Book of Shadows

Magical Alphabets

        Magical alphabets are cool. Literally, they're just cool. Their intended purpose is to keep occult secrets secret, but there's no real reason to do that, so their real purpose is to write spells and form sigils. Using magical alphabets for your spells can give them more power, just as wearing special robes for rituals can help you get into the right state of mind. Honestly, they're just so much fun to use! They look mystical and mysterious! They're awesome! It's good to know at least one, in case you really do want to keep something secret, so here's a few of the most common magical alphabets.

Runic/Futhark: The Runic Alphabet is the first in the image, arranged left-to-right from A to Z. The letter X is missing.The final two glyphs stand for the combined sounds "TH" and "NG," respectively. Runic alphabets are the ancient Germanic and Anglo-Saxon system of writing. In Norse Mythology, Odin learned it when he hung himself on Yggdrasil, and recorded the glyphs from the falling branches. "Rune" literally means "secret" or "mystery." This one is extremely easy to use and memorize! I've got it down, so I can write in runes almost as smoothly as I can write in the Latin alphabet (though I can't read it as smoothly...). It's useful for writing notes that I didn't want anyone to read and for complaining about classes in my notebook. If you're going to memorize one magical alphabet, I highly recommend this one.

Theban: The Theban Alphabet is the second in the image, arranged from left-to-right from A to Z. The letters J, U, and W are missing. (W can just be the symbol for V repeated twice.) This alphabet surfaced in the sixteenth century in the works of Cornelius Agrippa, and was attributed to one "Honorius of Thebes" who may or may not have actually existed (and probably didn't invent this alphabet either way). It corresponds almost directly to the Latin alphabet. The Golden Dawn eventually adapted it, and it went from there. It's sometimes called the "Witch's Alphabet," since Wiccans often use it. This one's a lot harder, in my opinion, because many of its glyphs look so similar and they're a bit of a pain to write.

Enochian: The Enochian Alphabet is the third in the image, arranged from left-to-right from A to Z. (No letters are missing, but several repeat, and "W" is just the glyph for U and V repeated twice.) The Enochian Alphabet is one of many that claim to be the Angelic alphabet, the one true writing system of Heaven. Yeah, okay. This particular one comes from John Dee (and Edward Kelley) and his system of Enochian magic, hence the name. It corresponds to the Latin alphabet, but Dee wrote it right-to-left, which is too much of a pain in the ass for a left-to-right writer like me to deal with. I first ran across it in the supplemental material from Nox Arcana's album The Dark Tower, and I think it's one of the coolest-looking magical alphabets.

Of course, you don't have to use any of these alphabets. Nox Arcana has a bunch of super cool magical alphabets in their albums that seem to be made up. You can easily create a magical alphabet of your own, and base it off of any existing writing system.