kaos

But on the other hand, we cannot ignore the recent deciphering of the third book.
Here are my two cents (an idea which has no real value until I read myself the
Steganographia, but the only transcription I know is on Joseph Peterson’s website, and
medieval Latin is too much for my stomach!): Steganographia is a “pure” manual of
cryptography, but Trithemius saw cryptography as a sacred science, not only a collection
of tricks: encoding a document became in itself a magical operation, which has therefore
to be placed under the invocation of spiritual forces, or “angels”. This seems to me to be
quite in the spirit of Renaissance magic, which did not draw strong borders between
“profane” and “magical” activities. There is, for instance, a magician (I don’t remember
who, perhaps Camillo or Paolini, probably somebody of this circle) who tried to apply
the concepts of alchemy to rhetoric. This would give a new vision of magical activity,
which, not being confined to the limits of the magic circle, would become a way to
work on “profane” things with a “sacred” mindset.
REM
I certainly agree that the distinction between pure science and magic was blurred then,
but if Trithemius was supposed to be strongly opposed to demonic magic why would
he make his work look like a manual of demonic magic? You’d have to be phenomenally
intelligent to think Steganographia wasn’t a demonic book, because that was precisely
what it looked like, so if the book was only a manual of cryptography and had no magical
content why choose such a risky disguise? As you say, it is a strange enigma. There is of
course the concept in cryptography of a false decipherment to throw people off the
trail, where a bogus possible decipherment is deliberately placed, such that when people
find it they give up looking for some other decipherment that is hidden deeper in the
text. Jim Reeds is of course aware of such things.
Trithemius does seem in private correspondence to have written of the work in occult
terms, such as in his 1499 letter to Arnoldus Bostius where he mentions that the
Steganographia contains, besides over a hundred kinds of secret writing, a method for
communicating one’s thoughts by fire over a distance and other forms of telepathy. And
Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486–1535) wrote in De Occulta Philosophia, concerning a
method of conveying one’s thoughts to a person far away within 24 hours: “And I know
how to do this and have often done it. Abbot Trithemius also knew how to do it and
used to do it.” Agrippa stayed with Trithemius at his monastery and learnt from him
firsthand. I need to classify exactly which demons possess the ability to teach how to
read secret writings and discover hidden things, there may be some clue there, but I will
do it in the Lemegeton, for I have a vague suspicion that the example of Trithemius
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