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Johannis Trithemii [Johannes Trithemius], STEGANOGRAPHIA...
Publisher:
Zubrodt, Mainz
Publication Date: 1676
Text: Latin
'Trithemius's Steganographia, edited by W. E. Heidel. Small 4to (approx. 175 mm x 210 mm), [8], 394 (i.e. 396, error in page numbering), [4]. Title in red and black. Includes Heidel's life of Trithemius and his vindication of the Steganographia.
The text of the Steganographia, pp. [124]-313, has a separate title page reprinted from the 1621 Darmstadt edition.
Binding: modern half mottled calf, raised bands, marbled sides; new endpages. Woodcut title vignette, initials, and head- and tailpieces. Speckled red edges. Provenance: contemporary initials in ink on title page. Browning and spotting throughout. Neat repair to final leaf of text at foredge.
Otherwise a good copy of this classic text on cryptography and magic. This edition of Trithemius's Steganographia is an interesting one. 'Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516) was perhaps the central figure in the evolution of the Western Esoteric Tradition.' (Adam McLean) He was an abbot at Spanheim (now Sponheim) in Germany and one of the leading intellectuals of his day. The Steganographia (Greek, "secret writing") was written circa 1500 and first printed in 1606.
While the first two books of the Steganographia are, like the Polygraphia, a "straightforward" exposition of cryptography, the third book is written in the guise of occult workings.
There are many tables of numbers apparently containing the secrets of conjuring spirits, and for this reason the Steganographia was long considered "a main renaissance manual of practical Cabala or angel-conjuring" (Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, p.108).
One gainsayer was an obscure figure called Wolfgang Heidel, who in the present edition of the Steganographia claimed that the tables in Book 3 were cryptograms and that he had solved them.
However, he wrote about his discovery using his own secret code, which no-one could decipher.
Such was the situation until the late 1990s, when the "magical" formulae in Book 3 were shown to be covertexts for yet more cryptography content by two researchers working independently and unaware of each other's work.
In 1998, Jim Reeds of AT&T showed that the tables can be deciphered by reducing them modulo 25 and applying them to a reversed, slightly modified alphabet, but he had unknowingly been preempted by Thomas Ernst in 1996, then a research student at the University of Pittsburgh. Ernst's paper, written in German and published in an obscure Dutch journal Daphnis, went largely unnoticed. Ernst also wondered about Heidel and whether he had in fact solved the cryptogram tables in Book 3 of the Steganographia. So he returned to Heidel's book and solved Heidel's code to find that, sure enough, Heidel had indeed solved Trithemius's cryptograms back in the 17th century! Caillet 10856.
Adam McLean writes on the magicl side of the work:: 'The Steganographia is, however, the most notorious of Trithemius' books and though his nae has suffered, over the centuries, by him being branded as a conjuror of evil spirits. It is a book which works on two levels. As a grimoire of Cabbalistic Angle Magic, it involves long lists of spiritual beings associated with the Directions of Space and the Beings can be invoked through conjurations expressed in a strange, though seemingly consistent language, which actualy flows very easily... The spirits are to be used for the purpose of carrying messages and here an elaborate cryptographic system is hidden in a deeper layer of the text.' (p. 7).
This book is desirable to any occult library!
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