kaos

Although it has been thought that the decipherment by Jim Reeds of Steganographia
Book III—thus showing it is a book of cryptography and not the occult treatise it
purports to be—must necessarily downgrade Trithemius’s position in the history of
early modern magic, personally I don’t think it’s as clearcut as that. Trithemius was
undeniably a great cryptographer, but he also had a fascination for occult manuscripts
and wrote about his own work in private correspondence in such a way as to show that
he believed it was not simply a work of cryptography but contained methods of magic.
The book’s professed purpose is to show how to use spirits to send secret messages over
distances. I wonder whether, therefore, there may be some deeper level of cipher
contained in his work that has something to say on the occult, and that the decipherment
thus far discovered was deliberately placed to absolve him of charges of witchcraft should
it have become necessary to reveal the book’s supposed “key” and thus prove it a work of
cryptography and nothing else.
The reputation of Trithemius as an occultist was established after the alchemist
Charles de Bouelles described a visit to Trithemius in 1504 during which he saw the
Steganographia. Bouelles asserted in a letter that was published in 1510 that Trithemius
must have consorted with demons and that the book should be burned. The
Steganographia was not published until 1606, in Frankfurt, when it appeared with another
work from the same publisher in the same year called Clavis Steganographiæ Ioannis
Trithemii Abbatis Spanheimensis, presumably written by Trithemius or one of his disciples,
which explained quite straightforwardly how the ciphers of Books I and II worked, but
it did not discuss Book III. The Clavis revealed that the demonic incantations were
actually encrypted instructions for concealing a secret message. Nonetheless, the
Steganographia was placed in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609. Shortly thereafter
various works of cryptography appeared seeking to vindicate Trithemius by explaining
the cryptographic principles of the Steganographia and thereby acquit its author of the
charge of consorting with infernal spirits. So this illustrates that a reasonable defence
against an accusation of diabolism was to show a book could be deciphered into ordinary
plain text, and that the purpose of the book was of an entirely different order. I suggest
that the decipherment of Book III does nothing to diminish Trithemius’s reputation as
an occultist, it has merely brought to light a defence Trithemius could have used to
acquit himself of charges of black magic. The mystery of Trithemius’s ultimate purpose
appears far from solved. And as for cryptographic structure in the Book of Soyga and in
Enochian, one must suppose that what has been discovered thus far was placed there by
the spirits themselves, turning back to the idea of early apparently magical cryptography
as a kind of proof of the genuineness of spirit communication, rather than it being the
deliberate placement of Kabbalistically inspired early cryptologists.
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