It would be another forty years before the manuscript that Dee now had in his possession was published. It appeared in Frankfurt in 1606, together with a shorter work called the Clavis (or ‘key’) to the Steganographia. It was the Clavis that revealed Trithemius’s true purpose. The apparently nonsensical spiritual incantations of the first two books turned out to be coded messages. For example, in the case of the call for Padiel:
Padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas peludyn malpreaxo
the message, or ‘plain text’ as cryptographers now call it, was encoded in alternate letters of alternate words:
padiel aPoRsY mesarpon oMeUaS peludyn mAlPrEaXo
which yields the words ‘Primus apex’ (the first summit). The Clavis thus showed that Books I and II of the Steganographia were not really about magic. They were full of sample ciphers. However, the Clavis did not include a key for Book III. Did this mean it was really a work of magic or a code book too? The question remained unresolved for centuries. Gustavus Selenus (the pseudonym of Duke August II of Brunswick-Lüneburg) reprinted Book III in his definitive 1624 study Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae, establishing Trithemius’s position as a founding father of modern cryptography, but offered no solution. W. E. Heidel claimed to have cracked the code in 1676, but published his results in the form of a series of equally indecipherable cryptograms, thereby managing merely to add to the mystery.
By the late twentieth century, most scholars seem to have given up, and had consigned the work to the occult.17 Then, in the late 1990s, two people settled the matter once and for all, one in 1993, the other in 1996. The first to succeed was a German linguist called Thomas Ernst.18 The second, who had no idea of Ernst’s success until he had published his own paper, was Jim Reeds, working in the Mathematics and Cryptography Research Department at AT&T. Reeds’s diligent efforts at analysing this and other mysterious texts associated with Dee have proved extraordinarily successful.
Ernst and Reeds discovered that the third book of the Steganographia did indeed contain a code. There were hints as to how it might work in the tables and the text. For example, Reeds noticed that the first column of the table in the preface contained multiples of twenty-five. What was the significance of this number? There was also a passage in the first chapter that seemed suggestive:
If you wish to operate in Steganography… you must first of all acquaint yourself with [Saturn’s] various and diverse motions; and first the various motions, pure, proper, mixed, direct, retrograde and perplexed.
With a combination of skill and guesswork, Reeds worked out that the numbers in the tables represented letters of an alphabet, with each letter being a number added to a multiple of twenty-five. Lengthy analysis revealed the alphabet to comprise twenty-two of the Roman characters (A to Z minus J, K and W), supplemented by three other symbols. It was also in reverse order, which was perhaps what Trithemius was hinting at in his reference to the ‘retrograde’ motions of Saturn.
Reeds tested the key by trying it out on various sections of the book. For example, a series of numbers in the first table spelt out ‘Ioannes’, the Latin form of John, Trithemius’s first name. A selection of words in one of the tables in chapter 1 contained German words which translate into the phrase ‘the bringer of this letter is a bad rogue and a thief’. Reeds found another puzzling phrase, this one in Latin. It was repeated several times: ‘Gaza frequens Libycos duxit Carthago triumphos’. It turns out to be a pangram, a phrase that contains all the letters of the alphabet (like ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’).19 Presumably these phrases were chosen to demonstrate the capabilities of the cipher.
Having broken the code, the tables yielded up the secrets they had hoarded for five hundred years. Unfortunately these proved uninformative: besides one or two gnomic phrases, the remainder of the plain text seemed unintelligible. This may be because the plain text is itself encoded in some further way, or because the tables became corrupted over years of underground circulation in manuscript form. Nevertheless, the discovery of the true purpose of Book III of the Steganographia was a breakthrough, because it proved for the first time that it was primarily a work of cryptography, not magic.
But whether Dee realised that the Steganographia was a code book remains unclear. He may not have seen the Clavis, the key to Books I and II. So, when he so excitedly commended the work to William Cecil as ‘meeter’ (more suitable or useful) and ‘more behoveful’ (more beneficial) to ‘your honor or a Prince’ (Queen Elizabeth) than any other, what did he mean? Spiritual communication is a possibility – but unlikely. Cecil was both very practical and conservative, and, though he undoubtedly accepted the existence of spirits, was unlikely to have been persuaded to practise the elaborate rituals Trithemius described.20
Dee was fascinated by, and evidently expert in, cryptography. He owned several copies of Trithemius’s Polygraphia, which was explicitly about codes, and studied other key texts on the subject, notably Jacques Gohorry’s De Usu et Mysteriis Notarum and Jacopo Silvestri’s Opus Novum, the latter of which Dee used to practise writing in cipher for himself.21 Thus, when he promised Cecil that the book would advance the ‘secret sciences’, he was not necessarily referring to the occult. When Dee sent his letter, Cecil was just beginning to put in place the espionage network which, under Francis Walsingham, his successor as spymaster, would become one of the most formidable and effective in Europe. This network came to rely heavily on codes.22
Dee did not see the Stegonographia as merely a political or diplomatic tool, considering the text to have other, more esoteric uses. Cryptography, particularly of the sort practised by Trithemius, was closely connected to the Cabala and it was conceivable that the same techniques used in the Steganographia could be used to decipher other texts written in forgotten or corrupted languages. One that would arouse particular excitement was called The Book of Soyga, an anonymous tome which Dee came to believe contained an ancient message written in the language originally spoken by Adam – in other words the true, unspoiled word of God. Another was a mysterious volume attributed to Roger Bacon which in coming centuries became notorious among cryptanalysts as the Voynich Manuscript.23 It has yet to be deciphered. The study of codes, which was also the study of the structure of language, might yield the magic key to decoding such texts and revealing the messages they contained.
Beyond even that, Dee commended the Steganographia to Cecil as an example of the intellectual treasures the Continent held and that England so conspicuously lacked. In his letter, he deplored the lack of an English philosopher able to produce works ‘in the Science De Numeris formalibus, the Science De Ponderibus mysticis, and ye Science De Mensuris diuinis: (by which three, the huge frame of this world is fashioned…)’. His travels, learning and access to rare texts and Europe’s leading thinkers meant that he could be just such a philosopher, opening up the riches of the Renaissance to the English court.
During his stay in Antwerp, Dee wrote:
‘When infancy and childhood are past, the choice of a future way of life begins to present itself to young men as a problem. Having hesitated for some time at the crossroads of their wavering judgment, they at last come to a decision: Some (who have fallen in love with truth and virtue)