kaos

hath long sought and dayly yet doth seeke.” Since we don’t know how long the five
parts of the Lemegeton circulated in manuscript it seems reasonable to assume that
Trithemius based Steganographia on occult manuscripts already in circulation that later
became the Lemegeton in the 17 th century. Trithemius (1462–1516) was a Benedictine
abbot who visited many monasteries collecting manuscripts, so he was certainly in a
position to know about such works. His famous collection consisted of 2000 books, 800
of them manuscript, in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and other languages.
My suspicion is that Trithemius used manuscripts that already existed. The spirits in
Part 1 of the Ars Paulina (third part of the Lemegeton) coincide exactly with those found
in Trithemius’s Steganographia, Book II, but I don’t think this necessarily implies the
Ars Paulina was based on Steganographia, because why would Reginald Scot in 1584
refer to the Ars Paulina rather than a manuscript of Trithemius? It would mean that the
Ars Paulina had sprung into existence as a plagiarism of Steganographia in a matter of
decades without anyone realising. It seems to me more reasonable to assume Ars Paulina
already circulated in manuscript pre-1500 and Trithemius came across it and decided it
suited his purposes to illustrate his theory of cryptography.
The real question then becomes: why use occult manuscripts to illustrate methods
of cryptography if the manuscript did not also have an occult purpose? The mystery
remains. Jim Reeds wonders whether Trithemius regarded cryptography as inherently
magical, but overall suggests that he could have embraced the rhetoric of magic to
illustrate his cryptographic techniques as a strategy to engage the reader’s interest through
example after example of tedious explanations. But the point is, if the reader is reading
the text as a cryptography handbook, and not as occult text, and is aware that it is in
code and is not really an occult text, then I cannot see that the book would appear any
more interesting than it would if disguised as, say, a treatise on botany or geography.
In Steganographia Book III Reeds found what he regarded as a figurative clue to the
possibility of a reversed alphabet in a simple reference to the “retrograde” motion of
Saturn. But I reckon that was not necessarily a deliberately placed clue but a lucky
guess on his part inspired by the word. If it was a deliberate hint, then what are we to
make of the fact that of the 72 demons listed in the Goetia the powers of 12 of them
include the ability to discover secret or hidden things: Vassago (3), Marbas (5), Barbatos
(8), Paimon (9), Eligor (15), Purson (20), Shax (44), Vine (45), Procel (49), Gemory
(56), Valac (62), Cimeries (66). From this one might suppose that cryptography is indeed
a demonic art. This has made me wonder whether Trithemius was so interested in
occult manuscripts because, as a cryptographer, he had suspected or discovered they
were written in code. It’s only a speculation, but if this is so it is something that presently
goes unrecognised by cryptologists.
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