Malachim, the script of angels or of kings

The name Malachim is already a small riddle. In Hebrew malakhim means angels or messengers, while melakhim, written with the same consonants, means kings. Renaissance authors happily played on this ambiguity, and the alphabet bearing this name was presented now as an angelic script, now as a royal one. In both cases it was a mark of distinction: letters reserved for those on high.

An alphabet born on Agrippa's page

Malachim appears in the third book of the De occulta philosophia of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, in the complete Cologne edition of 1533. Agrippa describes it as one of the scripts used by the ancients for divine mysteries, alongside the celestial script and Passing the River. Like the other two, Malachim follows the twenty-two Hebrew letters one by one, keeping their order.

Agrippa gives no precise source for these letters. A rich repertory of exotic alphabets, some of them with a magical flavour, is also found in the Introductio in Chaldaicam linguam of Teseo Ambrogio degli Albonesi, printed in Pavia in 1539, a pioneering text on Oriental languages. This shows that in the first half of the sixteenth century tables of exotic characters circulated among Orientalists and devotees of magic, and were collected, compared and copied.

The form of the letters, however, differs from that of the celestial script. In Malachim the strokes are more angular, with crossed stems, small circles and forked endings, and the whole recalls certain medieval magical signs. Some scholars have noted the resemblance to the characters that appear on the seals of grimoires, and it cannot be ruled out that Agrippa drew on models of this kind.

Letters for divine names

In Agrippa's system the angelic scripts are not meant for correspondence or prose. They serve to write the names of God, of the angels and of the planetary intelligences on talismans, rings and metal plates. The underlying idea is that a sacred name, traced in characters withdrawn from common use, better preserves its own power and secrecy.

Readers of the De occulta philosophia took this indication literally. In the magical manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries one finds seals and pentacles with inscriptions in Malachim, often copied with many variants, because every copyist redrew the letters in his own way. Reconstructing an original form is therefore difficult, not least because the printed editions themselves do not entirely agree.

A long legacy

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Malachim was taken up by various initiatory orders and authors on occultism, who used it for diplomas, headings and ritual objects. In these settings the belief also spread that the alphabet went back to very remote times, perhaps to the angels themselves. The historical sources, by contrast, do not allow us to go beyond the Renaissance.

Malachim remains a telling example of how humanist culture reinvented the ancient. Starting from the Hebrew alphabet, sixteenth-century scholars built new scripts that seemed thousands of years old, and which still keep the charm of the secret today. Reading them with a historian's eye takes nothing away from their beauty: on the contrary, it allows us to appreciate the work of those who designed them and of those who, by copying them, kept them alive.