“Blood alphabet,” “bird alphabet,” “angel alphabet,” and the embroidered ABC: this paper highlights an essential element of rites of passage, which had remained unexplored prior to the works of Yvonne Verdier and Daniel Fabre. In European fairy tales, puberty happens in the forest, with girls’ way being likened to names of flowers and boys’ way to the name of birds. Each sex is as such redefined from “A” to “Z” during the second birth. Drawing from the body tattoos of societies without forms of writing, the author shows that the alphabet takes on a function of initiation in societies that write and in scriptural religions, notably in the Judeo-Christian context where the embryo is viewed as a writing tablet in the mother's womb, and the child as a Word to become flesh.