(letters of the Alphabet of Angels corrected and assigned to the Aiq Beker grid)
The table above was created more or less by chance. While responding to a reader's question about the method by which a particular spirit sigil had been constructed, I spent a few minutes studying the structure of the Alphabet of Angels that was recorded in tabular form by the 17th century English occultist Dr. Thomas Rudd. The table is shown below as redrawn around 1700 by Peter Smart. It is found in the British Library manuscript Harley 6482, and was published on pages 88-89 of A Treatise on Angel Magic, edited by Adam McLean (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1990).
I realized that this alphabet was based on the Aiq Beker, or Kabbalah of Nine Chambers, and saw that it contained numerous confusing errors that would be quite difficult to correct unless the method for deriving the esoteric alphabet was completely understood. Since the material was fresh in my mind, I decided to correct the letters of this alphabet, and to display it upon the Aiq Beker grid so that its derivation would be obvious.
It is not immediately clear in Dr. Rudd's table, but the Alphabet of Angels is based on the letters of the Latin alphabet. These are the same letters used in English, but the I and J are combined as one letter, and so are the U and V, so that there are only twenty-four letters, not twenty-six.
Each letter is indicated by the name of a spirit that begins with that letter. Thus, Agiel signifies A, Belah signifies B, Chemor signifies C, and so on. The letters are entered into the Aiq Beker grid in their natural order from left to right, and from the top row to the bottom row. Since there are only twenty-four letters, the bottom row of the grid has three empty spaces.
When the Aiq Beker is employed with the Hebrew alphabet, the letters are entered from right to left, and sometimes from the bottom row to the top row. Because there are twenty-two Hebrew letters, plus five final or end forms, for a total of twenty-seven letter forms, the grid is perfectly filled up when Hebrew is employed. The use of the Latin or English alphabet on this grid is quite common in Western esotericism but it is never as elegant as the use of Hebrew.
It is not immediately evident from Rudd's table, but obvious when the letters are placed on the grid, that the characters of the Alphabet of Angels are derived from the angles in the grid. The first letter entered in each cell of the grid receives an angelic character distinguished by a single mark; the second letter entered in a cell receives a character distinguished by two marks; the third letter entered in a cell receives a character distinguished either by three marks or by an angled line. Some of the marks used in the second set are compound, composed of two short lines close together.
The stars at the angles of these angelic characters appear to be irrelevant to the construction of the characters. They do not match the stars on the corresponding geomantic figures included in the table by Dr. Rudd.
As you will see by comparing the original characters in Rudd's table with my corrected characters, Rudd or the later copyist Peter Smart committed numerous errors in constructing the angelic letters. Whether this was done by accident or deliberately is difficult to judge. The essential information for the restoration of the characters was retained in Rudd's table, so I am inclined to think that the errors were deliberate, and were intended to prevent accurate use of this magic alphabet by the uninitiated.
The form of the letter Vabam or V shown by Rudd is quite curious. It is the only character that does not completely define the sides of its cell on the grid. It is obvious that it requires a diagonal line, but it may be that the diagonal is intended to be suggested by the lop-sided shape of the character. Therefore, it is quite possible that it is accurately drawn in Rudd's table, but even if this is so, it is not properly drawn. I have restored it to its ideal shape, based on the pattern by which the entire alphabet is constructed.
Close study of the corrected letters on the Aiq Beker grid will reveal that this Alphabet of Angels is not perfectly symmetrical in its formation. However, it appears that this asymmetry was deliberate, so I have allowed it to remain.
A description of this type of magic alphabet, to be used for the construction of spirit sigils, is given in Book 3, Chapter 30 of The Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Cornelius Agrippa. In Agrippa's book, Hebrew letters are employed, and the positions of the three letters in each cell are indicated by one, two, or three dots above the occult characters formed from the angles of the cell. Even so, Rudd's alphabet and Agrippa's alphabet are very similar, and their use is identical - the formation of spirit sigils by converting the letters in the name of a spirit into angles of the Aiq Beker grid, then combining the grid angles to make visually pleasing graphic forms.
(table of the Alphabet of Angels by Dr. Thomas Rudd in Ms. Harley 6482)