Occult Origins of Technology · Series II · 2/2 · c. 1499 – 1998 CE

Trithemius’s Angels → Cryptography

A cipher wearing a grimoire. The Steganographia addresses spirits, hours and planetary rulers while hiding operational messages inside the invocations. Solving the ciphers rescued a cryptographic book from the demonology shelf—but did not make its occult language historically meaningless.

REVISED 2026-08-21 · 10 THE CLAIMS, LABELLED

1. CL-01
   Trithemius composed the Steganographia around 1499–1500; it circulated in manuscript for about a century before its first printed edition in 1606.1606 Frankfurt edition, University of Freiburg digital collections; Reeds (1998) on composition and transmission.
   Documented
2. CL-02
   Books I and II conceal plaintext through named spirits, invocations and tables: the magical-looking instructions also operate as cipher instructions and cover text.Keys printed with the early editions and the worked examples in Steganographia; Reeds, Cryptologia 22(4).
   Documented
3. CL-03
   Book III also contains cipher messages, solved independently by Thomas Ernst and Jim Reeds in the 1990s after centuries without a generally accepted solution.Ernst, ‘The Numerical-Astrological Ciphers…’ and Reeds, ‘Solved: The Ciphers in Book III…’, both Cryptologia 22(4), 1998.
   Documented
4. CL-04
   Solving Book III proves that the Steganographia is only cryptography and that its angelic cosmology is meaningless camouflage.Reeds argued for an unambiguous cryptographic reading; later historians and translators note that cryptographic function and magical theology need not be mutually exclusive authorial contexts. The plaintext settles the cipher, not every purpose of the book.
   Disputed
5. CL-05
   Trithemius’s Polygraphiae libri sex, printed posthumously in 1518, was the first printed book devoted to cryptography in Europe.1518 edition, Wellcome Collection; Folger Shakespeare Library, Decoding the Renaissance. Earlier manuscript treatises, notably Alberti’s, prevent the stronger claim that it was Europe’s first cryptographic treatise.
   Documented
6. CL-06
   Polygraphia printed a tabula recta—a square of successively shifted alphabets that became a standard instrument for polyalphabetic substitution.Trithemius, Polygraphiae, Book V (1518); later cipher manuals reused the table under changing key systems.
   Documented
7. CL-07
   The Steganographia was placed on the Catholic Index in 1609, three years after its first printing, amid its reputation as a work involving spirits and illicit magic.Index history and early editions; the ban documents how the work was received, not whether every operation was intended as literal conjuration.
   Documented
8. CL-08
   Modern digital steganography shares Trithemius’s operational objective: conceal not only the content of a message but the fact that a secret message is present.The shared objective and name are direct; modern image, audio and network techniques derive from later information theory and computing rather than from his specific recipes.
   Technique
9. CL-09
   Trithemius’s angel network was an early Internet and directly produced modern encrypted communication.The analogy borrows modern infrastructure and projects it backward. No packet switching, electrical network, public-key method or digital algorithm descends from the named spirits. What survives is covered writing and some table techniques.
   Myth
10. CL-10
    Because the concealed messages were found only in the twentieth century, earlier readers simply failed to notice that the book was an ordinary cipher manual.Ciphers in Books I and II were known from the early printed keys. The long problem concerned Book III and the status of the whole work. Calling the entire book either obvious magic or obvious cryptography flattens four centuries of mixed evidence.
    Reinterpretation