page_title: Yahshuah
section_title: Renaissance occultism
hierarchical_section_title: Yahshuah / Renaissance occultism
caption_attribution_description: Symbol of early 17th-century mystic Jakob Böhme, including the names "Christus", "Iesus" (Jesus), and "Immanuel" surrounding an inverted heart containing a Tetractys of the Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton, and at the bottom, the Pentagrammaton.
context_page_description: The pentagrammaton or Yahshuah is a constructed form of the Hebrew name of Jesus originally found in the works of Athanasius Kirchner, Johann Baptist Grossschedel and other late Renaissance esoteric sources. It is to be distinguished from the name Yahshua found in the works of the Sacred Name Movement in the 1960s, though there has been some conflation or confusion between the two. The pentagrammaton Yahshuah has no support in archeological findings, such as the Dead Sea scrolls or inscriptions, nor in rabbinical texts as a form of Joshua. Scholarship generally considers the original form of Jesus to be Yeshua, a Hebrew Bible form of Joshua.
  The essential idea of the pentagrammaton is of an alphabetic consonantal framework Y-H-Sh-W-H, which can be supplied with vowels in various ways.
context_section_description: The first ones to use a name of Jesus something like "Yahshuah" were Renaissance occultists. In the second half of the 16th century, when knowledge of Biblical Hebrew first began to spread among a significant number of Christians, certain esoterically minded or occultistic circles came up with the idea of deriving the Hebrew name of Jesus by adding the Hebrew letter shin ש into the middle of the Tetragrammaton divine name yod-he-waw-he יהוה to produce the form yod-he-shin-waw-he יהשוה.  
  This was given a basic Latin transliteration JHSVH or IHSVH or IHSUH (since there was no letter "W" or sh / [š] sound in Latin, and "I" and "J" were then not yet clearly distinguished as letters of the alphabet, nor were "U" and "V"). This could then be supplied with further vowels for pronounceability. It was a coincidence that the first three letters of this consonantal transcription IHSVH etc. were identical with the old IHS/JHS monogram of the name of Jesus (from Greek iota-eta-sigma).
  In Renaissance occultistic works, this pentagrammaton (or five-letter divine name) was frequently arranged around a mystic pentagram, where each of the five Hebrew letters י ה ש ו ה was placed at one of the points (the letter shin ש was always placed at the upward-pointing vertex of the pentagram).  One of the earliest attested examples of this diagram is in the Calendarium Naturale Magicum Perpetuum or "Magical Calendar" (published 1620 but dated 1582) of either
  Theodor de Bry (Flemish-born German, 1528–1598) or Matthäus Merian the Elder (Swiss, 1593–1650).  This idea of the pentagrammaton was funneled into modern occultism by 19th-century French writer Eliphas Levi and the influential late 19th-century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn favored the consonantal transcription IHShVH or YHShVH, and the pronunciation Yeheshuah.
  However, in all early Hebrew or Aramaic sources, the name "Jesus"/"Jeshua" actually appears as yod-shin-waw-`ayin ישוע Yeshua (or as the related longer form of the same name, yod-he-waw-shin-`ayin יהושע "Joshua"; or as the intentionally altered derogatory Talmudic variant yod-shin-waw ישו Yeshu), so that the Renaissance speculations were incorrect.  Note that the letter `ayin ע was specifically pronounced as a voiced pharyngeal consonant sound in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, and could not be easily confused with either a pronounced [h] sound or a silent Hebrew letter he ה.
caption: Symbol by early 17th-century mystic Jakob Böhme with names of Jesus, and a derivation of the pentagrammaton from the Tetragrammaton.
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