With interest increasing in the ancient religions that center around witchcraft, a look at the rebirth of the Theban alphabet will help to understand some of the cryptic writings that cloak Wiccan secrets. This alphabet is derived from the runes of the empire of Thebes. Many of the letters relate somewhat in their shape to the twenty-six letter alphabet that many of us are use to seeing.
The first major difference that is observable is that the letters I and J are combined into one symbol. The U and V are also combined. This leaves an alphabet of twenty-four letters. While combining these letters may create minor problems, with a little care in decyphering the writings, any conflict should be able to be resolved by examining the position of the letter. For example, not many people would have problems figuring out that it is “Jello” and not “iello.” By simply writing out the complete word and then considering its context in the text, these combined letters will be easy to decode.
It is interesting that if a reader looks closely at many of the letters they can be seen to resemble the English alphabet. Some of the more obvious ones to me were the A, E, F, H, L, N, Q, S, W, and Z. For people who choose to learn and use this alphabet, the transition should be relatively quick and easy with a modest level of determination.
Sentences are ended with a special symbol that looks like another letter instead of a period. In addition to this, the Wiccan alphabet uses other symbols to replace numbers. All combined to get a reasonable knowledge of this system, less than forty symbols need to be learned. However, if you do not plan to read and write regularly in this style, just keep a chart of the symbols handy and do a quick letter for letter translation before trying to read the document. This will be a little laborious, but if memorization is not your strong point, it will serve you well.
This alphabet can be obtain readily online. Any simple search will give you a great number of sites that will furnish the code for you. It is just a simple matter to download or print the Wiccan letters, numbers, and symbols. At first, they will seem very foreign. With use, you will begin to easily pick up the subtle differences between some of the letters. The similarities are no more difficult to master than the differences between an E and an F or an M and an N. Just watch closely when doing translations so that accuracy can be maintained.
If you are a puzzle worker, this will be a fun adventure if you do not have too many sentences of work to decode. Some web sites will furnish you with fonts for the new system if you want to be able to use your word processor to write your own Wiccan materials in the special alphabet.
