The Studio Esoterico Cornelio and secret letters

Why should a studio devoted to esotericism take an interest in runes, hieroglyphs and ciphers? The answer lies in the very history of the esoteric tradition, which for centuries regarded the letter as something more than a written sound. Occult Alphabets grew out of this observation and is curated by the Studio Esoterico Cornelio, active online since 2014 and committed to popular education through a network of websites on history, symbols and traditions.

Letters that hold meanings

In Kabbalah the twenty-two Hebrew letters are described as the tools with which the world was created; in the Greek tradition letters were also used for counting, and a name could become a number; in the circles of learned magic of the Renaissance, angelic and celestial alphabets were drawn. De occulta philosophia itself, by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), the author whom the Studio's name recalls as a cultural reference, reproduces the Theban alphabet, the celestial script, Malachim and Passing of the River.

Alongside sacred scripts, the site makes room for ciphers. Cryptography and esotericism long shared people and books: Trithemius wrote the Steganographia, a treatise on secret writing disguised as a work on angels, and Della Porta studied the secrets of letters as much as those of nature. Telling these intertwined stories helps us understand what hiding a message meant to a sixteenth-century reader.

Between documented history and legend

Few subjects attract as much unfounded information as secret alphabets. For this reason every article indicates, where possible, the first known source of a script: an inscription, a manuscript, a printed book with its date. If an alphabet is attributed to an ancient figure without evidence, as happens with the alphabet of Honorius, or if a supposed tradition is in fact modern, like the so-called Templar cipher, the text says so openly.

The symbolic meanings attributed to runes or Hebrew letters are presented as part of cultural history, separating what medieval sources such as the rune poems say from the interpretations that arose in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Studio and its network of websites

The name and trademark of the Studio Esoterico Cornelio are registered. To get to know the Studio and discover the other websites it curates, each devoted to a different aspect of the tradition, you can visit the official website studioesotericocornelio.com.