Benjamin Woolley - The Queen’s Conjuror - The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee

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 numerical values for twenty-one spirits, each of which is associated with one of the seven planets. There will, Trithemius promises, be seven chapters in the following book, one for each planet. Chapter 1, which is the only one to survive, duly follows with a description of how to call on the help of Saturn to communicate with a fellow adept. It is accompanied by a series of numerical tables which are apparently to be used to perform astronomical calculations.

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.