{"id":435,"date":"2002-05-12T00:12:18","date_gmt":"2002-05-12T07:12:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/05\/12\/435.html"},"modified":"2002-05-12T00:12:18","modified_gmt":"2002-05-12T07:12:18","slug":"trithemius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/05\/12\/trithemius\/","title":{"rendered":"Trithemius"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Fred also mentioned a 15th- to 16th-century abbot named <a href=\"http:\/\/cryptome.unicast.org\/cryptome022401\/tri-crack.htm\">Johannes Trithemius<\/a> (much less fictional, as far as I can tell, than the monk described in the previous entry) who wrote a trilogy of books titled <cite>Steganographia<\/cite> (see a <cite>Strange Horizons<\/cite> article for more info on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.strangehorizons.com\/2001\/20011008\/steganography.shtml\">steganography<\/a>); the third book consisted of a cryptic set of tables of numbers, which people for centuries thought had to do with black magic.<\/p>\n<p>In the late 1600s, a guy named Heidel claimed to that the book was in code, and claimed to have cracked the code, but he encrypted his solution in a code of his own.  It wasn't until 1996 that a professor in Pittsburgh published a plain-text solution to the Trithemius code; a couple years later, a New Jersey mathematician (unaware that the code had been broken) independently found and published the solution.  And cracked Heidel's code as well.<\/p>\n<p>So all of that is kinda interesting; but more interesting to me is that Trithemius was a contemporary of John Dee, and did some of the same kinds of things Dee did (cryptography, magic, advising the powerful).  And then there's this interesting bit from the article:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Trithemius was an adept practitioner of fictionally-enhanced nonfiction. \"He wrote histories, chronicles, even fake chronicles,\" said Dr. Gerhard F. Strasser, a historian at Pennsylvania State University in State College. \"He invented people who were only uncovered in the 19th century as being fictitious Germanic heroes,\" Dr. Strasser added.<\/p>\n<p>Trithemius also was a magician. \"Everyone who was interested in magic emulated him,\" Dr. Reeds said. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I'm now really curious as to whether Trithemius is going to show up in later volumes of John Crowley's <cite><a href=\"http:\/\/www.strangehorizons.com\/2002\/20020325\/aegypt.shtml\">Aegypt<\/a><\/cite> series.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fred also mentioned a 15th- to 16th-century abbot named Johannes Trithemius (much less fictional, as far as I can tell,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}