Steganographia: The Book of Spirits and Secret Messages

About this book

Around 1499 the Benedictine Abbot of Sponheim began a book on how spirits carry secret messages. Thirty-one princes of the air rule the sixteen winds and the four quarters of the world, each with his sign, his servants and his strange conjuration: "Pamersiel, ochurmy, Delmuson, Thafloin…". In the second book the spirits rule the hours of the day and the night; in the third the seven planetary angels, Orifiel, Zachariel, Samael, Michael, Anael, Raphael and Gabriel, work through long tables of numbers and images.

The book passed from hand to hand in copies, was placed on the Church's list of forbidden books in 1609, and its spirits' names found their way into later grimoires. Then the twist: the conjurations hide letters of ordinary text, and in the 1990s two scholars showed that even the numbers of the third book are a cipher. One decoded sentence reads: "The bearer of this letter is a rogue and a thief."

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of a Latin manuscript copy begun on 16 February 1588, eighteen years before the first printed edition. Sentence by sentence, not a summary or a retelling. The conjurations (the cipher text) are copied letter for letter and set off so you can see the "secret text".

What is inside

• the dedication to Philip, Elector Palatine; Book One (32 chapters: the spirits of the winds, the four emperors, the wandering spirits); Book Two (25 chapters: the spirits of the hours of day and night and the order of the art); Book Three (the planetary angels and their number tables)
• a contents page with every chapter and its spirit
• 40 conjurations copied exactly; all the manuscript's tables with every number
• seven pages of the 1588 manuscript in colour: the title page, the circle of spirits, the circle of the four emperors and four tables with the spirits' signs
• colour illustrations: the abbot's library, the spirit messenger, the bearer of the letter, the recipient, the planetary angels (created with AI tools)
• 109 short footnotes on the same page: people, places, words in plain language
• a foreword on Trithemius's life, the scandal and the cipher; commentary at the end: in plain words, the cipher behind the spirits, and Trithemius and his time

Who it is for

Readers of grimoires and Renaissance magic; anyone curious about angel names, spirit lore and the history of secret writing and codes; collectors of strange old books. A thoughtful gift for a lover of mysteries.

A historical source: Trithemius writes as a monk of 1500; his spirits, his piety and his warnings are kept as in the original. The notes and commentary explain what we know today.