The Theban alphabet: the witch's alphabet, where it comes from, and how to write it
The Theban alphabet is a cipher: one sign for each letter of the Latin alphabet, written left to right, the same way you write English. It appears in print for the first time in Johannes Trithemius, Polygraphia (1518), and again in the third book of Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533, in English in 1651). It is not a language, and it has nothing to do with Thebes in Egypt or Greece.
That is the whole of it, and it is why it works so well in your own pages. Your spelling, your spaces and your word order stay exactly as they are. Decide two small things, what you do with J and what you do with W, and you can write any English word in it tonight.
This page is the reference. The printed trail with its dates, how the signs map to your letters, how to copy the shapes so they are right, a line worked letter by letter, where to use it in your book, and the check to run before you put it on anything you cannot change later.
What the Theban alphabet is, in four lines
- First printed in 1518 The earliest appearance anyone has shown is Trithemius, Polygraphia, printed in 1518, two years after his death.
- One sign per letter It is a substitution cipher, so a word in Theban is the same word, spelled the same way, in different shapes.
- I and J, U and V share The chart comes from a 23-letter Latin alphabet, so J, U, V and W need one decision that you write down once and keep.
- Nothing to buy A pen, a page and a clean scan of the printed chart are the whole kit.
Printed in 1518, copied ever since
Johannes Trithemius (1462 to 1516) was a Benedictine abbot who wrote about ciphers and hidden writing. Polygraphia is a book about putting words on a page so that a reader without the key sees only shapes. The Theban chart sits in that company, among other scripts and codes, and that is the plainest thing we can say about what it was printed for.
The chart arrives with a name attached, and the names disagree. Trithemius credits Honorius of Thebes, a name tied to a medieval book of magic. Agrippa, printing the same signs in 1533, credits Peter de Abano, a physician and writer who died in the early fourteenth century. Neither attribution can be checked against anything older, and nobody has produced a source for the chart earlier than these printings. The printing is the part with a date on it. Say that plainly when someone tells you the alphabet is ancient.
English readers met it in the 1651 translation of Agrippa, signed J.F. on the title page and usually read as John French. Francis Barrett reprinted much of the same material in The Magus (1801). From there it went into popular witchcraft books and hand-copied Books of Shadows in the twentieth century, which is where the nickname "the witches' alphabet" comes from. The nickname is modern. The chart is five hundred years old in print.
Five dates you can check
Trithemius, Polygraphia
The earliest appearance anyone has shown. Trithemius credits the alphabet to Honorius of Thebes. The book itself is about ciphers and ways of writing.
Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy
The three books appear complete. The Theban chart is in the third book, printed alongside other scripts. Agrippa credits Peter de Abano instead, so the two attributions already differ fifteen years in.
The English Agrippa
The translation signed J.F. puts the chart in front of English readers. This is the printing most modern charts are ultimately copied from, and it is long out of copyright, so you can look at it yourself.
Barrett, The Magus
Francis Barrett reprints much of Agrippa, scripts included, for a new English readership. Another link in the chain, not an older source.
The witches' alphabet
The chart is copied into modern Books of Shadows and printed in popular witchcraft books. The name "witches' alphabet" belongs to this period, not to the old charts.
The 24 signs of the Theban alphabet and how they map to your letters
The chart is a straight swap. One Latin letter in, one sign out. Nothing is reordered, nothing is left out, nothing is added.
- A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H: one sign each.
- I: one sign, used for both I and J. The alphabet the chart was built on had no separate J.
- K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T: one sign each.
- U: one sign, used for both U and V.
- W: not in the old charts at all. Write the U and V sign twice, or use the W that some modern charts add. Either works, as long as you pick one and note it.
- X, Y, Z: one sign each.
- The end mark: most charts carry one more sign after Z, used to close a sentence or a passage rather than to stand for a letter.
That is 23 letter signs plus the end mark, which is why the alphabet is usually counted as 24. Charts that add a W for English come to 25. The counts differ because the charts differ, and it is worth knowing which one you are holding.
Three more rules follow from the same thing. There are no capitals, so a name looks like any other word. There are no numerals, so write figures as digits or spell the number out in letters. There is no punctuation beyond the end mark, so your spacing and your line breaks are yours to choose.
The signs themselves are small and rounded, built from loops, hooks and short tails. Several of them differ only in which way a tail turns or where a loop closes. That is the single practical fact about their shapes: they are close cousins, and a blurry copy turns one into another. Copy them from a clean printing, not from a picture of a picture.
Copy from a printed chart, not from memory
Image models and quick blog graphics get these letters wrong constantly, which is how variants spread. Work from the printings instead.
- Find a scan of the 1651 English Agrippa or of Trithemius, Polygraphia, 1518. Both are out of copyright and sit in the large library scans online, free to read.
- Put a modern chart next to it. Where the two differ, follow the printed one, and write the difference in your notes so you know which chart your pages are using.
- Trace each sign at the size you actually write, roughly the height of your normal letters. Big practice shapes do not transfer to a notebook line.
- Write the alphabet through three times with the chart covered. The letters you keep peeking at are the ones to practice.
- Make a key page at the back of your book: Latin letter, sign, then your decisions for J and W, with the date you made them.
That key page is the part people skip, and it is the part that saves you in a year when you come back to an old entry and cannot read your own line. If you would rather have the chart to hand with the other scripts and the rune rows beside it, that is what Runes, Sigils & Magical Alphabets is for: five alphabets, every rune labeled From the sources and In practice, and the methods worked step by step so nothing is glossed over.
Write a line, letter by letter
Start with a line that has nothing awkward in it. THIS BOOK IS MINE. Break it into letters before you write a single sign: T, H, I, S, then B, O, O, K, then I, S, then M, I, N, E. No J, no U, no V, no W, so there is nothing to decide. The double O in BOOK is two signs, written twice. Theban has no doubling mark.
Now the awkward ones. JUNE WILLOW. The J takes the I and J sign. The U takes the U and V sign. The double L is two L signs. The two W letters are your decision, made once and kept: either the U and V sign written twice, or the W your chart adds. Write it the same way every time and your old pages stay readable.
The method that keeps you honest is simple. Write the English line in pencil. Write the Theban underneath it, sign by sign, left to right. Cover the English and read your Theban back out loud from the chart. If a word comes back wrong, a sign is wrong, and you can see exactly which one before ink touches anything.
Where to use it in your own book
The alphabet earns its place where you want a line to be yours and not the room's. A few that work:
- Page headings. The heading in Theban, the content in plain writing, so the book is still usable at speed.
- One private line on a page that is otherwise ordinary, with the key page at the back of the book.
- The first page of a new book: your name and the date, written slowly, the way you would want the book to start.
- Labels on jars and bundles in the cupboard. Keep a plain English label on anything that goes near food, the stove or an animal. A private script is not worth a mix-up.
- The sentence before a sigil. If you reduce a statement to letters, writing it out in Theban first slows the hand and keeps the paper quiet. See how to make a protection sigil step by step for the rest of that method, which is modern, not old.
- A word in pencil inside a door frame or on the back of a picture, alongside the older door customs in what people really set at their doors.
- Your working log: the date, what you did, what you changed, what you noticed. That is the page worth having in a year.
Be clear with yourself about what the privacy is. A Theban line reads as a pattern to anyone who is not looking for one, and that is a real pleasure. It is not a lock. The chart is on the first page of any search, so anyone who wants to read it can. Write what you would mind a passing glance catching, not what you would mind a determined reader finding.
If you are still building the pages themselves rather than the script, the Complete Book of Shadows is the all-in-one grimoire, with the basics, the moon, the sabbats, the herbs and the runes gathered in one book to keep open beside your own.
Theban, runes and the other scripts in the same books
Theban writes letters. English spelling carries straight across, silent letters and all, one sign at a time. That makes it easy and it makes it forgiving.
Runes write sounds. A name in runes is spelled by ear, in a row that belongs to a particular time and place, which is why the two are never interchangeable. If that is where you are headed, start with the 24 Elder Futhark runes, from the sources and in practice, and with the oldest futhark we have, a stone slab with the whole row cut in order.
Agrippa's third book prints other scripts next to the Theban one, including the ones called Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River. Those were set out with a sign for each Hebrew letter rather than each Latin one, so they are not a substitute chart for English and cannot be mixed into a Theban line. Each script is its own chart, with its own rules, and swapping between them mid-word is how unreadable pages happen.
Mistakes, and the check before anything permanent
Most Theban errors come from four places: a blurry image copied from another image, two different charts mixed inside one line, the end mark written as if it were a letter, and the idea that the script changes a word's meaning. It does not. A word in Theban is the same word.
Before a tattoo, a carved piece, a painted wall or anything else you cannot redo, run this:
- Write the line in English and keep that line with your notes.
- Decide J and W before you start, and write the decision down with the date.
- Transcribe sign by sign, left to right, not word by word from memory.
- Check your line against two charts, one of them a scan of the 1651 or 1518 printing.
- Check that no end mark has slipped in where a letter should be.
- Check your doubles. OO, LL and SS are two signs each.
- Hand the chart and the finished line to someone else and ask them to read it back to you cold.
- Remember it is readable. Anyone with the chart can read it, so it needs to be right by the chart, not just right to you.
And one quiet note on claims. Nothing in Trithemius or Agrippa says these letters do anything on their own. What we can say honestly is what the hand knows: writing a line slowly, in shapes you had to learn, makes the page deliberate and keeps it to yourself. That is the whole of what we will promise.
Next in your own pages
Protection sigils: how to make one step by step, and keep it where no one will look
A protection sigil is a sentence turned into one mark. Word it, build it with the letter method, and five quiet places to keep it at home.
Rune meanings: the 24 Elder Futhark runes, from the sources and in practice
What each of the 24 Elder Futhark runes means: what the Old English, Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems say, and what is modern practice.
The oldest futhark we have: a stone slab in a Gotland grave with the whole row cut in order
The Elder Futhark cut in order on a slab laid face down in a grave at Kylver, Gotland, about 400 AD: what the find shows and what it does not.
Home protection spells from the old books: what people really set at their doors
Five home protection spells from named books, 1525 to 1696: rosemary, rowan and red thread, iron, vervain and dill, a sealed jar. One takes ten minutes.
