as the building blocks of creation, and runes, according to myth, were born from the sacrifice of Odin. This website tells the history of those signs and the meaning that has been attributed to them.
The section on runes and Ogham covers the Elder and Younger Futhark, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the rune stones of Jelling and Rök, the rune poems and the notched alphabet of early Ireland. Esoteric alphabets presents the scripts invented or handed down in circles of learned magic: the Theban alphabet, Agrippa's celestial script, Malachim, Passing of the River and the Enochian alphabet of John Dee and Edward Kelley.
Sacred scripts lead from Egyptian hieroglyphs and the Rosetta Stone to cuneiform, from the Phoenician alphabet to Hebrew and Greek, from Devanagari to Arabic calligraphy. The section on numbers and letters explains gematria, isopsephy, abjad, the Sator square, acrostics and monograms, while the one on historical ciphers tells of the Spartan scytale, the Caesar cipher, Leon Battista Alberti's cipher disk, Vigenère, Trithemius's Steganographia and the Enigma machine.
Every article, in Italian and English, separates the documented history of scripts from the legends that grew up around them, such as the supposed alphabet of the Templars or the extremely ancient origins attributed to certain signs. The site is curated by the Studio Esoterico Cornelio and is addressed to anyone curious to learn how letters became, time after time, an instrument of prayer, of secrecy and of knowledge.
Frequently asked questions
How many runes are there?
It depends on the series. The Elder Futhark, used roughly from the second to the eighth century, has twenty-four runes divided into three groups of eight. In Scandinavia, during the Viking Age, people moved to the Younger Futhark of sixteen runes. In England and Frisia, by contrast, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc grew to about thirty-three signs. The name Futhark comes from the sounds of the first six runes: f, u, th, a, r, k.
What is the Theban alphabet?
The Theban alphabet is a script whose signs correspond, one by one, to the letters of the Latin alphabet. It first appears in print in Trithemius's Polygraphia of 1518, where it is attributed to Honorius of Thebes by way of Pietro d'Abano, and it was later reproduced by Agrippa in De occulta philosophia. There is no evidence of an older origin: the attribution to Honorius belongs to the legend of the books of magic.
What is the Enochian alphabet?
It is the twenty-one-letter alphabet recorded by John Dee, mathematician and adviser to Elizabeth I, during his sessions with the scryer Edward Kelley in the 1580s. According to Dee's diaries, the letters and the language were communicated by angels; the name recalls the biblical patriarch Enoch. An important part of the material, the so-called Calls or Keys, was received in Kraków in 1584.
What does the Sator square mean?
The Sator square is made of the five words SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS, which read the same in every direction. Two examples inscribed at Pompeii predate the eruption of AD 79. Its meaning is debated: the word AREPO is obscure, and some scholars have noted that the letters can be rearranged into a cross reading PATERNOSTER, plus A and O. No interpretation is accepted by everyone.
What is gematria?
Gematria is an interpretive technique of the Jewish tradition that relies on the fact that each letter of the Hebrew alphabet also has a numerical value, from aleph equal to one up to tav equal to four hundred. Adding up the values of the letters gives the number of a word, and words with the same number are linked to each other. Similar practices exist in Greek, as isopsephy, and in Arabic, as abjad.
How does the Caesar cipher work?
According to the historian Suetonius, Julius Caesar, in his confidential correspondence, replaced each letter with the one three places further along in the alphabet: A became D, B became E, and so on. It is one of the oldest documented examples of a substitution cipher. Today it is very easy to break, because there are only a few possible keys, but it remains a classic of the history of cryptography.