Lloyd's Scriptorium: Write in Theban, Enochian and Other Forgotten Alphabets
A writing desk from 1530 in your browser. Type a sentence and a quill writes it out in one of nine historical scripts: the Theban "witches' alphabet", Agrippa's three angelic scripts, the secret letters of Hildegard von Bingen, the Enochian of John Dee, runes, ogham, and a Voynichese that nobody can read. Make a sigil from a wish, trace your name over Agrippa's planetary squares, or seal a message in a Renaissance cipher and send it as a letter. Everything on this page is real history, and none of it does anything. That is the point. Free, no account, nothing stored.
LLOYDOS / SCRIPTORIUM v1.0[1530.01.04_FO12]
S
Alphabetum Thebanum
Theban, 1518
1. The wish
—
2. Reduced
—
vowels and repeated letters struck out
3. Traced on the wheel
letter to letter: an arc along the ring when the next letter stands on the same ring, a straight line when it stands on another. A ring marks the start, a bar the end.
Ex Polygraphia Trithemii, Oppenheim 1518Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich Written in the studio of Lloyd Stellar, Hilversum. Anno Domini 2026.
Break the seal
How the desk works
Everything happens on the sheet. You type at the top; the quill writes below, letter by letter, in iron gall ink that goes on wet and brown and darkens as it dries. The first letter gets a vermilion initial with a vine behind it, the heading is the Latin name of the script, and the provenance stamp at the bottom names the book and the library the alphabet comes from. If you type a sign the script does not have (a digit, a question mark, an @), the quill does what a medieval scribe did: it puts a small tilde over the previous letter and moves on.
Tick Drolleries in the margins and the sheet gets what a psalter of 1320 had in its margins: a rabbit with an axe, a mermaid with her mirror, a man who pulls a face at the reader, a grotesque with a skull for a head, a rabbit beheading a man, and the nymphs of the Voynich manuscript in their green bath. These are not drawings of mine: they are the real figures, cut from public domain scans of the Luttrell, Gorleston and Macclesfield Psalters, the Smithfield Decretals and Beinecke MS 408, with the parchment of the original page lifted away so only the ink and paint remain. The text steps aside where a figure sits, as it did on the page. Pick one, or let the desk choose.
Four tabs, one desk. Transcribe turns your words into one of the nine scripts below. Sigil takes a sentence, strikes out the vowels and the repeated letters, and weaves the rest into one figure, cut as a woodblock. Square turns a name into numbers with Agrippa's Latin table and draws the line those numbers make over one of the seven planetary squares. Cipher enciphers a message on Alberti's disc, the tabula recta of Trithemius or the Vigenère square, and folds it into a sealed letter you can send as a link.
Three ways to take a sheet home: Folio is the full page as a PNG, parchment and all. Spolia is the ink alone as an SVG, nothing behind it, for a record sleeve or a shirt. Diploma is a 1200 by 630 banner for a post. The wax seal, with the LS of Lloyd Stellar pressed into it, is on by default; untick it if you want a clean sheet.
The nine scripts and where they come from
Script
Source and year
Kept where
Theban
Trithemius, Polygraphia (1518); Agrippa (1533)
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich
Celestial
Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia III (1533)
Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln
Malachim
Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia III (1533)
Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln
Passing the River
Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia III (1533)
Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln
Litterae ignotae
Hildegard von Bingen, Riesencodex (c. 1150)
Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain, Wiesbaden
Enochian
John Dee and Edward Kelley, diaries (1583)
British Library, London
Elder Futhark
Runic inscriptions (2nd to 8th century)
Kylver stone, Statens historiska museum, Stockholm
Ogham
Irish ogham stones (4th to 8th century)
National Museum of Ireland, Dublin
Voynichese
Beinecke MS 408 (c. 1404-1438), generated
Beinecke Library, Yale University
The letters on this page are my own redrawings after the printed plates and manuscripts, not scans. The Alphabet of the Magi from Paracelsus is not here yet: I have not found a plate I trust enough to copy.
Theban Trithemius, 1518: the witches' alphabet that predates the witches
Johannes Trithemius was the abbot of Sponheim and the first man to write a printed book on cryptography. His Polygraphia of 1518 contains this alphabet, attributed to a "Honorius of Thebes" who may never have existed. Agrippa copied it into De Occulta Philosophia in 1533, Francis Barrett copied it into The Magus in 1801, and from there it reached Gerald Gardner and modern Wicca, where it became "the witches' alphabet". For four hundred years before that, it was a monk's cipher.
The script has 24 signs: 23 letters (no J, U or W; the plate uses I and V for them) and one sign that closes a sentence, which the Scriptorium writes for every full stop.
Source: Polygraphiae libri sex, Oppenheim 1518, book VI. Also: De Occulta Philosophia III, ch. 29.
Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River Agrippa, 1533: three alphabets drawn from the stars
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim printed all three on facing pages of the third book of De Occulta Philosophia. Each has 22 letters, one for each Hebrew letter, and each is drawn as dots joined by lines, "after the figures of the stars". Scriptura Coelestis is the celestial script; Malachim means "angels" and was later borrowed by Freemasons; Transitus Fluvii, "the passing of the river", is the one Agrippa says the Israelites carried across the Euphrates. Alchemists engraved all three on talismans.
Because they run on Hebrew letters, the Scriptorium first turns your Latin text into its Hebrew equivalents: CH, SH, TH and TZ become one letter, E and O both become Ain, X becomes Caph plus Samech. Malachim has two forms of Samech; the second is used for a double S.
Source: De Occulta Philosophia libri tres, Cologne 1533, book III, ch. 30. Modern edition: V. Perrone Compagni (Brill, 1992).
Litterae ignotae Hildegard von Bingen, c. 1150: 23 letters invented by a nun
The oldest script in the room, and the only one that is truly medieval. Hildegard of Bingen, abbess, composer and visionary, left a list of 23 "unknown letters" in the Riesencodex, the great collection of her works kept in Wiesbaden, next to her Lingua Ignota: a vocabulary of just over a thousand invented words with Latin and German glosses, from Aigonz (God) to the names of plants and tools. What she used either for is not known. A letter to her from the monk Wolmarus suggests they died with her in 1179.
Type a word from her vocabulary (Aigonz, Aieganz, Inimois, Vanix, Peueriz, Maiz) and the quill writes it in vermilion; click it for the gloss from the codex.
Source: Riesencodex, Hs. 2 of the Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain, fol. 464v (letters) and 461v-464v (vocabulary). Edition: S. L. Higley, Hildegard of Bingen's Unknown Language (2007).
Enochian Dee and Kelley, 1583: the alphabet of the angels, dictated backwards
John Dee was Elizabeth I's mathematician and the owner of the largest library in England. From 1582 he held séances with the scryer Edward Kelley, who looked into a crystal and reported what the angels said. On 26 March 1583 Kelley dictated 21 letters; Dee drew them in his diary with their names, Pa, Veh, Ged, Gal, Or, Un, Graph, Tal, Gon, Na, Ur, Mals, Ger, Drux, Pal, Med, Don, Ceph, Van, Fam, Gisg. The angelic tables that followed were dictated right to left, letter by letter, in a language later called Enochian. Dee believed every word of it. Kelley, who later tried to talk him into a wife-swap on angelic orders, is a harder case.
The Scriptorium writes Enochian left to right by default; tick the box to write it the way Dee's tables were taken down.
Source: John Dee, Mysteriorum Libri Quinque, British Library Sloane MS 3188 (1582-1583). Edition: J. Peterson, John Dee's Five Books of Mystery (2003).
Elder Futhark 2nd to 8th century: 24 runes cut against the grain
Nothing occult here, just the oldest alphabet of the Germanic languages. The Kylver stone on Gotland, from about the year 400, carries the whole row of 24 in order, which is how we know the order. Horizontal strokes are rare, because a cut along the grain of wood vanishes; so the runes are all stems and diagonals. Letters are grouped in three families of eight, the ættir.
Source: the Kylver stone (G 88), Statens historiska museum, Stockholm. Reference: R. I. Page, An Introduction to English Runes (1999).
Ogham 4th to 8th century: notches on the edge of a stone
About four hundred ogham stones survive in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, most of them with a name and a father's name cut along the edge: one to five strokes to the left of the edge, to the right, or across it. The medieval Book of Ballymote explains the key and names each letter after a tree (B for beith, birch; L for luis, rowan), which gave the alphabet its reputation as a druid's tree code. It is read from the bottom up.
Source: the ogham stones in the National Museum of Ireland; the Book of Ballymote (RIA MS 23 P 12, c. 1390). Reference: D. McManus, A Guide to Ogam (1991).
Voynichese c. 1420: the script nobody can read, written by a machine that cannot read either
The Voynich manuscript is 240 pages of plants that do not exist, naked women in green baths, and a script no one has deciphered in a hundred years of trying. I spent a summer measuring it, and the result is the article The Book Nobody Can Read on this site, with a generator that writes text with the manuscript's statistical fingerprint. The Scriptorium does not translate into Voynichese, because nothing can. It takes the number of words you typed and writes that many words from the generator, in the letters of the manuscript as transliterated by the EVA system.
Source: Beinecke MS 408, Yale University (parchment radiocarbon-dated 1404-1438). The generator: model B+ from my Voynich investigation, 2026.
Sigils, squares and ciphers what the other three tabs are based on
The sigil. Two ideas from two centuries. Austin Osman Spare, a London artist who had exhibited at the Royal Academy at seventeen, described the reduction in The Book of Pleasure (1913): write your desire as a sentence, cross out every letter that repeats (most later sigil-makers drop the vowels too), and make one figure of what is left. The figure was to be forgotten, so it could work on the unconscious. The drawing method is older: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn traced names on its Rose Cross lamen (1888), a wheel of the 22 Hebrew letters on three rings, with a small circle at the start and a bar at the end. The Scriptorium offers both wheels: the modern witches' wheel with the Latin alphabet on three rings (A to M, N to U, V to Z) and the Rose Cross with the Hebrew letters, the simples outside, the doubles in the middle, the three mothers inside. The line goes from letter to letter, in an arc when both stand on the same ring and straight when they do not, which is what gives these figures their look of a labyrinth. "Turn the wheel" turns the rings by whole letters, so the same wish gives another figure.
The squares. Agrippa printed seven magic squares in De Occulta Philosophia (1533), one for each planet, with their Hebrew and Arabic numerals: Saturn 3 by 3 (every row, column and diagonal adds up to 15), Jupiter 4 by 4 (34), Mars 5 by 5 (65), the Sun 6 by 6 (111), Venus 7 by 7 (175), Mercury 8 by 8 (260), the Moon 9 by 9 (369). To draw a "character" of a name, the grimoires turn its letters into numbers and trace a line through the cells in order, with a ring at the start and a bar at the end. The number table is Agrippa's own Latin one from chapter 20: A is 1, K is 10, T is 100, Z is 500. A number that is not on the square is reduced by adding its digits.
The ciphers. Leon Battista Alberti, the architect, built the first cipher disc in 1467: two rings of letters, the inner one turned every few words so that one letter of the alphabet stood for different letters in turn. Johannes Trithemius printed the tabula recta in 1508, a square of 26 alphabets each shifted one step further, and used a new row for every letter. Blaise de Vigenère, in 1586, let a keyword choose the rows, which is the cipher that carried his name until it was broken in the 19th century. All three are here with the real procedure; the cipher of Trithemius is the one the Voynich manuscript was once accused of being.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Theban alphabet really a witches' alphabet?
It is older than any witch who used it. Johannes Trithemius, abbot of Sponheim, printed it in his Polygraphia in 1518 and attributed it to Honorius of Thebes; Agrippa reprinted it in 1533. It became the alphabet of Wicca only in the 20th century. It has no J, U or W and a sign for the end of a sentence.
Can the Scriptorium translate into Voynichese?
No, and nothing can: the Voynich manuscript has never been read. The Scriptorium writes a passage of the same length with the generator from my Voynich investigation, which reproduces the statistical fingerprint of the manuscript. It looks right and means nothing.
What does a sigil do?
On this page: nothing, except look good. The reduction is Austin Osman Spare's from around 1913: write a sentence, strike out the vowels and the repeated letters. The drawing is the letter wheel of the Golden Dawn's Rose Cross (1888): the remaining letters are traced in one line over three rings of letters, arcs along a ring, straight lines between rings. Spare believed the figure would work on the unconscious. Here it is a map of your sentence.
Where do the magic squares come from?
From book II, chapter 22 of Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia (1533), which gives one square for each of the seven classical planets, from Saturn (3 by 3, every row 15) to the Moon (9 by 9, every row 369). The letter values come from Agrippa's Latin table in chapter 20. The line over the square is drawn the way the grimoires describe it: a ring at the start, a bar at the end.
Is anything I write stored?
No. Everything runs in your browser. A sealed letter puts the enciphered message in the link itself, so there is no database and nothing to delete. The only things that leave your device are the usual page views in Google Analytics, without any text.
Can I use the images on a record sleeve or a shirt?
Yes. The spolia export is a clean vector of the ink alone, without parchment or seal, made for that. The folio and the banner carry the Lloyd Stellar wax seal unless you untick it. The alphabets themselves are centuries out of copyright; the drawings are mine and free to use.
Credits and the rest of the corner
Built by Lloyd Stellar, electro producer and software developer from Hilversum, whose initials are pressed into the wax seal and whose records are about cults, machines and the end of the world. The hand-drawn lines come from rough.js (MIT). Type: IM Fell English (Igino Marini) and EB Garamond, both under the SIL Open Font License; the letters pressed into the seal are outlines from EB Garamond and Great Vibes (TypeSETit), also OFL. The plates I drew from are public domain scans on Wikimedia Commons of the 1518 Polygraphia, the 1533 De Occulta Philosophia, Dee's 1583 table and the Riesencodex. The drolleries are cut from public domain scans of the Luttrell Psalter and the Gorleston Psalter and the Smithfield Decretals (British Library), the Macclesfield Psalter (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and the Voynich manuscript (Beinecke Library, Yale), all via Wikimedia Commons. Nothing on this page is affiliated with any order, lodge, coven or church.
More in Lloyd's Occult Corner: the article The Book Nobody Can Read, a statistical investigation of the Voynich manuscript. For words that need cutting up first, the Bowie Lyrics Cutter can send its result straight to this desk. And for the sound of all this: the music is on Bandcamp, and the rest of the free tools are on Lloyd's Music Tools.