Mem M

The Malachim alphabet (from the Hebrew malachim, 'angels' or 'messengers'; also called the 'writing of the kings') is one of three magical alphabets published by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in Book III of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533). Adapted from Hebrew and Greek letterforms, its twenty-two letters correspond one-to-one to the Hebrew alphabet, and it was used in Renaissance angel-magic to write the names of angels and to inscribe talismans. This letter is the Malachim form of the Hebrew letter Mem, whose name means 'water' and whose gematria value is 40. Its meaning and numerical value are inherited from that Hebrew correspondence; the script is a set of glyph-forms for the Hebrew letters, not an independent alphabet with its own separate symbolism. Malachim, Hebrew for angels or messengers, names the script for its claimed users, not its makers.

Agrippa printed Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River together in Book III of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Cologne 1533, without naming a source, and no earlier witness to any of the three survives; historians read them as a Christian kabbalist's own reworking of Hebrew letters, most likely Agrippa's, following Reuchlin's Rhineland work opening Hebrew letter mysticism to Christian scholars a generation before. Occultism today largely sets the three scripts aside as a documented ancient language, treating them as a Renaissance invention. In the Sefer Yetzirah's own threefold division of the alphabet, Mem is one of the three mother letters, assigned to water, its mute sound set against Shin's hiss and Aleph's silence.

Malachim Mem is drawn as a glyph-form for the Hebrew letter Mem in the Malachim, or writing of the angels, one of three magical scripts Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa published in 1533, rather than a script with independent letter meanings of its own; Mem's own sound and classification, discussed elsewhere in this atlas, belong to the underlying Hebrew tradition. As one of the Sefer Yetzirah's three mother letters, Mem is paired with the element water and, in the same classical scheme, with the belly and a cold climate, the belly being read as the seat of silence and stillness, the passive counterpart to Aleph's breath and Shin's speech.

Agrippa printed Malachim alongside Celestial and Passing the River in Book III of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Cologne 1533, without citing a source for any of the three, and no earlier witness to any of them survives; the name Malachim, angels or messengers, and an alternative name recorded for the script, the writing of the kings, both point to the same Renaissance ambition of dressing Hebrew letters in a more overtly angelic or royal guise for use in ceremonial magic. Of the other two mother letters, Aleph is paired with air and Shin with fire, the three together forming the elemental triad the Sefer Yetzirah builds its whole cosmology upon.