Theban alphabet

[1][2] It was first published in Johannes Trithemius's Polygraphia (1518) in which it was attributed to Honorius of Thebes "as Pietro d'Abano testifies in his greater fourth book".

Trithemius' student Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535) included it in his De Occulta Philosophia (Book III, chap.

In the original chart by Trithemius, the letter W comes after Z, as it was a recent addition to the Latin alphabet, and did not yet have a standard position.

Some users of those later charts transliterate W using the Theban characters for VV, parallel to how the English letter developed.

Eric S. Raymond, an American software developer and author, has created a draft proposal for adding the Theban alphabet to the Universal Coded Character Set/Unicode.

From Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533). Note character changes, including "w" becoming incorporated into the last sign itself, denoted by capital-Omega (Ω) — a symbol for "End" — rather than "W".
From the 1613 reprint of Polygraphia . Note changes to some characters, e.g. closed loops, and a left hook omitted from the symbol for W.
From Polygraphie (1561) by Gabriel de Collange (in French). W being a new letter and not used in France, that sign here represents the ampersand.
From The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett . Follows Agrippa's chart above.
A 19th-century gravestone in Llanfyllin , Wales , inscribed in the Theban alphabet (Agrippa/Barrett version) and Cistercian numerals .