Esoterica & Renaissance occult

The Theban cipher is first attested in 1518 in Trithemius’s Polygraphia, which credits it to Honorius of Thebes — a legendary 12th-century figure. Adopted by modern Wiccans, it is one of the standard ritual scripts of the Book of Shadows.

The Malachim ("writing of the angels") and the celestial alphabet also appear in Trithemius and again in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1531). All three are said by tradition to have been transmitted by the angels to the Hebrew patriarchs.

Enochian is the most peculiar. Invented in 1582 by the English magus John Dee and his medium Edward Kelley, it claims to be the language spoken by the angels — and before them by Adam in Paradise.

Dee recorded scrying sessions where Kelley dictated entire Enochian sequences which had to be transcribed backwards (letter by letter, starting from the end) to neutralise their danger. Five centuries later, Enochian remains one of the most studied constructed languages of Western ceremonial magic.

The Pigpen (also called the Rosicrucian, Freemason or windmill cipher) is the most popular. Its visual structure is simple — each letter is a sketch of the cell it occupies in a nine-cell grid, with a dot for the alphabet’s second half — making it memorisable in five minutes.

The Knights Templar used a variant before their dissolution in 1312. Mary Queen of Scots was corresponding via a homophonic substitution cipher when the Babington Plot was uncovered by Walsingham in 1586 — his reading of intercepted mail led to the queen’s execution.

The Copiale (a Berlin manuscript dated around 1730) resisted until 2011, when Kevin Knight, Christiane Schaefer and Beáta Megyesi cracked it: it is the ritual of a German oculist society.

All these alphabets have long been treated as folklore. Their mechanics, however, remain cryptography in the strict sense: a monoalphabetic substitution over an alphabet of unusual symbols. Trivial to crack mathematically (frequency analysis), psychologically formidable (the uninitiated reader gives up at first glance).