Johannes Trithemius

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In the winter of 1482 a young scholar named Johann Heidenberg, traveling home from the university toward the Mosel, was caught in a snowstorm and took shelter at the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim, near Bad Kreuznach. He never left. Within the year the monks elected him their abbot. He was twenty-one. The boy from Trittenheim would spend the rest of his life signing himself by the Latinized name of that village — Trithemius — and the reputation he built there, of a churchman who corresponded with angels and read the secret writing of the planets, would outlast every shelf in the great library he assembled.

Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), abbot of Sponheim and later of the Würzburg Schottenkloster. — Trier Portrait Database (Tripota), via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The abbot and his library

Trithemius found Sponheim neglected and undisciplined, its holdings amounting to perhaps fifty volumes. He turned the house into a workshop of letters. By spending the abbey’s income on manuscripts and printed books, on copyists and on his own ceaseless acquisition, he raised that collection past two thousand items, making it one of the richest libraries north of the Alps. Scholars came to consult it; humanists corresponded with its keeper; the abbot of a modest Rhineland monastery became a node in the learned network of the German Renaissance, exchanging letters with the sodalities of Heidelberg and the court of the emperor Maximilian I.

He was, before anything else, a writer. Some seventy works are attributed to him, the bulk of them ecclesiastical, bibliographical, and historical. His Liber de scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (1494) was among the first attempts at a systematic catalog of Christian authors; his Annales Hirsaugienses, a chronicle of the abbey of Hirsau, is sometimes counted among the earliest works of humanist history-writing. That same historical labor produced his most enduring embarrassment: the Chronicle he built partly on a source he called Hunibald, a supposed ancient authority on the Frankish kings, which later critics judged a fabrication — whether Trithemius’s own invention or one he credulously inherited remains argued. The man who cataloged the writers of the Church also salted the record with a phantom.

He was also, in the ordinary sense the word then carried, a churchman anxious about the demonic. His Antipalus maleficiorum — “the adversary of evildoers,” compiled around 1508 — is a treatise against witchcraft, a catalog of the works of harmful magic and their remedies written for a Christian prince. The man whose name would become a byword for necromancy spent some of his ink denouncing the very arts the public imagined him to practice. The contradiction is only apparent. In the mental world Trithemius inhabited, the boundary did not run between magic and no-magic; it ran between the licit and the diabolical, between a learned engagement with the angelic and celestial order that a pious abbot could defend and the maleficium of the witch that the Church must hunt down. He believed himself, throughout, on the right side of that line. Much of his later trouble came from readers who could not see where he had drawn it.

The discipline that consumed the library also strained the house. After more than two decades the relationship between abbot and monks broke down, and around 1505–1506 Trithemius left Sponheim — by some accounts driven out by a community that had wearied of his expensive learning and frequent absences. He did not return. He took up the abbacy of the Schottenkloster of St. James in Würzburg, the old Irish-Scottish Benedictine foundation, and there he remained, writing and corresponding, until his death on 13 December 1516. The library he had built at Sponheim was dispersed in the years after he abandoned it — the single most painful loss of his life, and a quietly bitter coda to the achievement that had made his name.

The book written as a cipher and read as a grimoire

The work that fixed Trithemius in legend was begun around 1499 and never finished. The Steganographia — the title is his own coinage, “covered writing” — circulates in its first two books as something that looks unmistakably like a manual of spirit-magic. It supplies the names of angels and their subordinate intelligences, the hours at which they may be invoked, and long conjurations to be addressed to them so that a message might be carried, instantly and invisibly, across any distance to a distant correspondent. Read at the surface, it is a treatise on summoning planetary and aerial spirits as couriers. Read this way, it terrified people. A letter Trithemius wrote in 1499 describing the project — boasting that he could teach a man to transmit his thoughts to another hundreds of miles away without words, messengers, or signs — leaked, was copied, and convinced a wide readership that the abbot of Sponheim trafficked with demons.

The other reading is the one the text was engineered to reward. The angel-names and invocations of Books I and II are not addresses to spirits at all; they are an elaborate steganographic apparatus. The “conjurations” are carrier-texts whose every other letter, or every letter under a stated rule, spells out a concealed message; the spirit-names encode the cipher methods themselves. Strip away the demonology and what remains is a sophisticated treatise on hidden communication — magic as the wrapping, cryptography as the gift inside. When the Steganographia was finally printed at Frankfurt in 1606, more than a century after it was written, an accompanying key revealed exactly this for the first two books. The Church was unconvinced of its innocence: the work was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609, where it remained until 1900. The numerical tables of the third book resisted that key and held out far longer; they were deciphered only in 1998, by the cryptologist Jim Reeds (and independently by Thomas Ernst), confirming the whole work as cryptography dressed in the language of conjuration.

The Steganographia did not reach print until 1606; this title page belongs to the 1608 Frankfurt issue. The book was placed on the Index in 1609. — Herzog August Bibliothek, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Book III resisted. Where Books I and II yielded to the 1606 key, the third book — shorter, denser, threaded with astrological tables and numbers attached to the planetary angels — looked to many like the part where the cryptographic game gave way to real occult doctrine, a genuine planetary magic that the cipher-pages had merely camouflaged. For most of four centuries the boundary held there: cipher up to a point, then something else. The boundary did not survive the twentieth century. Working independently in the 1990s, the cryptologists Thomas Ernst and Jim Reeds each found that Book III too was cipher — that its numbers and angelic tables concealed messages by yet another hidden method, with no residue of operative magic at all. Reeds published his solution, “Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia,” in the journal Cryptologia in 1998. The verdict of cryptographic scholarship is now that the Steganographia is a work of cryptography from its first page to its last.

What that verdict does not settle is the deeper question, and here the registers must be kept apart. That the text enciphers messages is demonstrated fact. Why Trithemius chose to encipher them inside the costume of angel-magic is not. He may have meant only to amuse and to advertise, dressing a dry technical art in robes that would sell — and books that promised commerce with spirits sold far better than dry handbooks of substitution. He may have meant to hide the strength of his methods from any reader not equipped to break them, protecting a powerful art from misuse by burying it where only an adept would think to dig. And there is a third possibility that the decipherment does not foreclose: that for Trithemius the two faces were not a disguise and a secret but a single thing — that he understood the manipulation of letters, numbers, and divine names as itself a participation in the angelic order, so that to write a perfect cipher and to address an intelligence were, in his theology of language, the same act. The Neoplatonic and Kabbalistic currents he drank from held exactly this: that the cosmos is composed in a script, that names are not labels but operative realities, and that the adept who reorders letters reorders the powers they name. On that view the Steganographia is no more a hoax than a sacrament is a fraud for being made of bread. The mathematics has been read; the mind that built it as a grimoire has not.

The seven angels and the printed cipher

Two later works carry the matter forward, each on one side of the divide the Steganographia refuses to honor. The Polygraphia, written for the emperor Maximilian and printed at Oppenheim in 1518, two years after Trithemius’s death, is cryptography with the mask off. It is the first printed book on the subject in Europe. Its six books lay out ciphers in the open — most famously the tabula recta, a square table in which each row is the alphabet shifted one place further along, so that a message may be enciphered letter by letter against a moving alphabet rather than a single fixed substitution. This is the germ of polyalphabetic cryptography, the principle that would be elaborated by Giovan Battista Bellaso and Blaise de Vigenère later in the century and that defeated frequency analysis for three hundred years. The method bears other men’s names; the table is Trithemius’s. The book also keeps one foot in the old costume: the earlier columns dress the cipher in pious phrases, vast lists of substitute words that turn an enciphered text into what reads as a prayer, so that even the open treatise on secret writing prefers to wear devotion as its outer garment. The remarkable title page, assembled from seven woodcut blocks, shows the author kneeling to present his book to the emperor while a bearded monk offers a pair of keys — the keys, one is meant to understand, to all hidden writing.

The Polygraphiae of 1518, the first printed work on cryptography, shown at the National Cryptologic Museum. — National Cryptologic Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

On the far side stands the De septem secundeis — “On the Seven Secondary Intelligences” — completed around 1508 and likewise dedicated to Maximilian, a work that hides nothing and means every word of its angelology. Here Trithemius sets out a theology of history. Beneath God, the first cause, seven secondary intelligences govern the world in turn, each ruling a fixed epoch of three hundred and fifty-four years and four months before yielding to the next, the cycle repeating through the whole span of time from the creation. Each intelligence is a planetary angel: Orifiel of Saturn opens the sequence, followed by Anael of Venus, Zachariel of Jupiter, Raphael of Mercury, Samael of Mars, Gabriel of the Moon, and Michael of the Sun, after whom Orifiel begins again. From this scheme Trithemius reads both the past — assigning the great turns of empire and religion to the angel reigning over each period — and the future, projecting the changes the next planetary regents must bring. He dated the present age and named the angel then in office; he read the coming of new faiths and the fall of old orders out of the rotation of the seven. It is astrology raised to a philosophy of providence: history as the legible signature of the angels who administer it, the same conviction that the cosmos is a written text now applied not to a private message but to the whole career of the world. The doctrine would echo for centuries — the notion of successive planetary epochs, each with its presiding angel and its civilizational temper, surfaces again in later occult periodizations of history and in the astrological mysticism of the Romantic esotericists. Where the Steganographia disguised cipher as theurgy, the De septem secundeis offers theurgic cosmology with no cipher beneath it at all — and the contrast between the two is the clearest evidence that, for Trithemius, the angelic frame was never merely a joke.

Teacher, suspect, and the seed of Faust

The afterlife of Trithemius runs along the same fault line as his work, split between the master of a respectable art and the magus the Church watched.

His most consequential act of transmission was personal. In late 1509 or early 1510 a young, ambitious occultist named Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa came to Würzburg and spent several days with the aging abbot in conversation. Encouraged, Agrippa finished a draft of the book that would become the founding summa of Renaissance learned magic, the De occulta philosophia, and sent it to Trithemius, dedicated to him. Trithemius answered on 8 April 1510 with warm praise and one piece of counsel that became among the most quoted sentences in the Western esoteric tradition: that one should communicate common things to common friends but higher and secret things only to the higher and secret — “Give hay to an ox, sugar to a parrot only” — lest, by casting his teaching before the unworthy, the philosopher be trodden under the oxen’s feet. The doctrine of deliberate concealment, of truth measured out to the capable and withheld from the crowd, passed from the cryptographer who hid messages inside angels to Agrippa, and through Agrippa into the whole later architecture of learned magic. The wandering physician Paracelsus is likewise counted among those touched by Trithemius’s circle, and the abbot’s blend of angelic hierarchy, planetary governance, and the Hermetic confidence that the cosmos is written in legible correspondences fed directly into the current that would carry John Dee’s angelic conversations, the emblem-books of the Rosicrucian dawn, and the lineage of practical Kabbalah in the North.

The darker afterlife is the legend. Trithemius’s contemporary reputation as a necromancer attached itself to a story that would not die. After the death of Maximilian’s beloved first wife, Mary of Burgundy, the abbot — so a sixteenth-century account by Augustin Lercheimer reports — was summoned to console the grieving emperor and conjured a shade of the dead empress, exact in every feature down to a birthmark on her neck that only Maximilian had known. The emperor, shaken, forbade him ever to do it again. The tale was retold for generations; it surfaced among the legends gathered by the Brothers Grimm, and it fed the developing legend of Doctor Faustus — the magician who raises Helen of Troy at the imperial court for the sovereign’s pleasure. The cryptographer who hid his ciphers behind the names of angels had, by then, become the half-mythical original of the scholar who sells his soul.

There is a symmetry in it. Trithemius spent his life on two operations that he may never have regarded as two: concealing meaning so that only the worthy could recover it, and reading the concealed meaning that the heavens and their angels had written into time. The cryptographers have recovered the first and pronounced his ciphers solved. The second he addressed to readers he never named, sugar reserved for the parrots; what endures is the method itself — a message folded so deep into its carrier that the carrier looks like another thing entirely — Trithemius’s surest monument, whatever he finally believed.

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