The Writing of the Angels

Malachim takes its name directly from the Hebrew word malakhim, meaning angels or messengers, and Agrippa presents it in the third book of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533, as the second of his three angelic scripts alongside Celestial and Passing the River. Like Celestial, Malachim is a substitution cipher rather than an independent language: its characters stand one for one for the letters of whatever language, most often Latin or a European vernacular, a practitioner chooses to write.

Its letterforms are typically drawn as spare, angular strokes, generally considered visually distinct from both Celestial's rounded, star-like marks and Passing the River's more direct echo of Hebrew letter shapes, giving the three companion scripts a family resemblance in purpose and presentation while remaining individually recognisable, a deliberate variety that let a sixteenth century practitioner choose among several angelic-associated scripts for a given working rather than being limited to one.