He later joined the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim, which was then ‘poor, undisciplined, ruinous, and virtually without furniture’. In July 1483, he was appointed abbot, and embarked on a complete renovation of the place, transforming it into a centre of learning. He built a lodge for visiting scholars, decorating the walls with classical and contemporary prose and poetry. He also rebuilt the library, increasing it from just forty-eight books to two thousand.
Trithemius’s book-collecting drew him towards the study of the Cabala, and his work became a strong influence for many of the great mystic scholars of the early sixteenth century, notably Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who was his pupil. Agrippa was the leading writer on mysticism and magic of the Renaissance. His shadow ‘made all Europe honour him’, Marlowe wrote in Dr Faustus.
As with Dee, Trithemius’s interest in such subjects led to his being accused of ‘trafficking’ with demons. It was even said he conjured up the bride of Maximilian I soon after her death so the Emperor could see her once more. As Trithemius kept his work increasingly secret, so these accusations became ever more insistent and threatening.
Dee knew of the accusations against Trithemius, placing him alongside Socrates and Pico della Mirandola (pioneer of a Christian form of the Cabala) as a victim of intolerance. Like Dee, Trithemius drew a sharp division between magic and superstition. Magic was about knowledge, the study of the hidden forces – spiritual as well as physical – that rule nature. Superstition exploited ignorance. Thus Trithemius called for witches and wizards to be rooted out, and attacked the sort of fortune-telling which was practised by Dee’s contemporaries like Nostradamus as ‘empty and foolish’.
Trithemius summed up his career: ‘I always wanted to know what was knowable in the world…But it was not within my power to satisfy the desire as I wished.’ This was a sentiment Dee would one day echo. But for the moment, with his growing library, knowledge of languages and science, his influence at court and friendships with Europe’s leading intellectuals, Dee seemed at the threshold of complete success. And now he had a copy of Steganographia within his grasp.
Trithemius had started work on the book between 1499 and 1500. He sent a letter to his friend Arnold Bostius, a Carmelite monk in Ghent, in which he boasted that once finished it would be a ‘great work… that, if it should ever be published (which God forbid), the whole world will wonder at’. He promised that it would contain a host of hidden writing systems, a way of transmitting messages over great distances using fire, a method of teaching Latin in two hours and a form of communication that can be achieved while eating, sitting or walking without speech, facial expressions or signs. Unfortunately Bostius died before the letter arrived and it was read with horror by his brother Carmelites, who circulated it in an attempt to discredit Trithemius.
A further setback came when Trithemius was visited by an officious dignitary called Carolus Bovillus in 1500. Bovillus later reported that ‘I hoped that I would enjoy a pleasing visit with a philosopher; but I discovered him to be a magician.’ It was his perusal of the Steganographia, in particular its lists of the ‘barbarous and strange names of spirits’ in languages he did not recognise, that convinced him of this.10
Trithemius then abandoned the work, dying in 1516. But the Steganographia lived on, thanks to its advance publicity: manuscript copies of three of the four books mentioned by Bovillus were thought to have survived. They soon acquired mythical status and became as sought after as Aristotle’s lost dialogues.
Dee was intensely excited when he heard of the existence of a copy of the manuscript in Antwerp. Getting his hands on it proved difficult. It involved spending all his travelling money, some twenty pounds, and working through an intermediary, a mysterious ‘nobleman of Hungary’, who in return demanded that Dee ‘pleasure him…with such points of science as… he requireth’.11 Even then, he was only allowed to keep the manuscript for ten days.
Tucked away in his lodgings at the sign of the Golden Angel, he began transcribing the work. It was a difficult task. Ignoring any problems of legibility, the manuscript was a difficult one to copy. It was filled with tables of numbers and endless lists of nearly identical and apparently meaningless names. Dee had to work round the clock to get the job done in time.
On 16 February 1563, he forced his tired fingers to pen one more document: a letter to William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s key minister, reporting the discovery of this, ‘the most precious jewel that I have yet of other men’s travails recovered’, and begging for some recompense for his costs, which had left him virtually penniless.12 This discovery demonstrated why Elizabeth’s regime needed someone with his contacts and understanding scouring the Continent for new texts and ideas, and why it was worth paying him to allow him to continue.
When Dee wrote his letter, he knew that it was about to embark on a long and perilous journey that could last a few days or several weeks with no means of knowing when or even if it would reach its destination.
As every sixteenth-century prince and general knew, distance was the first enemy. Roads were often impassable, ‘noisome sloughs’, ‘so gulled with the fall of water that passengers cannot pass’.13 Despite such barriers and discomforts, despite the enormous cost, Tudor nobles, scholars and merchants were determined to travel. There was constant traffic of people and goods across Europe and as a result growing interdependence between regions. A system that promised instant communications over unlimited distances was of obvious importance, and that was one of many innovations that Trithemius had boasted to Bostius the Steganographia contained. When Dee finally managed to read the manuscript for himself, he found that Trithemius was apparently equal to his word. The Steganographia was divided into three books, the last incomplete and of a rather different nature to the first two. Books I and II describe an enormously elaborate system for sending messages between two people using incantations.
Trithemius gave several examples of how the system would work. For instance, the sender of a message first writes it out, using any language he chooses, after a preamble of paternosters and other supplications. He then speaks a special formula to summon one of the many spirits identified by Trithemius, say, Padiel:
Padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas peludyn malpreaxo. Condusen, vlearo thersephi bayl merphon, paroys gebuly mailthomyon ilthear tamarson acrimy Ion peatha Casmy Chertiel, medony reabdo, lasonti iaciel mal arti bulomeon abry pathulmon theoma pathormyn.14
Padiel should then appear, whereupon the sender hands over the message. The spirit takes it to the recipient, who must speak another incantation, and the meaning of the message becomes clear.
To complicate matters further, the sender must learn the ‘places, names, and signs of the principal spirits, lest through ignorance one calls from the north a spirit dwelling in the south; which would not only hinder the purpose but might also injure the operator’.15 There are hundreds of thousands of spirits – some of which appear in the day, others of which prefer the dark of the night, some subordinate to others – each with its own sign. Books I and II list many of them, giving details of their powers and peculiarities and the conjurations needed to call them.
Book III, which is incomplete, is very different. It begins by promising even greater feats of communication than the first two, which are based on the discoveries of an ancient (apparently fictional) philosopher called Menastor. In the tradition of occult knowledge, the findings have been, Trithemius warns, presented in a way so that ‘to men of learning and men deeply engaged in the study of magic, it might, by the Grace of God, be in some degree intelligible’ but not to ‘thick-skinned turnip-eaters’.16
Instead of endless epistles, Book III is filled with tables. They are messily laid out, except for the one which appears in the book’s preface. This assigns