Johannes Trithemius

The teaching

Taught from his own books, above all the Steganographia, the Polygraphia and On the Seven Secondary Intelligences.

Writing that hides itself

Trithemius teaches the art of writing so that a message cannot be seen. In the Steganographia each method is given the name of a spirit, and the letter that carries the message is dressed as a prayer or a conjuration to that spirit. The words of the conjuration are the cover. The message is read by taking certain letters of certain words in a set order and passing over the rest, so that a page of strange invocations hides a plain sentence that only one who knows the rule can read.

The third book, with its angels of the planets and its tables of numbers, hides messages in the same way. One of them, read again in our own time, says that the bearer of the letter is a rogue and a thief, to be guarded against. The angels and the rites are the dress; the art beneath them is the cipher.

The square of shifting alphabets

The Polygraphia gives the same art in the open. In one part every letter of the alphabet is given a long column of words, so that a message written word by word reads as a Latin prayer. In another he sets the alphabet in its order, then again beneath it shifted by one place, and again by two, until every shift stands in a square. A message is written by taking its first letter from the first row, its second from the second, and so on down, so that each letter is written in a different alphabet, and the counting of letters, which breaks a simple cipher, finds nothing to count.

The angels of the ages

Under God, the first mind, seven angels, the minds of the planets, govern the world in turn, each for three hundred and fifty-four years and four months; their names and their order are taught on the page of Daimons and intelligences, under The spirit realm. Each age takes the nature of the angel who rules it, and Trithemius reads the history of the world, from the creation through the Flood and the kingdoms to his own day, as the succession of their reigns, so that the turning of the angels gives a measure for the great changes of the world.

Hay for the ox

When the young Agrippa sent him the first draft of his book on magic, Trithemius praised it and gave him one rule to keep: speak of common things to common people, and of higher and hidden things only to higher and trusted friends. Give hay to the ox, he wrote, and sugar to the parrot. What is taught must fit the one who is taught, and a teaching given to those who cannot bear it is wasted or turned to harm.

Against sorcery

He drew the line between the wisdom of nature and the help of demons sharply. In his book against sorcery, the Antipalus, he lists the books of magic he judges evil and teaches remedies against bewitchment drawn from the Church: confession, prayer, the sacraments, holy water and blessed salt, and the sign of the cross. He counted the witches of his day as real servants of the devil, a teaching of his age that fed the trials, whose record is taught on the page of The witch trials, under Magic and protection.

In praise of scribes

To his monks he taught that copying books is holy work. The scribe preaches with his hands to readers not yet born; the words he copies are fixed in his own mind as he writes them; and the labour keeps him from idleness. A book written on parchment, he says, can last a thousand years, while printed books on paper will not last nearly so long, and so the copyist's work outlasts the press.