The
third Acher, read at its own scale — a grimoire hidden inside a cipher,
an abbot who forged his own master, and the state check the manuscripts
wrote, which the blog has not had before
Fifteenth of the readings. The holy daimon read Frater Acher’s first
volume for a guide that is met and not mediated, and
found no check in it but the practitioner’s own judgement. The holy heretics read his second and
found the same unmediated encounter turned against an institution. Geosophia read the operations underneath the
Western material and found a hazard named in order to be refused. The western column read the West as a
syllabus and found its safeguards written into the lessons. All four
read a meeting or a curriculum. None
of them read a text — a book whose first subject is how
a tradition hides a practice inside another book, and whose second is
what a reader has to do to get it back out.
Status. This post reads one source, Frater
Acher’s Black Abbot · White Magic, in its Scarlet Imprint
edition, together with one external paper that the book’s own footnote
is out of date against. Every quotation is verbatim, checked character
for character, with the source’s typographic quotation marks rendered as
straight ASCII, its small-capital drop-capital and printer’s page-break
artefacts normalised, a quotation’s opening capital normalised to its
position in the sentence, and elisions marked with a bare ellipsis. The
reading of the material is an inference, offered as
one. The book’s cosmology is not endorsed — nothing
here claims that an angel, a daimon or a planetary intelligence exists,
and nothing here claims the operations do not work. No living author is
diagnosed; nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s
practice. As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.
1. The third
Acher, and the vertex the blog left out
Two readings of this author are already here, and both concern a
relation that arrives from outside and is owned by no one. The holy daimon reported that its daimon is
met rather than mediated, that no office stands in the route, and that
the book publishes its own evidence so a reader can judge it; the holy heretics reported the same
relation pointed at an institution. Neither had a document in
the middle of it.
This book puts a book where the being was. Black Abbot · White
Magic is about Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), abbot of Sponheim —
the “black abbot” of the title, and on Acher’s account the man through
whom the medieval magical underground reached Agrippa, Dee and the early
modern tradition. Its subject is a text, built to be
read two ways:
“A book made from equal parts of cunning deceit and genuine magic. A
book with a worldly facade, and a hidden chamber, patiently waiting to
be discovered by a curious mind.”Frater Acher, Black Abbot · White Magic: Johannes
Trithemius and the Angelic Mind, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2020,
ISBN 978-1-912316-35-9 — edited by Peter Grey, copy-edited by Paul
Holman, designed and typeset by Alkistis Dimech, illustrated by Jose
Gabriel Alegría Sabogal. From the front matter and Introduction: “A book
made from equal parts of cunning deceit and genuine magic. A book with a
worldly facade, and a hidden chamber, patiently waiting to be discovered
by a curious mind”; “we should be careful. We shall step warily into
this man’s past and into the maze of stories, lore and fables he seeded
for us”; the Trithemius epigraph, “Whatever in the world is knowable, I
always desired to know”; and the McLean epigraph, “Johannes Trithemius
was perhaps the central figure in the evolution of the Western esoteric
tradition.”
Every frame the blog has described as dangerous kept the check out of
the participant’s hands: the owned
cosmos hid nothing at its seat — it named the endpoint and described
it openly — and left the checks with the mediator, while the costume and the certified frame hid the mechanism
and the warrant, so that the participant could not see the structure at
all. This is a third thing — a frame hidden from a
reader, in which the participant is told exactly what
is happening. §4 and §9 turn on that distinction, and it is the
correction this reading owes. One more thing makes this the right third
vertex: where the holy daimon had no
clinical check at all, the manuscripts here carry an explicit rule about
the state the operator must be in before the work is
attempted.
2. What the book is
Black Abbot · White Magic: Johannes Trithemius and the Angelic
Mind is by Frater Acher, published by Scarlet Imprint in 2020,
edited by Peter Grey, designed and typeset by Alkistis Dimech,
illustrated by Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal, ISBN 978-1-912316-35-9.Frater Acher, Black Abbot · White Magic: Johannes
Trithemius and the Angelic Mind, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2020,
ISBN 978-1-912316-35-9 — edited by Peter Grey, copy-edited by Paul
Holman, designed and typeset by Alkistis Dimech, illustrated by Jose
Gabriel Alegría Sabogal. From the front matter and Introduction: “A book
made from equal parts of cunning deceit and genuine magic. A book with a
worldly facade, and a hidden chamber, patiently waiting to be discovered
by a curious mind”; “we should be careful. We shall step warily into
this man’s past and into the maze of stories, lore and fables he seeded
for us”; the Trithemius epigraph, “Whatever in the world is knowable, I
always desired to know”; and the McLean epigraph, “Johannes Trithemius
was perhaps the central figure in the evolution of the Western esoteric
tradition.” The epigraphs set the register:
Trithemius’s own “Whatever in the world is knowable, I always desired to
know”, Adam McLean’s “perhaps the central figure in the evolution of the
Western esoteric tradition”, and, from D. P. Walker, the blog’s kind of
sentence:
“It cannot be proved with absolute certainty that Trithemius was in
the habit of performing magical operations with the help of planetary
angels, but it is highly probable.”Black Abbot · White Magic, front matter,
epigraph credited to “P. D. WALKER”: “It cannot be proved with absolute
certainty that Trithemius was in the habit of performing magical
operations with the help of planetary angels, but it is highly
probable.” The book’s bibliography identifies the source as D. P.
Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella,
Studies of the Warburg Institute vol. 22, London: Warburg Institute,
1958 — the same work cited in the book’s footnote at
A claim measured as a probability, by a scholar, on the cover — and
the book largely keeps that standard. Acher says what kind of reader he
is: “As a practicing magician, I will undertake the challenge not
through the lens of an academic scholar, but through that of a magical
operator.”Black Abbot · White Magic, Introduction — “As a
practicing magician, I will undertake the challenge not through the lens
of an academic scholar, but through that of a magical operator”; “the
foremost intent of this book is to mend and polish this particular link
in the chain and to reinsert the black abbot into the collective memory
of our tradition”; that practitioners “often place a premium on concepts
such as lineage and the historical validity of their favoured tradition”
and that most “are not trained historians”; that Trithemius “attempted
to reintroduce certain forms of magic into the curriculum of the
Christian Church” and had “to not end on the pyre”; “the one essential
goal of all white magic: to make the human and the angelic minds alike”;
and, on the optional prayers, “the experienced practitioner would weave
their own way of praying and creating intentional spiritual contact into
each rite”. The Introduction’s own section headings — “Mending the
chain”, “Learning from ancestors”, “In pursuit of white magic”, “The
structure of the book” — are the book’s. The first half is
manuscripts and analysis: translations of Two Books
· Of the knowledge and name of one’s good angel and The Tablet
of Truth, both attributed to a Majorcan hermit called Pelagius
Eremita, and The General Key, attributed to Trithemius, each
with a close reading, plus The Powder of Pelagius from
Trithemius’s own Antipalus maleficiorum.Black Abbot · White Magic, “The Powder of
Pelagius” — the recipe is drawn from Trithemius’s Antipalus
maleficiorum (written 1508, published 1605) for exorcistic use; the
book lists its herbal body and its apotropaic ingredients, including
“pulverised offertory bread blessed in the Lord’s Supper” and “powdered
cemetery dirt”, and notes the paradox that an anti-magical screed of the
kind the Malleus Maleficarum inspired became a practical
handbook. Cited here only for that paradox, and for Will-Erich
Peuckert’s verdict on the Antipalus, quoted in the book: “these
things have remained alive, and they still exist today.” The
second half is biography — Klaus Arnold’s essay on Trithemius’s life,
then Acher on the bond between Trithemius and his supposed magical
master.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at
Two cautions inside the text belong in the body from the start.
Acher’s own, on the first page: “we should be careful. We shall step
warily into this man’s past and into the maze of stories, lore and
fables he seeded for us”.Frater Acher, Black Abbot · White Magic: Johannes
Trithemius and the Angelic Mind, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2020,
ISBN 978-1-912316-35-9 — edited by Peter Grey, copy-edited by Paul
Holman, designed and typeset by Alkistis Dimech, illustrated by Jose
Gabriel Alegría Sabogal. From the front matter and Introduction: “A book
made from equal parts of cunning deceit and genuine magic. A book with a
worldly facade, and a hidden chamber, patiently waiting to be discovered
by a curious mind”; “we should be careful. We shall step warily into
this man’s past and into the maze of stories, lore and fables he seeded
for us”; the Trithemius epigraph, “Whatever in the world is knowable, I
always desired to know”; and the McLean epigraph, “Johannes Trithemius
was perhaps the central figure in the evolution of the Western esoteric
tradition.” And one he does not soften:
alongside the grimoires, the Pelagius manuscripts and the mentoring of
Agrippa, he credits Trithemius with “his role as a proponent, and
possibly an instigator of the witch hunts in the 16th and 17th
century”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius and his
magical master Pelagius Eremita” — the chapter’s epigraph is Peuckert,
“More so than Faust has this man moved the hearts of contemporaries and
posterity: the magician of the emperor and the Rhenish Abbot”;
Trithemius is described as “father of bibliography and forger of
historical codices”, and the four contributions include “his role as a
proponent, and possibly an instigator of the witch hunts in the 16th and
17th century”. From the chapter’s section “Spiritual location”: “he
scattered hints like breadcrumbs leading towards the occult manuscripts
of Pelagius Eremita, which were only to be found and read by the few”;
“No religious community is necessary to forge this bond. With Trithemius
the bond becomes the direct and personal relationship of every man and
their angel. And with this final elitist turn, all responsibility rests
entirely with each individual”; and “In stark contrast to the Solomonic
tradition, what is central to Trithemius’ tradition of white magic is
not an act of demonic command and coercion, but a continuous effort from
the human side towards angelic assimilation.” The chapter’s closing
section reads the pen name as a triple allusion — the fourth-century
heresiarch Pelagius, Ramon Llull, and the legendary hermit Pelagius of
the Codex Calixtinus, whose abbey of St James in Würzburg was
Trithemius’s home for his last decade. That last is the book’s argument
and not this post’s. A book that reports its subject’s
part in the trials has its counterweight already in the body, and that
one is the book’s, not this post’s.
3. The double text
Now the subject the blog cannot afford to blur: what
Steganographia is. In 1499 Trithemius wrote to a Carmelite
friend, Arnold Bostius, describing a book he was finishing; Bostius died
before the letter arrived, the prior of Ghent opened it, and copies went
across Europe.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at In it Trithemius claims, for the
second book, an art of conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any
kind of distance … without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of
messenger”, such that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture …
would not be able to confess anything of the message which is entirely
unknown to him” — adding that all of it can be done “without the help of
superstitious means and without the assistance of spirits”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at Read that last clause again: the
book on angel magic is announced, by its author, as not needing
angels.
Walker’s Spiritual and Demonic Magic (1958) — the same
Walker as the epigraph — established the reading the book’s own footnote
still follows: the first two books of the Steganographia are a
cryptographic system wearing the costume of a grimoire, and only the
unfinished third is the magic it appears to be. (The whole-book version
of the cipher reading, all three at once, is Wayne Shumaker’s.) Acher
accepts the double reading and goes past it:
“The most likely answer is both. Trithemius’ Steganographia
is partly a treatise on cryptography in which the methods of
encipherment are disguised as demonic magic and partly a treatise on
demonic magic.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at
The book does not choose, and it gives the reason: Trithemius
“deliberately chose the most infamous and dangerous genre of his time in
which to conceal his message”, when he could have hidden the same keys
in a poem or a chronicle.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at
And here the book is out of date in its own footnote, which
the post has to say. Its note runs:
“To be precise, most researchers today agree that the first two books
of the Steganographia contain cryptographic instructions in
disguise; it is the unfinished third book, however, that stands out as
it does not seem to contain cryptographic code, yet rather concentrates
on the actual angelic magic described in it in detail, e.g. Walker:
87”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at
That is Walker’s position, cited to Walker: the state of the question
as of 1958, with Walker’s third book the real grimoire. It is no longer
that. Two cryptologists solved the third book — Thomas Ernst in
Daphnis in 1996, and Jim Reeds in Cryptologia in 1998,
whose abstract reads in full:
“Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia (written ca. 1500)
contains hidden cipher messages within what is ostensibly a work on
magic. After almost 500 years these cryptograms have been detected and
solved. (Since 1606 it was known that similar ciphers were present in
Books I and II.) As a result the Steganographia can no longer
be regarded as one of the main early modern demonological treatises but
instead stands unambiguously revealed as the first book-length treatment
of cryptography in Europe.”Jim Reeds, “Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of
Trithemius’s Steganographia”, Cryptologia 22:4
(October 1998), 291–317, DOI 10.1080/0161-119891886948. The passage
quoted is the paper’s abstract, as published on the journal’s article
page (Taylor & Francis): “Book III of Trithemius’s
Steganographia (written ca. 1500) contains hidden cipher
messages within what is ostensibly a work on magic. After almost 500
years these cryptograms have been detected and solved. (Since 1606 it
was known that similar ciphers were present in Books I and II.) As a
result the Steganographia can no longer be regarded as one of
the main early modern demonological treatises but instead stands
unambiguously revealed as the first book-length treatment of
cryptography in Europe.” The same solution was reached independently by
Thomas Ernst, “Schwarzweisse Magie. Der Schlüssel zum dritten Buch der
Steganographia des Trithemius”, Daphnis 25 (1996), and
by Ernst again in Cryptologia (“The Numerical-Astrological
Ciphers in the Third Book of Trithemius’s Steganographia”,
1998). The book under review cites neither; its footnote follows Walker
(1958), which is the pre-1996 state of the question. This is the only
external source the post quotes.
So the correction runs one line further than the book, in the
direction the book was already going: its thesis is that the frame can
be read two ways, and the scholarship since 1996 says Book III is a
third cipher too. The reading did not collapse to “only a cipher” — the
text still tells a practitioner exactly how to do the operation — but
the proportion of the double reading moves. Acher’s “most
likely answer is both” survives on the broader text; his aside that the
third book escapes the cipher does not. The blog reports both:
established, and argued.
4. Hidden in plain sight
The phrase the book uses is the phrase to keep. Acher, on what
Trithemius knew how to do:
“As a life-long reformer of magic and master cryptographer we can
surmise that he would have known how to conceal in plain sight a
heretical teaching in the periphery of a work focussed on a much more
straightforward operation.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Tablet of Truth” — the composition, consecration and operation are
analysed in the sections “The composition of the Tablet of Truth”,
“ALMIEL & the angelic prayer” and “An act of dactylomancy”. On the
mechanism: a positive answer is a movement east–west “from bread to
bread”, a negative one north–south “from wax to wax”. On the angel
ALMIEL, the book notes its appearance in the Key of Solomon’s
third pentacle of Venus (as “Ægalmiel”, which the book reads as a
mistranslation of ALMIEL) and ties the gematria to the Hebrew for
magician or soothsayer, “literally ‘the one who knows’”. The comparison
with Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century) is the book’s, and it is
Acher’s judgement that the older account is the more sophisticated
instrument. The “conceal in plain sight” sentence is from the chapter’s
conclusions, and the table comparing the Tablet of Truth with Francis
Barrett’s “Table of Trithemius” from The Magus (1801) is the
book’s. The chapter’s conclusions also carry the observation that “such
practices could easily land one on the pyre”.
The book also gives the prosecutor’s frame verbatim. In 1504 the
respected Parisian theologian Carolus Bovillus spent two weeks at
Sponheim, was shown the manuscript but not the key to it, and then wrote
to a bishop:
“I took myself to Trithemius; who I encountered entirely as a
sorcerer and in no manner whatsoever a philosopher.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at
And then: “if the good angel of the Lord still exists, as I believe,
so may he cut him in two, right down the middle and resolve the wicked
pact he had formed with the evil angels.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at
That is a frame supplied from outside by a reader who did not perform
the operation and could not read the text. The apparatus of “white
magic” in the title is an attempt to write a magic that could survive
him: Trithemius’s project was to “reintroduce certain forms of magic
into the curriculum of the Christian Church”, knowing the alternative
was “to not end on the pyre”.Black Abbot · White Magic, Introduction — “As a
practicing magician, I will undertake the challenge not through the lens
of an academic scholar, but through that of a magical operator”; “the
foremost intent of this book is to mend and polish this particular link
in the chain and to reinsert the black abbot into the collective memory
of our tradition”; that practitioners “often place a premium on concepts
such as lineage and the historical validity of their favoured tradition”
and that most “are not trained historians”; that Trithemius “attempted
to reintroduce certain forms of magic into the curriculum of the
Christian Church” and had “to not end on the pyre”; “the one essential
goal of all white magic: to make the human and the angelic minds alike”;
and, on the optional prayers, “the experienced practitioner would weave
their own way of praying and creating intentional spiritual contact into
each rite”. The Introduction’s own section headings — “Mending the
chain”, “Learning from ancestors”, “In pursuit of white magic”, “The
structure of the book” — are the book’s. When the work is
legible as sorcery, the practitioner’s problem is not whether the daimon
is real but whether the man holding the book will be believed.
5. The angelic
mind, in the manuscripts’ own words
Acher’s term for Trithemius’s target is the angelic
mind, and the goal is stated in the Introduction in a sentence
worth reading slowly: “the one essential goal of all white magic: to
make the human and the angelic minds alike.”Black Abbot · White Magic, Introduction — “As a
practicing magician, I will undertake the challenge not through the lens
of an academic scholar, but through that of a magical operator”; “the
foremost intent of this book is to mend and polish this particular link
in the chain and to reinsert the black abbot into the collective memory
of our tradition”; that practitioners “often place a premium on concepts
such as lineage and the historical validity of their favoured tradition”
and that most “are not trained historians”; that Trithemius “attempted
to reintroduce certain forms of magic into the curriculum of the
Christian Church” and had “to not end on the pyre”; “the one essential
goal of all white magic: to make the human and the angelic minds alike”;
and, on the optional prayers, “the experienced practitioner would weave
their own way of praying and creating intentional spiritual contact into
each rite”. The Introduction’s own section headings — “Mending the
chain”, “Learning from ancestors”, “In pursuit of white magic”, “The
structure of the book” — are the book’s.
The manuscripts put it in the operative voice. From the first chapter of
Pelagius’s Two Books:
“But if man wants to achieve this, he must unite himself with the
angelic mind and become alike.”Pelagius Eremita, Two Books · Of the knowledge and
name of one’s good angel (Cod.mag.13, Bibliotheca Albertina,
Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig; the book dates the German copy to 1710
or earlier and the Latin original to the later fifteenth century). Book
I, ch. I — “But if man wants to achieve this, he must unite himself with
the angelic mind and become alike”; “the angelic understanding is
complete in all parts”; “and man with the help of the angel can attain a
knowledge of all future and present things”. Book I, ch. II — “this book
is not meant for the unworthy, those who are not worthy of having
contact with it, such as heretics, infidel Christians, those who lead a
swinish life”, running on to “all are incapable and unworthy to possess
knowledge of this.” Book I, ch. VII — the Alphonsus of Salamis episode,
in which the hermit tells the angel, “Watch out that you are not a liar
and a deceitful spirit, for I am a servant of God, and have nothing to
do with lies.” Book I, ch. XVII — “Also based upon such insights and
received revelations nobody should be convicted or sentenced to death”,
and “One should also not inquire about superstitious things, but only
honest, befitting things such as about your health, food, wealth”. Folio
numbers in the book’s citations are to the Leipzig manuscript; the
small-capital drop capitals and the printer’s page-break marks are
normalised here, and one page-break mark inside the ch. XVII passage is
elided as an artefact.
The two minds differ from the outset: “the angelic understanding is
complete in all parts”, while “man with the help of the angel can attain
a knowledge of all future and present things”.Pelagius Eremita, Two Books · Of the knowledge and
name of one’s good angel (Cod.mag.13, Bibliotheca Albertina,
Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig; the book dates the German copy to 1710
or earlier and the Latin original to the later fifteenth century). Book
I, ch. I — “But if man wants to achieve this, he must unite himself with
the angelic mind and become alike”; “the angelic understanding is
complete in all parts”; “and man with the help of the angel can attain a
knowledge of all future and present things”. Book I, ch. II — “this book
is not meant for the unworthy, those who are not worthy of having
contact with it, such as heretics, infidel Christians, those who lead a
swinish life”, running on to “all are incapable and unworthy to possess
knowledge of this.” Book I, ch. VII — the Alphonsus of Salamis episode,
in which the hermit tells the angel, “Watch out that you are not a liar
and a deceitful spirit, for I am a servant of God, and have nothing to
do with lies.” Book I, ch. XVII — “Also based upon such insights and
received revelations nobody should be convicted or sentenced to death”,
and “One should also not inquire about superstitious things, but only
honest, befitting things such as about your health, food, wealth”. Folio
numbers in the book’s citations are to the Leipzig manuscript; the
small-capital drop capitals and the printer’s page-break marks are
normalised here, and one page-break mark inside the ch. XVII passage is
elided as an artefact.
Acher says the instruction deliberately de-personalises the being:
Pelagius “deliberately uses the non-individual form when referring to
the angelic mind”, evoking “the idea of an angelic hive-mind, or at
least the notion that all angels can access the same reservoir of
perfected knowledge”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Two Books” — the analysis opens with an epigraph from Juan de Maldonado
(1570): “Angelic existence cannot be proved by reason: but by
experience, which passes above all reasons, it can be proved.” On the
lexicon, that Pelagius “deliberately uses the non-individual form when
referring to the angelic mind”, evoking “the idea of an angelic
hive-mind, or at least the notion that all angels can access the same
reservoir of perfected knowledge”; “The key to the operation lies in the
gradual assimilation of the human mind to the angelic mind until they
have become sufficiently alike that they can hold a shared space”; “all
of these ritual preparations, prayers and acts of devotion will be null
and void if the practitioner has not adopted a way of life that allows
the angelic mind to come close to and thence continually dwell in
proximity to their human mind”; the closing section’s “a wealth of
relevant material for the modern practitioner”. The
interspecies-communication material is the book’s section of that name:
“deciphering these kinds of prophetic dreams, as Pelagius explains,
remains a source of noise and error”; “Direct exposure to angelic beings
can have all sorts of unintended consequences on the human organism”;
“we should consider if direct exposure to them is such a smart idea
after all?”; “The Achilles’ heel of this method might seem to be our
human (in)ability to differentiate between our own thoughts and the ones
received through angelic mediation”; and “However, if looked at through
a more practical lens, this concern turns out to be void: to the person
with a problem it doesn’t matter where the solution comes from — either
from their own ingenious free spirit or through the mediation of another
being — as long as it solves the problem.” The optional-prayers passage,
quoted by the book from Pelagius at f.52v, includes “need not perform
the prayers at the precise length written here”, “those who pray aright,
pray in their spirit, and not by the number of the psalms” and “for
those who are weak in their prayer and do not know how to go about their
prayer”. The book calls the hermit’s being the “holy daimon”:
“establishing communion with one’s good angel, or as we like to call it
holy daimon”. Set that beside the holy daimon, where the being was named,
personal and met, and the emphasis has moved: what is to be joined is a
body of knowledge with a mind attached, and the operation is
first of all an act of assimilation. Acher is explicit
that this is load-bearing: “The key to the operation lies in the gradual
assimilation of the human mind to the angelic mind until they have
become sufficiently alike that they can hold a shared space.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Two Books” — the analysis opens with an epigraph from Juan de Maldonado
(1570): “Angelic existence cannot be proved by reason: but by
experience, which passes above all reasons, it can be proved.” On the
lexicon, that Pelagius “deliberately uses the non-individual form when
referring to the angelic mind”, evoking “the idea of an angelic
hive-mind, or at least the notion that all angels can access the same
reservoir of perfected knowledge”; “The key to the operation lies in the
gradual assimilation of the human mind to the angelic mind until they
have become sufficiently alike that they can hold a shared space”; “all
of these ritual preparations, prayers and acts of devotion will be null
and void if the practitioner has not adopted a way of life that allows
the angelic mind to come close to and thence continually dwell in
proximity to their human mind”; the closing section’s “a wealth of
relevant material for the modern practitioner”. The
interspecies-communication material is the book’s section of that name:
“deciphering these kinds of prophetic dreams, as Pelagius explains,
remains a source of noise and error”; “Direct exposure to angelic beings
can have all sorts of unintended consequences on the human organism”;
“we should consider if direct exposure to them is such a smart idea
after all?”; “The Achilles’ heel of this method might seem to be our
human (in)ability to differentiate between our own thoughts and the ones
received through angelic mediation”; and “However, if looked at through
a more practical lens, this concern turns out to be void: to the person
with a problem it doesn’t matter where the solution comes from — either
from their own ingenious free spirit or through the mediation of another
being — as long as it solves the problem.” The optional-prayers passage,
quoted by the book from Pelagius at f.52v, includes “need not perform
the prayers at the precise length written here”, “those who pray aright,
pray in their spirit, and not by the number of the psalms” and “for
those who are weak in their prayer and do not know how to go about their
prayer”. The book calls the hermit’s being the “holy daimon”:
“establishing communion with one’s good angel, or as we like to call it
holy daimon”. And the manuscripts put the life
first: “all of these ritual preparations, prayers and acts of devotion
will be null and void if the practitioner has not adopted a way of life
that allows the angelic mind to come close to and thence continually
dwell in proximity to their human mind.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Two Books” — the analysis opens with an epigraph from Juan de Maldonado
(1570): “Angelic existence cannot be proved by reason: but by
experience, which passes above all reasons, it can be proved.” On the
lexicon, that Pelagius “deliberately uses the non-individual form when
referring to the angelic mind”, evoking “the idea of an angelic
hive-mind, or at least the notion that all angels can access the same
reservoir of perfected knowledge”; “The key to the operation lies in the
gradual assimilation of the human mind to the angelic mind until they
have become sufficiently alike that they can hold a shared space”; “all
of these ritual preparations, prayers and acts of devotion will be null
and void if the practitioner has not adopted a way of life that allows
the angelic mind to come close to and thence continually dwell in
proximity to their human mind”; the closing section’s “a wealth of
relevant material for the modern practitioner”. The
interspecies-communication material is the book’s section of that name:
“deciphering these kinds of prophetic dreams, as Pelagius explains,
remains a source of noise and error”; “Direct exposure to angelic beings
can have all sorts of unintended consequences on the human organism”;
“we should consider if direct exposure to them is such a smart idea
after all?”; “The Achilles’ heel of this method might seem to be our
human (in)ability to differentiate between our own thoughts and the ones
received through angelic mediation”; and “However, if looked at through
a more practical lens, this concern turns out to be void: to the person
with a problem it doesn’t matter where the solution comes from — either
from their own ingenious free spirit or through the mediation of another
being — as long as it solves the problem.” The optional-prayers passage,
quoted by the book from Pelagius at f.52v, includes “need not perform
the prayers at the precise length written here”, “those who pray aright,
pray in their spirit, and not by the number of the psalms” and “for
those who are weak in their prayer and do not know how to go about their
prayer”. The book calls the hermit’s being the “holy daimon”:
“establishing communion with one’s good angel, or as we like to call it
holy daimon”.
That is the finding the holy daimon
reported from the other direction — the work on the self is the
prerequisite, and the encounter happens on the way out — stated here as
arithmetic: a life, or nothing.
And here is the counterweight, in the body, and it is the
book’s own. Of the channel through thoughts — the third of the
three Acher identifies, alongside dreams and visible appearance — he
names the obvious objection and dissolves it:
“The Achilles’ heel of this method might seem to be our human
(in)ability to differentiate between our own thoughts and the ones
received through angelic mediation.” “However, if looked at through a
more practical lens, this concern turns out to be void: to the person
with a problem it doesn’t matter where the solution comes from — either
from their own ingenious free spirit or through the mediation of another
being — as long as it solves the problem.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Two Books” — the analysis opens with an epigraph from Juan de Maldonado
(1570): “Angelic existence cannot be proved by reason: but by
experience, which passes above all reasons, it can be proved.” On the
lexicon, that Pelagius “deliberately uses the non-individual form when
referring to the angelic mind”, evoking “the idea of an angelic
hive-mind, or at least the notion that all angels can access the same
reservoir of perfected knowledge”; “The key to the operation lies in the
gradual assimilation of the human mind to the angelic mind until they
have become sufficiently alike that they can hold a shared space”; “all
of these ritual preparations, prayers and acts of devotion will be null
and void if the practitioner has not adopted a way of life that allows
the angelic mind to come close to and thence continually dwell in
proximity to their human mind”; the closing section’s “a wealth of
relevant material for the modern practitioner”. The
interspecies-communication material is the book’s section of that name:
“deciphering these kinds of prophetic dreams, as Pelagius explains,
remains a source of noise and error”; “Direct exposure to angelic beings
can have all sorts of unintended consequences on the human organism”;
“we should consider if direct exposure to them is such a smart idea
after all?”; “The Achilles’ heel of this method might seem to be our
human (in)ability to differentiate between our own thoughts and the ones
received through angelic mediation”; and “However, if looked at through
a more practical lens, this concern turns out to be void: to the person
with a problem it doesn’t matter where the solution comes from — either
from their own ingenious free spirit or through the mediation of another
being — as long as it solves the problem.” The optional-prayers passage,
quoted by the book from Pelagius at f.52v, includes “need not perform
the prayers at the precise length written here”, “those who pray aright,
pray in their spirit, and not by the number of the psalms” and “for
those who are weak in their prayer and do not know how to go about their
prayer”. The book calls the hermit’s being the “holy daimon”:
“establishing communion with one’s good angel, or as we like to call it
holy daimon”.
The blog’s whole instrument set — the
differential, the machine said
so, the label — exists because that
indistinguishability is the problem, not a technicality: a source
trusted as external is a source that can no longer be checked. This is
the book saying the opposite in one clause — origin is dropped for
result — and the two criteria are not reconcilable: if the criterion is
it worked, there is nothing left to check.
6. What the manuscripts
actually prescribe
The blog’s daimon readings have had no practical layer at source;
Acher’s are translations of operations, so it is worth stating plainly
what they ask for.
The Two Books is dream incubation, Christianly
framed. Book I gives nineteen chapters: live alone and
chastely, pray without ceasing, know the star and hour of your angel,
and put the question to God so that it can be answered “in my sleep
through your holy angel N.N.”Two Books, Book II (“Of the Consecration”),
chs. I–VIII, and the book’s own ritual summary. From the translation:
the chamber “should be clean and pure and quiet”, with “an altar with a
crucifix” and three wax candles inscribed with the Trinity, with “In the
name of my angel, and in the name of the seven planets in the celestial
firmament”, and with “the name of our Lord Jesu Christi Nazareni”;
confession and communion; the consecrated wax tablet inscribed with the
question and placed “under your head”; the four-quarters exorcism,
ending “Begone, therefore, far from here, in the name of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit!”; and the instruction to fall asleep
“without having spoken to anyone and not having taken up any other
matter in your thoughts”. The recurring prayer formula is “reveal to me
in my sleep through your holy angel N.N. the answer to my question”. The
book’s ritual-summary table names the phases Preparation, Opening,
Devotion, Confession, Invocation, Conclusion, Banishing, Dream
incubation and Continuation. Book II is the
consecration — a clean chamber with a crucifix and three wax candles
consecrated on a Marian feast, a written question on a consecrated wax
tablet placed under the pillow, a confession, and then a long body of
orisons addressed in turn to Father, Son, Holy Spirit, the Virgin, and
the angel, named by the practitioner as “N.N.”Two Books, Book II (“Of the Consecration”),
chs. I–VIII, and the book’s own ritual summary. From the translation:
the chamber “should be clean and pure and quiet”, with “an altar with a
crucifix” and three wax candles inscribed with the Trinity, with “In the
name of my angel, and in the name of the seven planets in the celestial
firmament”, and with “the name of our Lord Jesu Christi Nazareni”;
confession and communion; the consecrated wax tablet inscribed with the
question and placed “under your head”; the four-quarters exorcism,
ending “Begone, therefore, far from here, in the name of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit!”; and the instruction to fall asleep
“without having spoken to anyone and not having taken up any other
matter in your thoughts”. The recurring prayer formula is “reveal to me
in my sleep through your holy angel N.N. the answer to my question”. The
book’s ritual-summary table names the phases Preparation, Opening,
Devotion, Confession, Invocation, Conclusion, Banishing, Dream
incubation and Continuation.
At the close the practitioner faces the four quarters and speaks an
exorcism — “Begone, therefore, far from here, in the name of the Father
and the Son and the Holy Spirit!” — and then goes to sleep “without
having spoken to anyone and not having taken up any other matter in your
thoughts”.Two Books, Book II (“Of the Consecration”),
chs. I–VIII, and the book’s own ritual summary. From the translation:
the chamber “should be clean and pure and quiet”, with “an altar with a
crucifix” and three wax candles inscribed with the Trinity, with “In the
name of my angel, and in the name of the seven planets in the celestial
firmament”, and with “the name of our Lord Jesu Christi Nazareni”;
confession and communion; the consecrated wax tablet inscribed with the
question and placed “under your head”; the four-quarters exorcism,
ending “Begone, therefore, far from here, in the name of the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit!”; and the instruction to fall asleep
“without having spoken to anyone and not having taken up any other
matter in your thoughts”. The recurring prayer formula is “reveal to me
in my sleep through your holy angel N.N. the answer to my question”. The
book’s ritual-summary table names the phases Preparation, Opening,
Devotion, Confession, Invocation, Conclusion, Banishing, Dream
incubation and Continuation. The Tablet of
Truth is a pendulum operation, the most concretely magical
thing in the book. Attributed to Pelagius and transmitted through the
intermediary Libanius Gallus, its title names its angel: “The Work of
ALMIEL. The Tablet of Truth … under the office and direction of the holy
angel ALMIEL, who reveals the truth in dubious and ambiguous matters”,
with the manuscript’s gloss that “Almiel is a peaceful angel and friend
of life, who abhors the shedding of blood”.Libanius Gallus and Pelagius Eremita, The Tablet of
Truth (Cod.mag.25, Leipzig; Latin title given as Magistri
Pelagii Eremitæ in insula Majoricarum circulus seu tabula veritatis
proscribente eam discipulo suo magistro Libano Gallo, with an older
version in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF Latin 7869). The
work is titled “The Work of ALMIEL. The Tablet of Truth. By Master
Pelagius, hermit in the realm of Majorca under the office and direction
of the holy angel ALMIEL, who reveals the truth in dubious and ambiguous
matters”, with the parenthetical “(Almiel is a peaceful angel and friend
of life, who abhors the shedding of blood)”. From the consecration: the
priest’s interrogation, “Will you act in each operation with maturity?
That is, you will not perform the action out of recklessness, on a
childish inclination, or as a confused or insane soul?”; the requirement
that the officiating priest be no mocker, since his consecration “will
be void”; the grant of “rulership over the spirits”; and the closing
oath, not to show the work “to a person who is unlike us, for any cause,
prize, or reward”. The one occurrence of “safeguards” in the book is in
the fifth consecration prayer, to the guardian angel: “Holy Angel, who
guards the soul of this servant of God and safeguards it on every
path”.
The operator makes a wooden tablet with a design on its face and a
conjuration circle on its reverse, has it consecrated by a priest, seals
a splinter of the True Cross into a cavity in it, and suspends a needle
threaded on silk, stuck into a consecrated piece of bread, over a cross.
A movement east–west is yes; north–south is no. The angel moves the
bread.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Tablet of Truth” — the composition, consecration and operation are
analysed in the sections “The composition of the Tablet of Truth”,
“ALMIEL & the angelic prayer” and “An act of dactylomancy”. On the
mechanism: a positive answer is a movement east–west “from bread to
bread”, a negative one north–south “from wax to wax”. On the angel
ALMIEL, the book notes its appearance in the Key of Solomon’s
third pentacle of Venus (as “Ægalmiel”, which the book reads as a
mistranslation of ALMIEL) and ties the gematria to the Hebrew for
magician or soothsayer, “literally ‘the one who knows’”. The comparison
with Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century) is the book’s, and it is
Acher’s judgement that the older account is the more sophisticated
instrument. The “conceal in plain sight” sentence is from the chapter’s
conclusions, and the table comparing the Tablet of Truth with Francis
Barrett’s “Table of Trithemius” from The Magus (1801) is the
book’s. The chapter’s conclusions also carry the observation that “such
practices could easily land one on the pyre”. That is the operation in full, and
it is a technique — a divinatory instrument with a hinge, a
consecration and a rule for reading it, in the same family as the
ring-over-a-plate of the witch trials that Acher traces back to
Ammianus.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Tablet of Truth” — the composition, consecration and operation are
analysed in the sections “The composition of the Tablet of Truth”,
“ALMIEL & the angelic prayer” and “An act of dactylomancy”. On the
mechanism: a positive answer is a movement east–west “from bread to
bread”, a negative one north–south “from wax to wax”. On the angel
ALMIEL, the book notes its appearance in the Key of Solomon’s
third pentacle of Venus (as “Ægalmiel”, which the book reads as a
mistranslation of ALMIEL) and ties the gematria to the Hebrew for
magician or soothsayer, “literally ‘the one who knows’”. The comparison
with Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century) is the book’s, and it is
Acher’s judgement that the older account is the more sophisticated
instrument. The “conceal in plain sight” sentence is from the chapter’s
conclusions, and the table comparing the Tablet of Truth with Francis
Barrett’s “Table of Trithemius” from The Magus (1801) is the
book’s. The chapter’s conclusions also carry the observation that “such
practices could easily land one on the pyre”. It is described apparatus, with a
named agent and a reading rule.
The General Key is a grimoire of sympathetic
magic, spurious to Trithemius — his own General Key
was the cryptographic key to the Steganographia, a different
book entirely — and Acher is clear that the attribution is false while
defending why the text is worth reading: it condenses the premises of
astral magic into numbered rules and then performs one full example.Black Abbot · White Magic, “The General Key”
(Cod.mag.118, Leipzig) and “Analysis of the General Key”. The text’s
preface: “O most blessed reader, you are honoured to see this document …
Pay attention that you not wickedly abuse such a rich and magnificent
treasure, for if you were to, sooner or later you would feel heaven’s
revenge.” Rule 7 of the twelve includes the prohibition on contact with
a menstruating woman. The example operation (“To cause love between a
man and a woman”) produces a powder “which if drunk to the health of the
person [will ensure] that person will be in love with you incessantly
until their death”, and the prayer over the incense asks “O beautiful
Anael, you who delight in this incense, come to receive this offering …
so that it possesses the power to bind all women in love to me”. The
text’s own caveat: “I do not intend to teach the devil’s work, but that
one has to differentiate evil from good.” Acher’s analysis holds the
attribution to Trithemius to be spurious — Trithemius’s own General
Key was the Clavis generalis triplex in libros
steganographicos, written by 1500 and first printed in 1621 — and
reads the preface’s warning as the common disclaimer of late medieval
magical authors, which “placed responsibility into the hands of the
practitioner” and whose real content is “the most important key to all
operations of magic: to perform them with virtue”. The example is the one the post has
to name, because it is the in-body counterweight to the phrase “white
magic”. It is a love philtre: a dove killed and its heart burned while
still quivering; powders mixed with the operator’s own blood; a
parchment figure written with two names joined by the angel’s name and
burnt; and the result a powder “which if drunk to the health of the
person [will ensure] that person will be in love with you incessantly
until their death”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “The General Key”
(Cod.mag.118, Leipzig) and “Analysis of the General Key”. The text’s
preface: “O most blessed reader, you are honoured to see this document …
Pay attention that you not wickedly abuse such a rich and magnificent
treasure, for if you were to, sooner or later you would feel heaven’s
revenge.” Rule 7 of the twelve includes the prohibition on contact with
a menstruating woman. The example operation (“To cause love between a
man and a woman”) produces a powder “which if drunk to the health of the
person [will ensure] that person will be in love with you incessantly
until their death”, and the prayer over the incense asks “O beautiful
Anael, you who delight in this incense, come to receive this offering …
so that it possesses the power to bind all women in love to me”. The
text’s own caveat: “I do not intend to teach the devil’s work, but that
one has to differentiate evil from good.” Acher’s analysis holds the
attribution to Trithemius to be spurious — Trithemius’s own General
Key was the Clavis generalis triplex in libros
steganographicos, written by 1500 and first printed in 1621 — and
reads the preface’s warning as the common disclaimer of late medieval
magical authors, which “placed responsibility into the hands of the
practitioner” and whose real content is “the most important key to all
operations of magic: to perform them with virtue”. The prayer over the incense asks
the angel to bless it “so that it possesses the power to bind all women
in love to me”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “The General Key”
(Cod.mag.118, Leipzig) and “Analysis of the General Key”. The text’s
preface: “O most blessed reader, you are honoured to see this document …
Pay attention that you not wickedly abuse such a rich and magnificent
treasure, for if you were to, sooner or later you would feel heaven’s
revenge.” Rule 7 of the twelve includes the prohibition on contact with
a menstruating woman. The example operation (“To cause love between a
man and a woman”) produces a powder “which if drunk to the health of the
person [will ensure] that person will be in love with you incessantly
until their death”, and the prayer over the incense asks “O beautiful
Anael, you who delight in this incense, come to receive this offering …
so that it possesses the power to bind all women in love to me”. The
text’s own caveat: “I do not intend to teach the devil’s work, but that
one has to differentiate evil from good.” Acher’s analysis holds the
attribution to Trithemius to be spurious — Trithemius’s own General
Key was the Clavis generalis triplex in libros
steganographicos, written by 1500 and first printed in 1621 — and
reads the preface’s warning as the common disclaimer of late medieval
magical authors, which “placed responsibility into the hands of the
practitioner” and whose real content is “the most important key to all
operations of magic: to perform them with virtue”. A book whose title announces a
purified white magic contains, in the text it publishes, a recipe for
drugging a third party into love. Acher reads the animal sacrifice
level-headedly and does not pretend the operation is anything other than
what it is.Black Abbot · White Magic, “The General Key”
(Cod.mag.118, Leipzig) and “Analysis of the General Key”. The text’s
preface: “O most blessed reader, you are honoured to see this document …
Pay attention that you not wickedly abuse such a rich and magnificent
treasure, for if you were to, sooner or later you would feel heaven’s
revenge.” Rule 7 of the twelve includes the prohibition on contact with
a menstruating woman. The example operation (“To cause love between a
man and a woman”) produces a powder “which if drunk to the health of the
person [will ensure] that person will be in love with you incessantly
until their death”, and the prayer over the incense asks “O beautiful
Anael, you who delight in this incense, come to receive this offering …
so that it possesses the power to bind all women in love to me”. The
text’s own caveat: “I do not intend to teach the devil’s work, but that
one has to differentiate evil from good.” Acher’s analysis holds the
attribution to Trithemius to be spurious — Trithemius’s own General
Key was the Clavis generalis triplex in libros
steganographicos, written by 1500 and first printed in 1621 — and
reads the preface’s warning as the common disclaimer of late medieval
magical authors, which “placed responsibility into the hands of the
practitioner” and whose real content is “the most important key to all
operations of magic: to perform them with virtue”. The boundary between white and
black here is drawn by the intent of the operator, and the same
manual contains both registers.
Two boundaries in that manual belong in the body too. Rule 7 of the
General Key’s twelve, after the instruction that everything
used must be unused, reads: “These things shall not be seen or touched
by a woman or a maiden who is menstruating, otherwise they lose their
power.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “The General Key”
(Cod.mag.118, Leipzig) and “Analysis of the General Key”. The text’s
preface: “O most blessed reader, you are honoured to see this document …
Pay attention that you not wickedly abuse such a rich and magnificent
treasure, for if you were to, sooner or later you would feel heaven’s
revenge.” Rule 7 of the twelve includes the prohibition on contact with
a menstruating woman. The example operation (“To cause love between a
man and a woman”) produces a powder “which if drunk to the health of the
person [will ensure] that person will be in love with you incessantly
until their death”, and the prayer over the incense asks “O beautiful
Anael, you who delight in this incense, come to receive this offering …
so that it possesses the power to bind all women in love to me”. The
text’s own caveat: “I do not intend to teach the devil’s work, but that
one has to differentiate evil from good.” Acher’s analysis holds the
attribution to Trithemius to be spurious — Trithemius’s own General
Key was the Clavis generalis triplex in libros
steganographicos, written by 1500 and first printed in 1621 — and
reads the preface’s warning as the common disclaimer of late medieval
magical authors, which “placed responsibility into the hands of the
practitioner” and whose real content is “the most important key to all
operations of magic: to perform them with virtue”. And the Two Books bars
from the practice “heretics, infidel Christians, those who lead a
swinish life”, running on through gluttons, boozers, the unchaste,
mockers, bandits, murderers, thieves, liars, gamblers, “dalliers”,
adulterers and “black artists”: “all are incapable and unworthy to
possess knowledge of this.”Pelagius Eremita, Two Books · Of the knowledge and
name of one’s good angel (Cod.mag.13, Bibliotheca Albertina,
Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig; the book dates the German copy to 1710
or earlier and the Latin original to the later fifteenth century). Book
I, ch. I — “But if man wants to achieve this, he must unite himself with
the angelic mind and become alike”; “the angelic understanding is
complete in all parts”; “and man with the help of the angel can attain a
knowledge of all future and present things”. Book I, ch. II — “this book
is not meant for the unworthy, those who are not worthy of having
contact with it, such as heretics, infidel Christians, those who lead a
swinish life”, running on to “all are incapable and unworthy to possess
knowledge of this.” Book I, ch. VII — the Alphonsus of Salamis episode,
in which the hermit tells the angel, “Watch out that you are not a liar
and a deceitful spirit, for I am a servant of God, and have nothing to
do with lies.” Book I, ch. XVII — “Also based upon such insights and
received revelations nobody should be convicted or sentenced to death”,
and “One should also not inquire about superstitious things, but only
honest, befitting things such as about your health, food, wealth”. Folio
numbers in the book’s citations are to the Leipzig manuscript; the
small-capital drop capitals and the printer’s page-break marks are
normalised here, and one page-break mark inside the ch. XVII passage is
elided as an artefact. A tradition of white
magic that defines itself by what it excludes has told you something
about itself, and it is not the daimon.
7. The caution, searched and
reported
The vocabulary the blog has used before — safeguard, caution, danger,
pace, warning, protection — was looked for across the whole book.
The word “safeguard” occurs once, and not as a warning:
it is in the fifth prayer of the Tablet of Truth’s
consecration, to the guardian angel, who “guards the soul of this
servant of God and safeguards it on every path”.Libanius Gallus and Pelagius Eremita, The Tablet of
Truth (Cod.mag.25, Leipzig; Latin title given as Magistri
Pelagii Eremitæ in insula Majoricarum circulus seu tabula veritatis
proscribente eam discipulo suo magistro Libano Gallo, with an older
version in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF Latin 7869). The
work is titled “The Work of ALMIEL. The Tablet of Truth. By Master
Pelagius, hermit in the realm of Majorca under the office and direction
of the holy angel ALMIEL, who reveals the truth in dubious and ambiguous
matters”, with the parenthetical “(Almiel is a peaceful angel and friend
of life, who abhors the shedding of blood)”. From the consecration: the
priest’s interrogation, “Will you act in each operation with maturity?
That is, you will not perform the action out of recklessness, on a
childish inclination, or as a confused or insane soul?”; the requirement
that the officiating priest be no mocker, since his consecration “will
be void”; the grant of “rulership over the spirits”; and the closing
oath, not to show the work “to a person who is unlike us, for any cause,
prize, or reward”. The one occurrence of “safeguards” in the book is in
the fifth consecration prayer, to the guardian angel: “Holy Angel, who
guards the soul of this servant of God and safeguards it on every
path”.
There is no “physician”, no “psychiatrist”, no “mental health”, no
“sanity”, and no referral of any kind to anyone outside the practice;
“doctor” appears three times and every one means a learned man.Pelagius Eremita, Two Books · Of the knowledge and
name of one’s good angel (Cod.mag.13, Bibliotheca Albertina,
Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig; the book dates the German copy to 1710
or earlier and the Latin original to the later fifteenth century). Book
I, ch. I — “But if man wants to achieve this, he must unite himself with
the angelic mind and become alike”; “the angelic understanding is
complete in all parts”; “and man with the help of the angel can attain a
knowledge of all future and present things”. Book I, ch. II — “this book
is not meant for the unworthy, those who are not worthy of having
contact with it, such as heretics, infidel Christians, those who lead a
swinish life”, running on to “all are incapable and unworthy to possess
knowledge of this.” Book I, ch. VII — the Alphonsus of Salamis episode,
in which the hermit tells the angel, “Watch out that you are not a liar
and a deceitful spirit, for I am a servant of God, and have nothing to
do with lies.” Book I, ch. XVII — “Also based upon such insights and
received revelations nobody should be convicted or sentenced to death”,
and “One should also not inquire about superstitious things, but only
honest, befitting things such as about your health, food, wealth”. Folio
numbers in the book’s citations are to the Leipzig manuscript; the
small-capital drop capitals and the printer’s page-break marks are
normalised here, and one page-break mark inside the ch. XVII passage is
elided as an artefact. The clinical referral is
absent, which means the second Acher reading in this series has
found the same absence in the same author. A search shows only what it
indexes, so the claim is scoped: within this book, the referral is not
there.
But the operational caution is not absent, and it is stronger
here than in Holy Daimon. It comes in three forms,
each inside the operation.
One — a state check before the work, and it is
explicit:
“Additionally, you should take care not to attempt to inquire in
pursuit of the truth by means of this tablet, in cases when you are not
in a good mental state, if your head is not right, if you are not well
disposed, that is, in cases where you are sad, melancholic or generally
confused, when you are tired, lethargic, scowling, when you have overly
indulged in wine or food or are in disorder in any other way, because
under these circumstances you will not have success in your work, but
rather will experience illusion.”The Tablet of Truth, “Rules to be observed”
(ten rules) and “Here are some notes to be followed during the
operation” (thirteen further notes). Rule 4 — “not in rage and fury and
not with a wine-filled stomach, but on an [empty stomach?] you shall
undertake it and in good health and spirits”, the bracketed query being
the edition’s. Rule 5 — “Never put this tablet to use for the killing of
a human being, for theft, robbery or any other crime by which the
respective person might be killed, for the spirit ALMIEL and his
companions despise bloodshed amongst humans.” Rule 7 — “When you are
posing a question concerning your own matters, liberate yourself from an
excess of involvement in your personal desires and elevate your craving
towards the perception of truth beyond yourself. Should you not do this,
but turn your desires to other matters, you will easily be deceived.”
The state-check passage, following the ten rules — “you should take care
not to attempt to inquire in pursuit of the truth by means of this
tablet, in cases when you are not in a good mental state, if your head
is not right, if you are not well disposed, that is, in cases where you
are sad, melancholic or generally confused, when you are tired,
lethargic, scowling, when you have overly indulged in wine or food or
are in disorder in any other way, because under these circumstances you
will not have success in your work, but rather will experience
illusion.” Note 11 — “The best time to unveil the truth is in the
morning: sober and on an empty stomach”, for “when a man is full of food
and drink, the good spirits despise him.” Note 10 warns the operator not
to bother a hasty spirit “with reckless and useless questions”, since
otherwise “the good spirit will retire insulted, and a wicked one will
come, deceive you with its lies, and weaken the tablet by its presence”;
note 9, to pause when “the mind is sluggish”.
This is the instrument the blog has been asking about since the differential: a rule that says do
not operate in this state. It is a self-check and not a referral —
the remedy for a bad state is to postpone the operation, not to leave
the tradition — but it is written down, at source, for the moment before
the work starts.
Two — a refusal list. The Tablet’s rule 5:
“Never put this tablet to use for the killing of a human being, for
theft, robbery or any other crime by which the respective person might
be killed, for the spirit ALMIEL and his companions despise bloodshed
amongst humans.”The Tablet of Truth, “Rules to be observed”
(ten rules) and “Here are some notes to be followed during the
operation” (thirteen further notes). Rule 4 — “not in rage and fury and
not with a wine-filled stomach, but on an [empty stomach?] you shall
undertake it and in good health and spirits”, the bracketed query being
the edition’s. Rule 5 — “Never put this tablet to use for the killing of
a human being, for theft, robbery or any other crime by which the
respective person might be killed, for the spirit ALMIEL and his
companions despise bloodshed amongst humans.” Rule 7 — “When you are
posing a question concerning your own matters, liberate yourself from an
excess of involvement in your personal desires and elevate your craving
towards the perception of truth beyond yourself. Should you not do this,
but turn your desires to other matters, you will easily be deceived.”
The state-check passage, following the ten rules — “you should take care
not to attempt to inquire in pursuit of the truth by means of this
tablet, in cases when you are not in a good mental state, if your head
is not right, if you are not well disposed, that is, in cases where you
are sad, melancholic or generally confused, when you are tired,
lethargic, scowling, when you have overly indulged in wine or food or
are in disorder in any other way, because under these circumstances you
will not have success in your work, but rather will experience
illusion.” Note 11 — “The best time to unveil the truth is in the
morning: sober and on an empty stomach”, for “when a man is full of food
and drink, the good spirits despise him.” Note 10 warns the operator not
to bother a hasty spirit “with reckless and useless questions”, since
otherwise “the good spirit will retire insulted, and a wicked one will
come, deceive you with its lies, and weaken the tablet by its presence”;
note 9, to pause when “the mind is sluggish”. The Two Books has the same
structure without the tablet, and goes further than a modern reader will
expect: “Also based upon such insights and received revelations nobody
should be convicted or sentenced to death”, and it limits legitimate
questions to “honest, befitting things such as about your health, food,
wealth”.Pelagius Eremita, Two Books · Of the knowledge and
name of one’s good angel (Cod.mag.13, Bibliotheca Albertina,
Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig; the book dates the German copy to 1710
or earlier and the Latin original to the later fifteenth century). Book
I, ch. I — “But if man wants to achieve this, he must unite himself with
the angelic mind and become alike”; “the angelic understanding is
complete in all parts”; “and man with the help of the angel can attain a
knowledge of all future and present things”. Book I, ch. II — “this book
is not meant for the unworthy, those who are not worthy of having
contact with it, such as heretics, infidel Christians, those who lead a
swinish life”, running on to “all are incapable and unworthy to possess
knowledge of this.” Book I, ch. VII — the Alphonsus of Salamis episode,
in which the hermit tells the angel, “Watch out that you are not a liar
and a deceitful spirit, for I am a servant of God, and have nothing to
do with lies.” Book I, ch. XVII — “Also based upon such insights and
received revelations nobody should be convicted or sentenced to death”,
and “One should also not inquire about superstitious things, but only
honest, befitting things such as about your health, food, wealth”. Folio
numbers in the book’s citations are to the Leipzig manuscript; the
small-capital drop capitals and the printer’s page-break marks are
normalised here, and one page-break mark inside the ch. XVII passage is
elided as an artefact. A divinatory technique that can
give a true answer is a technique that can kill someone by accusation,
and the manuscript closes that door in its own list of rules.
Three — an oath sworn to a priest, and it holds the closest
thing in this book to a clinical sentence. Before the
consecrated tablet is handed over, the priest puts a set of questions to
the operator:
“Will you act in each operation with maturity? That is, you will not
perform the action out of recklessness, on a childish inclination, or as
a confused or insane soul?”Libanius Gallus and Pelagius Eremita, The Tablet of
Truth (Cod.mag.25, Leipzig; Latin title given as Magistri
Pelagii Eremitæ in insula Majoricarum circulus seu tabula veritatis
proscribente eam discipulo suo magistro Libano Gallo, with an older
version in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF Latin 7869). The
work is titled “The Work of ALMIEL. The Tablet of Truth. By Master
Pelagius, hermit in the realm of Majorca under the office and direction
of the holy angel ALMIEL, who reveals the truth in dubious and ambiguous
matters”, with the parenthetical “(Almiel is a peaceful angel and friend
of life, who abhors the shedding of blood)”. From the consecration: the
priest’s interrogation, “Will you act in each operation with maturity?
That is, you will not perform the action out of recklessness, on a
childish inclination, or as a confused or insane soul?”; the requirement
that the officiating priest be no mocker, since his consecration “will
be void”; the grant of “rulership over the spirits”; and the closing
oath, not to show the work “to a person who is unlike us, for any cause,
prize, or reward”. The one occurrence of “safeguards” in the book is in
the fifth consecration prayer, to the guardian angel: “Holy Angel, who
guards the soul of this servant of God and safeguards it on every
path”.
The operator swears, gives his hand on it, confesses and
communicates. The check on the person is not a diagnosis and not a
screening; it is a vow taken in front of another man, and the other man
is the priest who has just been told, in the same manuscript, to be
careful that he himself is no mocker, since a mocker’s consecration
“will be void”.Libanius Gallus and Pelagius Eremita, The Tablet of
Truth (Cod.mag.25, Leipzig; Latin title given as Magistri
Pelagii Eremitæ in insula Majoricarum circulus seu tabula veritatis
proscribente eam discipulo suo magistro Libano Gallo, with an older
version in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF Latin 7869). The
work is titled “The Work of ALMIEL. The Tablet of Truth. By Master
Pelagius, hermit in the realm of Majorca under the office and direction
of the holy angel ALMIEL, who reveals the truth in dubious and ambiguous
matters”, with the parenthetical “(Almiel is a peaceful angel and friend
of life, who abhors the shedding of blood)”. From the consecration: the
priest’s interrogation, “Will you act in each operation with maturity?
That is, you will not perform the action out of recklessness, on a
childish inclination, or as a confused or insane soul?”; the requirement
that the officiating priest be no mocker, since his consecration “will
be void”; the grant of “rulership over the spirits”; and the closing
oath, not to show the work “to a person who is unlike us, for any cause,
prize, or reward”. The one occurrence of “safeguards” in the book is in
the fifth consecration prayer, to the guardian angel: “Holy Angel, who
guards the soul of this servant of God and safeguards it on every
path”. There is a witness in the
operation — the only witness in the whole book — and he is there to
refuse it to someone who is not in a position to use it.
And the danger the book names most often is not a danger to
the practitioner at all. It is the danger of being read as a
sorcerer: the Steganographia’s “risk of being construed as
demonic magic”,Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at and the observation that “such
practices could easily land one on the pyre”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Tablet of Truth” — the composition, consecration and operation are
analysed in the sections “The composition of the Tablet of Truth”,
“ALMIEL & the angelic prayer” and “An act of dactylomancy”. On the
mechanism: a positive answer is a movement east–west “from bread to
bread”, a negative one north–south “from wax to wax”. On the angel
ALMIEL, the book notes its appearance in the Key of Solomon’s
third pentacle of Venus (as “Ægalmiel”, which the book reads as a
mistranslation of ALMIEL) and ties the gematria to the Hebrew for
magician or soothsayer, “literally ‘the one who knows’”. The comparison
with Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century) is the book’s, and it is
Acher’s judgement that the older account is the more sophisticated
instrument. The “conceal in plain sight” sentence is from the chapter’s
conclusions, and the table comparing the Tablet of Truth with Francis
Barrett’s “Table of Trithemius” from The Magus (1801) is the
book’s. The chapter’s conclusions also carry the observation that “such
practices could easily land one on the pyre”.
The negative finding, stated plainly: this book carries no
clinical referral, and the check it does carry is a state check plus a
refusal list plus an oath — all of them inside the operation and none of
them outside the tradition. For the blog’s count: Acher’s first
volume has no check, Quareia’s has a clinical triage and a referral out,
and this is the middle case — a gate on the state of the
operator, with no door in it leading out of the practice.
8. The master who never
existed
The whole practical layer of §6 is attributed to Pelagius Eremita,
and Acher argues — flatly, in his own voice, with the evidence set out —
that Pelagius never lived:
“not only is Trithemius the only confirmed literary source we have
for the works of this 15th century hermit, but in fact Pelagius Eremita
never existed.” “The only conclusion to draw is that Trithemius invented
this pen name in order to share his own magico-mystical teachings under
the secure disguise of an occult authority.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius and his
magical master Pelagius Eremita”. The chapter’s untitled opening, before
the section “Critical appraisal”: “not only is Trithemius the only
confirmed literary source we have for the works of this 15th century
hermit, but in fact Pelagius Eremita never existed”; “The only
conclusion to draw is that Trithemius invented this pen name in order to
share his own magico-mystical teachings under the secure disguise of an
occult authority”. From the section “III Trithemius the forger”:
“Overstepping and deliberately blurring the lines between fact, fiction
and forgery, is at the heart of the Western magical tradition, whether
one appreciates or is appalled by it”; “Writing something new was not a
virtue during his time; whatever was new resembled the lie, only the
ancients held the weight and importance of tradition.” The documentary
evidence, in the section “Literary location”: the Two Books’s
citation of Agrippa, so that the dating of the treatise “to 1480 or
earlier is obviously false”, and Carlos Gilly on “the freely invented
purported letter which Trithemius’ alleged teacher Libanius Gallus wrote
on 6.4.1499”, a fiction that “has deceived scientists until today”.
Gilly, Paola Zambelli and Michael Kuper are cited as reaching a similar
conclusion about the letters, at least in part. The fabrications of the
historian “Meginfrid” and the chronicler “Hunibald” are in the same
section, “III Trithemius the forger”.
His evidence is documentary and checkable. The Two Books
cites Agrippa — “as Cornelius Agrippa writes in his Philosophia
about these things” — and De occulta philosophia did not exist
in manuscript before 1510, so the self-dating to 1480 “is obviously
false”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius and his
magical master Pelagius Eremita”. The chapter’s untitled opening, before
the section “Critical appraisal”: “not only is Trithemius the only
confirmed literary source we have for the works of this 15th century
hermit, but in fact Pelagius Eremita never existed”; “The only
conclusion to draw is that Trithemius invented this pen name in order to
share his own magico-mystical teachings under the secure disguise of an
occult authority”. From the section “III Trithemius the forger”:
“Overstepping and deliberately blurring the lines between fact, fiction
and forgery, is at the heart of the Western magical tradition, whether
one appreciates or is appalled by it”; “Writing something new was not a
virtue during his time; whatever was new resembled the lie, only the
ancients held the weight and importance of tradition.” The documentary
evidence, in the section “Literary location”: the Two Books’s
citation of Agrippa, so that the dating of the treatise “to 1480 or
earlier is obviously false”, and Carlos Gilly on “the freely invented
purported letter which Trithemius’ alleged teacher Libanius Gallus wrote
on 6.4.1499”, a fiction that “has deceived scientists until today”.
Gilly, Paola Zambelli and Michael Kuper are cited as reaching a similar
conclusion about the letters, at least in part. The fabrications of the
historian “Meginfrid” and the chronicler “Hunibald” are in the same
section, “III Trithemius the forger”. Every mention of Pelagius and his
messenger Libanius Gallus comes from Trithemius’s own letters and books,
and only his; Carlos Gilly calls one of the letters “the freely invented
purported letter which Trithemius’ alleged teacher Libanius Gallus wrote
on 6.4.1499”, a fiction that “has deceived scientists until today”.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius and his
magical master Pelagius Eremita”. The chapter’s untitled opening, before
the section “Critical appraisal”: “not only is Trithemius the only
confirmed literary source we have for the works of this 15th century
hermit, but in fact Pelagius Eremita never existed”; “The only
conclusion to draw is that Trithemius invented this pen name in order to
share his own magico-mystical teachings under the secure disguise of an
occult authority”. From the section “III Trithemius the forger”:
“Overstepping and deliberately blurring the lines between fact, fiction
and forgery, is at the heart of the Western magical tradition, whether
one appreciates or is appalled by it”; “Writing something new was not a
virtue during his time; whatever was new resembled the lie, only the
ancients held the weight and importance of tradition.” The documentary
evidence, in the section “Literary location”: the Two Books’s
citation of Agrippa, so that the dating of the treatise “to 1480 or
earlier is obviously false”, and Carlos Gilly on “the freely invented
purported letter which Trithemius’ alleged teacher Libanius Gallus wrote
on 6.4.1499”, a fiction that “has deceived scientists until today”.
Gilly, Paola Zambelli and Michael Kuper are cited as reaching a similar
conclusion about the letters, at least in part. The fabrications of the
historian “Meginfrid” and the chronicler “Hunibald” are in the same
section, “III Trithemius the forger”. Acher places the invention in
1505–1509, after the leaked letter and after Bovillus — and he names the
precedent, in a sentence the blog should quote because it is an author
describing his own tradition’s method without flinching:
“Overstepping and deliberately blurring the lines between fact,
fiction and forgery, is at the heart of the Western magical tradition,
whether one appreciates or is appalled by it.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius and his
magical master Pelagius Eremita”. The chapter’s untitled opening, before
the section “Critical appraisal”: “not only is Trithemius the only
confirmed literary source we have for the works of this 15th century
hermit, but in fact Pelagius Eremita never existed”; “The only
conclusion to draw is that Trithemius invented this pen name in order to
share his own magico-mystical teachings under the secure disguise of an
occult authority”. From the section “III Trithemius the forger”:
“Overstepping and deliberately blurring the lines between fact, fiction
and forgery, is at the heart of the Western magical tradition, whether
one appreciates or is appalled by it”; “Writing something new was not a
virtue during his time; whatever was new resembled the lie, only the
ancients held the weight and importance of tradition.” The documentary
evidence, in the section “Literary location”: the Two Books’s
citation of Agrippa, so that the dating of the treatise “to 1480 or
earlier is obviously false”, and Carlos Gilly on “the freely invented
purported letter which Trithemius’ alleged teacher Libanius Gallus wrote
on 6.4.1499”, a fiction that “has deceived scientists until today”.
Gilly, Paola Zambelli and Michael Kuper are cited as reaching a similar
conclusion about the letters, at least in part. The fabrications of the
historian “Meginfrid” and the chronicler “Hunibald” are in the same
section, “III Trithemius the forger”.
Now the blog’s part, and it has to be stated without
tidying. Every one of the operations in §6 is a text Acher
translates in full and recommends to a modern practitioner as “a wealth
of relevant material for the modern practitioner” — and the argument of
the second half is that the man who wrote it was the abbot whose name is
on the spine of the book.Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Two Books” — the analysis opens with an epigraph from Juan de Maldonado
(1570): “Angelic existence cannot be proved by reason: but by
experience, which passes above all reasons, it can be proved.” On the
lexicon, that Pelagius “deliberately uses the non-individual form when
referring to the angelic mind”, evoking “the idea of an angelic
hive-mind, or at least the notion that all angels can access the same
reservoir of perfected knowledge”; “The key to the operation lies in the
gradual assimilation of the human mind to the angelic mind until they
have become sufficiently alike that they can hold a shared space”; “all
of these ritual preparations, prayers and acts of devotion will be null
and void if the practitioner has not adopted a way of life that allows
the angelic mind to come close to and thence continually dwell in
proximity to their human mind”; the closing section’s “a wealth of
relevant material for the modern practitioner”. The
interspecies-communication material is the book’s section of that name:
“deciphering these kinds of prophetic dreams, as Pelagius explains,
remains a source of noise and error”; “Direct exposure to angelic beings
can have all sorts of unintended consequences on the human organism”;
“we should consider if direct exposure to them is such a smart idea
after all?”; “The Achilles’ heel of this method might seem to be our
human (in)ability to differentiate between our own thoughts and the ones
received through angelic mediation”; and “However, if looked at through
a more practical lens, this concern turns out to be void: to the person
with a problem it doesn’t matter where the solution comes from — either
from their own ingenious free spirit or through the mediation of another
being — as long as it solves the problem.” The optional-prayers passage,
quoted by the book from Pelagius at f.52v, includes “need not perform
the prayers at the precise length written here”, “those who pray aright,
pray in their spirit, and not by the number of the psalms” and “for
those who are weak in their prayer and do not know how to go about their
prayer”. The book calls the hermit’s being the “holy daimon”:
“establishing communion with one’s good angel, or as we like to call it
holy daimon”. That is not a
debunking: on his account the material is stronger, not weaker,
for having an author. The blog’s job is narrower. It is to note that the
material offers no independent witness either — the text’s authority
derives from a master, the master was invented by the author, and the
author is the only source. The follower
post and the empty vessel both
dealt with authority routed through an absent person; here the routing
is deliberate and literary, and the person is a pen name. On the book’s
own argument these texts are not a surviving record of a
fifteenth-century tradition but the composition of one man, published
after his own attempt to write in his own name went badly wrong. That is
a finding about a text’s provenance, not about anyone’s experience of
it: nothing here says the operation is inert.
9. The correction the blog
owes
Three readings of this author, and this one has moved the register
twice.
The correction, stated explicitly: the blog’s question has
been where the check is held, and this book moves it to who the
concealment is aimed at. The frames the blog has analysed as
dangerous each put the check somewhere other than the participant’s
hands. The owned cosmos is the cleanest
case, because it hides nothing at all: it names the endpoint and
describes the seat openly — “the cosmology did not merely permit it. The
cosmology described it” — and what makes it the most dangerous of the
three is that its checks are “held by the mediator”. The costume hides the mechanism and the certified frame hides the warrant,
and there too the participant is the one who cannot verify what is being
done to them. So the axis is not hidden versus open but where
the check is held. This book adds a second axis: it is about a
frame hidden from an adversary, where the participant is told
everything. Trithemius writes an operation in full, hides it inside a
text that reads as demonic magic, and the reader he is hiding it from is
the reader who would burn him: the concealment protects the practitioner
from the prosecutor, and the practitioner is given the technique entire.
Acher’s phrase is that a master cryptographer “would have known how to
conceal in plain sight a heretical teaching”, and the record shows why
he had to — Bovillus got through only a few chapter openings and did not
hold the book for longer than two hours, and wrote that the man was a
sorcerer, and that verdict came close to finishing him. The blog owes
the distinction because the two look identical from the outside — a text
that is not telling you what it is — and because the blog’s existing
rule, a frame that hides its structure is doing work on the person
inside it, is false of this one. The rule needs an addition, not a
retraction: the blog must ask who the concealment is aimed
at. Concealment aimed at the occupant is the mechanism;
concealment aimed at a third party is a defence, and the tell is whether
the participant knows the shape of the operation. Here they do. That
correction has a cost: if the same text is legitimately legible as a
cipher and as a grimoire, the reading the blog brings is not neutral —
it is the same act the prosecutor performed, at the same text, with a
different verdict, which is what the machine has no reading says,
arrived at from inside the tradition.
A second correction, smaller and narrower, and the triangle
closes on it. §5 raised the question of whether Acher’s
“angelic mind” is a seat — an owned endpoint with a
person at it — or the lateral guide of the
holy daimon. The book answers it in its own words, in the passage
where Acher describes what the invention was for:
“No religious community is necessary to forge this bond. With
Trithemius the bond becomes the direct and personal relationship of
every man and their angel. And with this final elitist turn, all
responsibility rests entirely with each individual.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius and his
magical master Pelagius Eremita” — the chapter’s epigraph is Peuckert,
“More so than Faust has this man moved the hearts of contemporaries and
posterity: the magician of the emperor and the Rhenish Abbot”;
Trithemius is described as “father of bibliography and forger of
historical codices”, and the four contributions include “his role as a
proponent, and possibly an instigator of the witch hunts in the 16th and
17th century”. From the chapter’s section “Spiritual location”: “he
scattered hints like breadcrumbs leading towards the occult manuscripts
of Pelagius Eremita, which were only to be found and read by the few”;
“No religious community is necessary to forge this bond. With Trithemius
the bond becomes the direct and personal relationship of every man and
their angel. And with this final elitist turn, all responsibility rests
entirely with each individual”; and “In stark contrast to the Solomonic
tradition, what is central to Trithemius’ tradition of white magic is
not an act of demonic command and coercion, but a continuous effort from
the human side towards angelic assimilation.” The chapter’s closing
section reads the pen name as a triple allusion — the fourth-century
heresiarch Pelagius, Ramon Llull, and the legendary hermit Pelagius of
the Codex Calixtinus, whose abbey of St James in Würzburg was
Trithemius’s home for his last decade. That last is the book’s argument
and not this post’s.
And in the same analysis: “In stark contrast to the Solomonic
tradition, what is central to Trithemius’ tradition of white magic is
not an act of demonic command and coercion, but a continuous effort from
the human side towards angelic assimilation.”Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius and his
magical master Pelagius Eremita” — the chapter’s epigraph is Peuckert,
“More so than Faust has this man moved the hearts of contemporaries and
posterity: the magician of the emperor and the Rhenish Abbot”;
Trithemius is described as “father of bibliography and forger of
historical codices”, and the four contributions include “his role as a
proponent, and possibly an instigator of the witch hunts in the 16th and
17th century”. From the chapter’s section “Spiritual location”: “he
scattered hints like breadcrumbs leading towards the occult manuscripts
of Pelagius Eremita, which were only to be found and read by the few”;
“No religious community is necessary to forge this bond. With Trithemius
the bond becomes the direct and personal relationship of every man and
their angel. And with this final elitist turn, all responsibility rests
entirely with each individual”; and “In stark contrast to the Solomonic
tradition, what is central to Trithemius’ tradition of white magic is
not an act of demonic command and coercion, but a continuous effort from
the human side towards angelic assimilation.” The chapter’s closing
section reads the pen name as a triple allusion — the fourth-century
heresiarch Pelagius, Ramon Llull, and the legendary hermit Pelagius of
the Codex Calixtinus, whose abbey of St James in Würzburg was
Trithemius’s home for his last decade. That last is the book’s argument
and not this post’s. A
bond that needs no community, direct and personal, whose whole
responsibility sits with the individual, achieved by assimilation rather
than command: that is the relation the holy
daimon found, and Acher says so with the word — he calls the
Majorcan hermit’s being the “holy daimon”. The blog’s triangle
is therefore not three kinds of relation. It is one relation —
unmediated, unowned, outward — met three times: as a guide, against an
institution, and behind a text. The correction is that the blog
must stop treating the text as a mediator: it is not what
stands between the practitioner and the encounter, but one of the places
the encounter has been stored.
And with that, the counterweight, because the triangular
reading must not be allowed to make the book tidy. The relation
may be the same. The route is not. The Tablet of
Truth cannot be started without a priest: he consecrates the
tablet, blesses the needle and the thread and the bread and the wax,
says three masses, hears the operator’s confession, and hands the
finished instrument over with the words that grant “rulership over the
spirits”.Libanius Gallus and Pelagius Eremita, The Tablet of
Truth (Cod.mag.25, Leipzig; Latin title given as Magistri
Pelagii Eremitæ in insula Majoricarum circulus seu tabula veritatis
proscribente eam discipulo suo magistro Libano Gallo, with an older
version in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF Latin 7869). The
work is titled “The Work of ALMIEL. The Tablet of Truth. By Master
Pelagius, hermit in the realm of Majorca under the office and direction
of the holy angel ALMIEL, who reveals the truth in dubious and ambiguous
matters”, with the parenthetical “(Almiel is a peaceful angel and friend
of life, who abhors the shedding of blood)”. From the consecration: the
priest’s interrogation, “Will you act in each operation with maturity?
That is, you will not perform the action out of recklessness, on a
childish inclination, or as a confused or insane soul?”; the requirement
that the officiating priest be no mocker, since his consecration “will
be void”; the grant of “rulership over the spirits”; and the closing
oath, not to show the work “to a person who is unlike us, for any cause,
prize, or reward”. The one occurrence of “safeguards” in the book is in
the fifth consecration prayer, to the guardian angel: “Holy Angel, who
guards the soul of this servant of God and safeguards it on every
path”. The book is kept secret under an
oath sworn to that priest, and the manuscript’s closing instruction is
that the work is not to be shown “to a person who is unlike us, for any
cause, prize, or reward”.Libanius Gallus and Pelagius Eremita, The Tablet of
Truth (Cod.mag.25, Leipzig; Latin title given as Magistri
Pelagii Eremitæ in insula Majoricarum circulus seu tabula veritatis
proscribente eam discipulo suo magistro Libano Gallo, with an older
version in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF Latin 7869). The
work is titled “The Work of ALMIEL. The Tablet of Truth. By Master
Pelagius, hermit in the realm of Majorca under the office and direction
of the holy angel ALMIEL, who reveals the truth in dubious and ambiguous
matters”, with the parenthetical “(Almiel is a peaceful angel and friend
of life, who abhors the shedding of blood)”. From the consecration: the
priest’s interrogation, “Will you act in each operation with maturity?
That is, you will not perform the action out of recklessness, on a
childish inclination, or as a confused or insane soul?”; the requirement
that the officiating priest be no mocker, since his consecration “will
be void”; the grant of “rulership over the spirits”; and the closing
oath, not to show the work “to a person who is unlike us, for any cause,
prize, or reward”. The one occurrence of “safeguards” in the book is in
the fifth consecration prayer, to the guardian angel: “Holy Angel, who
guards the soul of this servant of God and safeguards it on every
path”. So the relation is
unmediated and the access is gated — by a cleric, by an oath,
and by an instrument only a priest can commission. That is not the western column’s graded curriculum,
where the gate is a syllabus: this gate is not a stage on a path, it is
a permission. The earlier finding was that the West wrote its safeguards
into the syllabus; the addition is that this corner of the West also
wrote its practice into a lock, and gave the key to a man in a
stole.
10. What this reading adds
Two things, briefly. One — the caution is real, and it is not
clinical. §7 found a state check, a refusal list and an oath,
and no referral, which makes the clinical referral look like what it is:
a modern addition, bolted on where a tradition had a gate but no door.
The manuscript’s answer to a practitioner in a bad state is postpone
the operation; the safeguards and the
clinical column say the answer is leave the practice and see
someone. Both are written down, and they are not the same
instrument.
Two — the two-way frame. The blog has spent a great
deal of space on frames hidden from the people inside them. This is the
first source that shows the opposite case from within: an author who
codes his own work, the prosecutor who reads it the other way, and the
reader whose method is to hold both readings at once and refuse to
collapse them. “The most likely answer is both” is the book’s sentence
about the Steganographia, and it is the honest sentence to end
on, because the post had to add a correction to it: the cryptologists
who came after the book’s sources solved the third book, and the cipher
did not stop at two.
What the holy daimon called the check
that was missing, this book has partly supplied and partly left where it
was. The manuscripts write down when not to work. They do not write down
who to tell when the work has gone wrong. And the practice they describe
is not owned by a seat and not mediated by an institution; it is
mediated by a man in a stole who holds the tablet, and it is hidden from
a reader who would kill you. That is not the blog’s cosmology and it is
not the blog’s permission. It is one text, read at its own scale, and
the frame in it is one the blog had not learned to ask about:
not who is being hidden from — who is being hidden from
whom.
Notes
Black Abbot · White Magic, “Trithemius’ Life
and Work” (an English translation of an essay by Professor Klaus Arnold)
and “Trithemius and his magical master Pelagius Eremita”, sections
“Critical appraisal” and “Three incidents” — “I The expulsion from
Sponheim”, “II The Steganographia incident”. The Steganographia
material: the 1499 letter to Arnold Bostius, describing an art of
conveying “my thoughts to the initiate over any kind of distance …
without words, writing or signs by whatever kind of messenger”, such
that a messenger “pressed for an answer by torture … would not be able
to confess anything of the message which is entirely unknown to him”,
and that “all of this can be done when and how often one desires,
without the help of superstitious means and without the assistance of
spirits”; Trithemius’s own account of the source — “By the way, I
learned none of this from a human, but through some kind of – I even
don’t know myself – revelation” — with the dream dialogue in which the
visitor “spoke and taught me every single thing in order, and he showed
me how easily these things could be accomplished”; and “so that you may
know me as a philosopher and not as a sorcerer”. The Introduction
summarises the same material — “Trithemius admitted openly (and much to
his later regret) that most of the cryptographic masterpieces in his
Steganographia were revealed to him by a spiritual entity in
his sleep. Problems he had struggled with for months were suddenly shown
to him in dreams. Who this entity was, whether it was the same youth he
had described in his origin story, or whether he had used any magical
techniques to trigger such contact, he didn’t dare reveal.” — a passage
of the Introduction, not the chapter quoted above. The regret is
attested in the same chapter as the 1507 decision to stop work on the
unfinished third book, for three stated reasons: the first “because of
the harm that its techniques could inflict if used by evil men”, the
last “the opinion of the unlearned rabble, who attribute everything they
cannot understand to the evil arts”; the book only saw print “some 99
years later in 1606”. The Bovillus verdict is quoted from the 1509
letter to Germanus de Ganay. The frame’s ingredient “risk of being
construed as demonic magic” is from the same chapter; the observation
that “such practices could easily land one on the pyre” is from the
conclusions of “Analysis of the Tablet of Truth”, quoted at.
Black Abbot · White Magic, “Analysis of the
Tablet of Truth” — the composition, consecration and operation are
analysed in the sections “The composition of the Tablet of Truth”,
“ALMIEL & the angelic prayer” and “An act of dactylomancy”. On the
mechanism: a positive answer is a movement east–west “from bread to
bread”, a negative one north–south “from wax to wax”. On the angel
ALMIEL, the book notes its appearance in the Key of Solomon’s
third pentacle of Venus (as “Ægalmiel”, which the book reads as a
mistranslation of ALMIEL) and ties the gematria to the Hebrew for
magician or soothsayer, “literally ‘the one who knows’”. The comparison
with Ammianus Marcellinus (fourth century) is the book’s, and it is
Acher’s judgement that the older account is the more sophisticated
instrument. The “conceal in plain sight” sentence is from the chapter’s
conclusions, and the table comparing the Tablet of Truth with Francis
Barrett’s “Table of Trithemius” from The Magus (1801) is the
book’s. The chapter’s conclusions also carry the observation that “such
practices could easily land one on the pyre”.. The same chapter carries the
Steganographia’s “most likely answer is both” passage and the
footnote quoted in §3, cited there to “Walker: 87”.
Marking: documented — every passage in quotation marks,
taken from Black Abbot · White Magic in the Scarlet Imprint
edition (2020, ISBN 978-1-912316-35-9), checked character for character
and cited in the notes by chapter and section; the manuscript quotations
are the edition’s own translations, and the typographic normalisations
are stated in the Status note. The one external source is Jim Reeds’s
1998 Cryptologia paper, quoted from the abstract on the
journal’s article page. Inferred, as this post’s — §4’s reading of the
concealment as aimed at a third party rather than at the participant;
§5’s reading of the “turns out to be void” passage as a criterion the
blog’s instrument set cannot adopt; §7’s classification of the book’s
caution as a state check, an oath and a refusal list rather than a
referral; §8’s separation of the forgery finding (the book’s) from any
finding about what a practitioner experienced (not the post’s); and the
two corrections in §9. The correction the blog owes is stated in
§9 and is not resolved here: a frame that conceals its
structure from an adversary and one that conceals it from the occupant
look identical from outside, and the blog’s existing rule — a frame that
hides its structure is doing work on the person inside it — does not
hold for this book, which tells its practitioner everything and hides
from the prosecutor. It did not fit the
owned cosmos either, whose seat was named openly and whose danger
lay in the checks being held by the mediator. The gap is real
and is also in the body: this book contains no clinical
referral, and the check it does carry stops at the operation’s edge,
where the western column recorded one
that leaves the tradition. Nothing here validates or disqualifies
anyone’s practice, and nothing here is a claim about the state of mind
of Acher, Trithemius, Pelagius, Bovillus or anyone else named.
The cosmology is not endorsed — the post takes no
position on whether an angel, a daimon or a planetary intelligence
exists, and none on whether the operations work.