kaos

imply that other ostensibly occult texts are similarly enciphered? Many demonic
incantations involve long strings of barbarous words I have often wondered about the
origin of—could they contain cipher messages, just as Trithemius placed numerical
ciphers, as Jim Reeds has shown, in what have the appearance of tables of astronomical
data in Book III. It was thinking about this that gave me the idea of a Goetic evocation
to gain the ability to read secret writings and discover all manner of hidden things, and
it is telling that this is precisely a typical power that can be bestowed by certain Goetic
demons. And of course cryptography is a classic demonic art anyway. Much of John
Dee’s angelic invocations and endless repetitive details of occult workings are believed
by some cryptologists not to be angelic invocations and magical writings at all, but the
use of occult as a convenient cover for Elizabethan espionage, with Dee as a spy reporting
back on the affairs of the Bohemian court and suchlike. The discovery of ciphers in the
Steganographia Book III seems to imply that occultists were wrong to regard Trithemius
as a magician. But is it as simple as that?
JB
[Ed’s note—See: Reeds, Jim. “Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s
Steganographia.” Cryptologia 22 (1998), pp 291–318. Shortly after Reeds announced his
discovery he found out that Thomas Ernst had already solved the cipher and published
it as “Schwarzweiße Magie. Der Schlüssel zum dritten Buch der Steganographia des
Trithemius’’ in Daphnis 25:1 (1996), also published as a book, which Reeds reviewed in
Cryptologia 23 (1999). The New York Times of April 14, 1998, covered the story of the
two men breaking the code independently of one another. Books I and III are translated
in: Tait F, Upton C. The Steganographia of Johannes Trithemius. Edinburgh: Magnum
Opus Hermetic Sourceworks, 1982. As an aside, the cipher used in the Golden Dawn
cipher manuscript is one originated by Trithemius in Polygraphiæ et Universelle Escriture
Cabalistique, Paris, 1561. Jim Reeds also figured out a complex hidden pattern in the
magic tables of the Book of Soyga, a copy of which was owned by John Dee.]
Joel—Trithemius is a fascinating enigma. The fact is that Steganographia almost destroyed
his reputation as a theologian and as a witch hunter (Trithemius was strongly opposed
to any kind of “demonic magic”), so to disguise a treatise of cryptography as a manual
of magic would make no sense in the context of the times. More importantly, Trithemius
seemed to think that Steganographia would give the reader “instantaneous universal
knowledge”, à la ars notaria; at least he says so in a letter to his friend Arnold Bostius.
And if Steganographia was a kind of “hoax”, wouldn’t he have told Cornelius Agrippa?
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