Passing the River: the story of an alphabet with a biblical name

Of the scripts Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa regarded as sacred, one bears a name that seems to come out of a travel story: Passing the River, in Latin Transitus fluvii. Its letters, angular and adorned with small circles, appear in the third book of the De occulta philosophia, printed in Cologne in 1533, alongside the celestial script and Malachim. Like these, Passing the River also follows the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

Which river?

Agrippa does not explain the name at length, and interpreters have proposed several readings. The most widespread links it to the Euphrates and to the figure of Abraham, who according to the biblical account left Ur of the Chaldees to go towards the land of Canaan. An ancient tradition derived the word Hebrew, in Hebrew ivri, from a root meaning to pass or to cross: the Hebrews would thus be those who come from the other side of the river.

Another interpretation thinks instead of the return from the Babylonian exile, when the Jews crossed the Euphrates again to go back to Jerusalem at the end of the sixth century BC. According to this reading, the alphabet would be the script used by the sages at the moment of passage between captivity and the rebuilding of the Temple. Neither hypothesis is documented in the ancient sources: these are symbolic explanations, consistent with the Renaissance taste for sacred etymologies.

The shape of the letters

Compared with the celestial script, which arranges the letters like constellations, Passing the River looks more compact. The letters are built with straight and broken strokes, often closed by small rounds at their ends. Some recall the structure of Hebrew characters, others depart from it considerably. A comparison of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century editions shows numerous differences, a sign that printers and engravers interpreted the models with a certain freedom.

Like Agrippa's other angelic alphabets, this one is generally written from right to left, following the order of Hebrew. It contains no true vowels, because it reproduces a consonantal alphabet. Those who used it in the Renaissance were therefore not writing in Latin or in the vernacular, but transcribing Hebrew words and names: the names of God, of the angels, of the celestial spheres.

From talismans to modern rituals

In the magical manuscripts of later centuries Passing the River appears on seals, rings and pentacles, often mixed with other characters. In the nineteenth century it was taken up by authors of French and English occultism, and some initiatory orders included it in their ritual materials. In these settings the alphabet acquired a patina of antiquity that the historical sources do not support, because no evidence earlier than the Renaissance exists.

Today the letters of Passing the River often appear in repertories of symbols, beside runes and fantasy alphabets, with no indication of their origin. Recalling their birth among Agrippa's pages makes it possible to give them back a precise context. Whoever comes across them on a piece of jewellery or in a film rarely knows that they come from a sixteenth-century Latin treatise, written by a German physician and philosopher who travelled between Italy, France and the Low Countries.

Passing the River is, after all, an alphabet that tells of a crossing. Whether the river is Abraham's Euphrates or that of the exile, the name suggests the idea of a border between two worlds, between common writing and the writing reserved for mysteries. It is an image sixteenth-century scholars found fitting for a script meant for those who wished to cross to the other side of knowledge.