The Abbot Who Hid Secrets Inside Prayer: Johannes Trithemius, Polygraphia, Steganographia and the World That Produced Agrippa

Michelle Hayman

1 day ago

18 min read

Johannes Trithemius is troubling precisely because he cannot honestly be dismissed as an eccentric magician standing outside Christianity. He was inside the institutional Church. He was a Benedictine monk, a priest, an abbot, a monastic reformer, a writer on Scripture, saints, repentance, priestly life and Benedictine discipline, a correspondent of bishops and princes, and a man whose library and scholarship attracted some of the most important intellectual figures of his generation. His own catalogue records that he entered the monastery of Sponheim in 1482, became its abbot in 1483, governed there for more than twenty-three years and later accepted the abbey of St James at Würzburg.

The same catalogue that lists his works on the Rule of Benedict, the priesthood, repentance, Scripture and the saints also lists Polygraphia, its explanatory Key, De Septem Secundeis on the seven celestial intelligences, and Steganographia.

That is where this investigation has to begin. Trithemius was not attacking medieval Christianity from the outside. Nor was he merely collecting codes as a detached mathematician. He occupied ecclesiastical office while constructing an extraordinary intellectual system in which prayer, alphabets, secret messages, Greek and Hebrew characters, numerical correspondences, planetary intelligences, spirits, apparently ritual formulae and theories of hidden knowledge were repeatedly brought into contact with one another. The question is therefore not whether strange material can be found in his writings. It plainly can. The real question is what he thought he was doing, where he believed the boundary between legitimate Christian knowledge and forbidden magic lay, and how a Benedictine abbot became a major figure in the intellectual environment from which Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Occult Philosophy emerged.

The older Latin tradition survived alongside the German place-name. Persee Thus when Trithemius speaks of the library of the ecclesia Argentinensis, he means the church at Strasbourg. There are enough astonishing things in these books without forcing a twentieth-century connection into a sixteenth-century place-name.

What is genuinely extraordinary is what Trithemius himself tells us about Polygraphia. In the dedication to Emperor Maximilian he admits that the work contains “mysteries wrapped in enigmas” and that its deeper meaning has deliberately been kept from universal understanding. He says certain mysteries are especially useful to princes because political government requires secrecy, and he therefore supplies Maximilian with a separate Key so that the emperor can penetrate what lies concealed beneath the figures. The obscurity is intentional. Knowledge is divided between the person who sees the surface and the person who possesses the key.

The first books then reveal exactly what this can mean. Trithemius constructs enormous series of Latin words arranged beneath alphabetic values. The writer chooses one word for each letter of the real message. Because the vocabulary has been arranged so that the selected words can form coherent Latin, an outsider may see a religious exhortation, a devotional text or some other apparently innocent discourse, while the initiated recipient extracts an entirely different message.

His own worked example makes the principle almost embarrassingly clear. Conditor represents C. Clemens represents A. Discernes represents V. Mundana represents E. Put together, the initial hidden result is CAVE: “Beware.” Trithemius then extends the system until the pious-looking outward Latin conceals a warning which essentially says: beware of this man; he is a thief and thoroughly wicked.

This is much more significant than the simple observation that a monk invented a cipher. Trithemius has deliberately separated the visible religious meaning from the actual intended communication. One reader encounters apparently edifying Latin. Another reader, possessing the method, encounters the real message underneath.

Trithemius himself explains the principle through one of the most revealing metaphors in Polygraphia: the relationship between the secret communication and its visible covering resembles the relationship between the invisible soul and the visible body. The outward discourse is the body. The secret is inside it. He repeatedly speaks in terms of light and darkness, visible and invisible, manifest and hidden, outer narrative and inner intention. Once this is understood, Polygraphia ceases to look like a miscellaneous collection of bizarre alphabets. It becomes a sustained theory of double communication: one text for the public eye and another for the initiated reader.

This becomes even more striking when language itself is divided. Trithemius is writing for a culture in which Latin is the language of Church, diplomacy and learned communication, while German is his native tongue. He explicitly adapts his alphabet to accommodate German, including the German W, and explains that a person who does not know Latin may hide a German secret beneath a Latin outward discourse. In other words, the surface text and the meaningful text need not even be in the same language. A reader can see Latin devotion while the recipient reads German intelligence.

The Greek and Hebrew material belongs to the same world. Trithemius repeatedly treats letters as things capable of transformation: they may be given numerical values, represented by foreign characters, replaced with invented signs, hidden beneath complete words or transposed through tables. He discusses Greek numerical characters, Hebrew-style doubling of letters, supposedly ancient Norman and Frankish alphabets, Latin numerical systems and entirely fabricated alphabets. Some of these historical claims cannot be trusted—Trithemius's supposed ancient Frankish authorities include figures bound up with the fabricated historical tradition surrounding “Hunibald”—but the intellectual habit is unmistakable. Letters are not simply marks on paper. They are units capable of concealment, substitution, transposition and layered meaning.

That distinction becomes vital when we encounter names associated with magical literature. Trithemius reproduces an alphabet attributed to Honorius the Theban and says it was used to conceal magical material, referring to Peter of Abano. He also reproduces the secret alphabet of an alchemist. In my view, the alchemist here resembles the figure Christ describes in John 10:1: “He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” The alchemist seeks hidden power and knowledge by another entrance—attempting to reach what is concealed by art, secret technique and manipulation rather than coming through the door God has appointed. In that sense, he is not merely a seeker but one trying to gain access by the back way.Yet his treatment of alchemy immediately turns satirical: he describes vanity, fraud, deception, sophistry, greed, falsity, poverty, despair and begging as the attendants or handmaids of alchemy. He is capable of transmitting a suspicious alphabet while mocking the claims of the people who used it. Possession of dangerous knowledge, in Trithemius, is therefore not automatically identical to endorsement.

The people parading through Polygraphia show the breadth of the genealogy he wanted to construct. Augustus is presented as using substitution to protect imperial communications. Archimedes is linked to a system in which writing becomes intelligible only when wrapped around the correct rod. Cicero is associated with vast systems of shorthand signs, and Saint Cyprian is said to have adapted or enlarged them for Christian use. Plato enters through the story of Theuth and Thamus in the Phaedrus. Cadmus, Palamedes and Pythagoras appear in traditions about the invention or augmentation of alphabets. Bede, Rabanus Maurus, Otfrid and Charlemagne place secret writing within Christian and German learned history. Marcomer, Pharamund and Clodius are recruited into Trithemius's reconstructed Frankish past. The effect is cumulative: secret writing is presented not as one isolated trick but as an ancient art running through rulers, philosophers, Christians, monks, warriors and learned men.

Then comes Steganographia, and here the problem becomes much more acute.

Read literally, parts of Steganographia look like a manual of ceremonial magic. Named spirit-princes govern subordinate spirits. Directions matter. East and southeast appear. The operator is told to pronounce formulae. Spirits are apparently summoned. Instructions speak of repetition, appearance and obedience. Some passages warn of danger. Christian names, invocations and spiritual language surround operations which, on the surface, look astonishingly similar to the conjuration literature of ritual magic.

That resemblance is real. It should not be sanitised.

But neither should it be treated as proof of literal spirit-summoning, because the book contains another level.

One of Trithemius's apparently strange formulae contains a German instruction effectively telling the reader to take the first letters of every word. Once that operation is performed, what looked like spiritual or magical language becomes a cryptographic mechanism. This is no longer a matter of apologetics for Trithemius. Modern cryptanalysis has independently established it. Jim Reeds demonstrated that Book III of Steganographia, long treated as the section most suggestive of magic, contains hidden cipher messages. Thomas Ernst independently analysed its numerical-astrological ciphers. The modern scholarly conclusion is that material outwardly presented as magic carries real cryptographic content. Taylor & Francis Online

This means that a responsible investigation cannot take every “spirit” in Steganographia literally. A passage which looks like conjuration may actually be telling the recipient how to decode a message.

But the cipher does not make the problem disappear. In some ways it sharpens it.

Why disguise cryptography as spirit-conjuration?

Why choose this vocabulary?

Why repeatedly place a practical art of secret intelligence beneath celestial, angelic and magical imagery?

And why use Christian prayer itself as cover?

That last fact is perhaps the strongest piece of evidence in the entire investigation because it does not depend upon guessing Trithemius's private beliefs. His mechanism can be demonstrated.

In one Steganographia example the outward text resembles Christian devotion. It invokes religious ideas and reads as though its purpose were prayer. The concealed message, however, is essentially:

Tonight after midnight I will come to you near the door which leads to the garden. Wait for me there. Make sure everything is prepared.

The visible text and the intended message are radically different.

That does not prove that the Christianity itself was false. Trithemius may perfectly well have believed the devotional statements he used. What it does prove is that he was prepared to employ the appearance of Christian devotion as an instrument of concealment.

That deserves to be stated strongly because it is stronger than speculation.

Christian language could function as camouflage.

The person outside the secret saw prayer.

The person inside the secret saw instructions.

The sacred vocabulary did not necessarily reveal the true purpose for which that particular piece of writing had been constructed.

That is an extraordinary fact to place beside Trithemius's ecclesiastical office.

It becomes more significant when we return to his own explanation of secrecy. He says knowledge that could be harmful if publicly disclosed should be hidden in mystical language. He repeatedly separates the wise or initiated from the curious, ignorant or wicked. Some things are to remain obscure. Some things are for princes. Some things should be transmitted only to those capable of understanding them. In Polygraphia he even warns that higher matters remain concealed beyond what he has publicly revealed.

This is the intellectual world in which Agrippa enters.

Agrippa's connection with Trithemius is not a similarity invented centuries later. It is documented. In the winter of 1509–1510 Agrippa went to Trithemius at St James in Würzburg. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the two spent several intense days discussing natural magic and its place in contemporary culture. The meeting had what the source describes as a crucial impact on Agrippa. Agrippa completed the early version of De occulta philosophia, dedicated it to Trithemius, and Trithemius received the manuscript shortly before 8 April 1510 and responded favourably. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

That chronological sequence matters enormously.

Agrippa was not an eighteenth-century occultist discovering an old monk's book. He sat with Trithemius in the abbey while forming the work that would become one of the foundational texts of Western occult philosophy.

And Trithemius's response contains the principle which runs like a thread through his own writings: ordinary matters may be communicated openly, but higher and secret matters should be reserved for suitable friends. The mentality of Polygraphia is present again: visible knowledge for the many; concealed knowledge for the selected recipient.

Agrippa later makes the connection even more explicit when discussing the seven planetary intelligences. Trithemius's De Septem Secundeis presents a succession of seven intelligences associated with the classical planetary spheres: Orifiel with Saturn, Anael with Venus, Zachariel with Jupiter, Raphael with Mercury, Samael with Mars, Gabriel with the Moon and Michael with the Sun. Their periods extend for approximately 354 years and four months before the cycle proceeds onward.

This is crucial because De Septem Secundeis is not a cipher hidden within a magical-looking paragraph of Steganographia. It is a separate work.

Therefore the discovery that the “spirits” of Steganographia sometimes function as cryptographic camouflage does not prove that celestial intelligences were meaningless to Trithemius.

The evidence demands a more difficult conclusion.

He genuinely inhabited a cosmological world in which celestial intelligences could be discussed, while simultaneously using similar imagery as cryptographic machinery.

Yet even here caution is necessary. Trithemius explicitly distances himself from unqualified acceptance of the system, presenting the doctrine as something reported from earlier authorities rather than simply asserting every part of it as his own unquestionable theology. That qualification must remain because it belongs to the evidence. But the existence of the independent treatise still prevents the entire celestial vocabulary from being dismissed as meaningless theatrical decoration.

The section concerning Michael is especially revealing. Michael is associated with the solar sphere, while Trithemius's historical scheme places within the corresponding period the rise of kingship and tyranny, Nimrod, the growth of idolatry and the redirection of worship from the Creator toward created things. That cannot honestly be converted into “Trithemius worshipped the Sun.” His own narrative treats movement away from the Creator toward creatures as corruption. Yet it proves that the Benedictine abbot was comfortable transmitting a cosmology in which the archangel Michael was connected with the sphere of the Sun.

That becomes significant when placed beside Agrippa, because Agrippa's mature Occult Philosophy develops celestial correspondences with far greater systematic boldness.

In Book I, chapter 74, Agrippa assigns letters to the planets, zodiacal signs and elements. Latin vowels are related to the seven planets; consonants are distributed among the zodiac and elemental scheme. Elsewhere he discusses divine names, characters, celestial signatures, numerical relationships, spiritual intelligences and magical operations. The important point is not that every Agrippan doctrine came directly from Trithemius. That cannot be proved. The point is that Agrippa personally discussed natural magic with Trithemius, submitted his early magical philosophy to him, received encouragement from him and later explicitly drew upon Trithemius's planetary-intelligence material. That is direct documentary contact, not a speculative family resemblance. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Trithemius's extraordinary self-defence now becomes easier to understand.

He knew what Steganographia looked like.

He tells the story of Arnold Bostius, the Carmelite to whom he wrote about the work, and of how the letter circulated after Bostius died. Then came Charles Bovillus, who visited Trithemius, examined the unfinished Steganographia and later accused him of wicked arts, magic and necromancy.

Trithemius reacted fiercely. He says he never had dealings with demons. He rejects harmful magical and necromantic arts. He insists that what he wrote is natural and not opposed to Christianity. Later he states with unmistakable force: he is a Christian, a priest and a Benedictine monk; he loves Christ (really?); he has no commerce with demons and intends to have none.

Those words matter.

But a profession of innocence is evidence of what a man claimed and understood himself to be, not an automatic theological verdict on everything he wrote.

Modern decipherment nevertheless vindicates part of his defence in a very concrete way. Bovillus saw material that looked like necromantic conjuration and judged it literally. The ciphers demonstrate that at least substantial portions of that appearance were deliberately constructed cryptographic cover.

So Trithemius was right that readers could misunderstand the work because they did not possess its key.

But that does not close the case, because Trithemius also inhabited an intellectual environment containing celestial intelligences, natural magic, Cabalistic secrecy, numerical systems and ideas about hidden correspondences. The most accurate picture is therefore neither “innocent code-maker falsely accused by idiots” nor “secret necromancer exposed by Bovillus.” It is a learned Christian abbot working at a boundary which his own age found difficult to define.

Thomas Aquinas helps us understand that boundary. And here we meet one of scholasticism’s more convenient inventions: the supposedly indelible sacramental “character” imprinted upon the soul by ordination—ah yes, that invisible metaphysical mark which Catholic theology makes the permanent basis of clerical power and sacramental orders, while Scripture itself never describes any such character being stamped upon a man’s soul, much less presents it as the source of a bishop’s power to ordain.

Medieval Christian thought did not automatically classify every claim about angelic governance of celestial things as witchcraft. Aquinas could discuss spiritual beings within the divine government of material creation. But he drew a very different line at illicit invocation, divination and attempts to obtain supernatural effects through characters or spirits independently of legitimate divine order. Thus “an angelic intelligence moves a heavenly sphere” and “I conjure a spirit to obey me” are not the same theological proposition.

This is why the cryptographic discoveries matter so much. If Trithemius's “conjuration” is actually an elaborate instruction to take certain letters, we cannot honestly classify that operation as literal consultation of spirits. But where he independently discusses planetary intelligences, that material must be examined on its own terms.

The same discipline is necessary when applying Scripture.

The KJV gives no ambiguity concerning actual occult consultation. Deuteronomy 18 condemns divination, enchantments, familiar spirits and necromancy. Isaiah 8 asks why the living should seek unto the dead rather than unto God. Acts 16 distinguishes the Holy Ghost from a spirit of divination. Acts 19 presents magical books as things renounced rather than Christianised. Paul says pagan sacrifice is offered to devils in 1 Corinthians 10:20. Colossians 2:18 warns against the worshipping of angels. First John 4:1 commands believers to “try the spirits whether they are of God.” Second Corinthians 11:14 warns that Satan himself may appear as “an angel of light.” And 1 Timothy 4:1 speaks of “seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils.”

Those texts leave no Christian permission for summoning spirits to obtain hidden knowledge merely because the operator sprinkles the procedure with the name of Christ.

If a rite actually instructs the operator to invoke a spirit, demand information from it, command it or depend upon it for supernatural revelation, attaching the Trinity, Christ, Mary, Latin prayer or ecclesiastical language to the operation cannot make the forbidden practice Christian. A doctrine does not become apostolic because Christian words have been placed around it.

That is precisely why the issue of masquerade deserves careful use.

There is one masquerade that can be proved beyond reasonable doubt in Trithemius: he intentionally creates writing that looks Christian while carrying another message.

That is factual.

There is another claim—that the entire system represents literal demonic doctrine masquerading as Christianity—which cannot simply be declared proved, because some of the apparently magical operations are demonstrably cryptographic constructions.

The first finding should therefore be pressed harder, not diluted by the second.

Trithemius has shown us, with his own machinery, that outward Christian vocabulary is not necessarily evidence of the purpose of a text.

A page may say “Creator,” “Saviour,” “mercy,” “Virgin,” “Passion,” “blood,” “repentance” and “eternal life” and yet have been deliberately engineered to communicate something else to the initiated.

That fact should make any reader very cautious about judging an operation merely by its religious vocabulary.

But it does not prove that Christian prayer itself is corrupt.

Nor does the presence of rosaries in Trithemius's bibliography establish that the rosary was secretly invented as cipher technology. His catalogue genuinely includes rosaries and devotional works. His cryptography genuinely includes pious vocabulary. Those are two proven facts. The leap from those facts to “the rosary is a cryptographic occult device” would require evidence we do not presently have.

The same discipline should be maintained with “characters.” In one place character may simply mean a written sign or substituted letter. In another author it can mean a celestial mark, magical seal or talismanic figure. Agrippa later invests characters with a much more explicitly cosmological significance. Trithemius's world certainly helps explain how letters, numbers and signs could become vehicles of hidden knowledge, but technical vocabulary must be examined passage by passage.

And this brings us back to the Church.

It would be easy to say, “Here is proof that the clergy were practising the doctrines of devils.” It would also be weak history.

Trithemius's own evidence does not establish a clergy-wide conspiracy. In fact the reaction to him proves disagreement. Bovillus denounced him. Trithemius defended himself. His books circulated among churchmen and rulers. Steganographia was finally printed after his death, and later Catholic authorities placed it on the Index.

There is another irony here. Trithemius repeatedly insists that concealed language can prevent ordinary people from understanding what is actually being communicated, yet for centuries the Roman Mass itself was ordinarily celebrated in Latin before congregations who often did not understand Latin. If intelligibility matters so much when exposing hidden meanings, why was the worship of God not ordinarily given to the people in the language they actually understood? Paul’s principle could scarcely be plainer: “I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue” (1 Corinthians 14:19, KJV).

To be fair, this is no longer generally the situation. Since the reforms following Vatican II, Roman Catholic Mass is ordinarily celebrated in vernacular languages such as English or Spanish, although Latin remains permitted and Vatican II itself ordered that its use be preserved in the Latin rites. Significantly, the Council also admitted that use of the mother tongue could be “of great advantage to the people.” Vatican One might reasonably ask why something of such obvious advantage to understanding required so many centuries to become normal practice.The work was controversial precisely because everyone inside ecclesiastical culture did not agree about how it should be classified.

What the evidence does establish is, in some ways, more serious because it is harder to dismiss.

A Benedictine abbot of substantial ecclesiastical standing could simultaneously write conventional Christian theology and devotion, cultivate secret knowledge, construct systems in which Christian language concealed unrelated messages, collect foreign and allegedly magical alphabets, write on celestial intelligences, discuss natural magic, surround cryptographic operations with the appearance of conjuration, correspond with powerful rulers about secrecy, and become a formative influence on the young Agrippa as Agrippa developed De occulta philosophia.

That is not a conspiracy theory.

It is the documentary record.

Trithemius himself tells us his theory of concealment. Dangerous knowledge, he says, should not be made universally available; mysteries may be wrapped in enigmas; outward language may carry an entirely different hidden intention; and certain things are to be reserved for princes and carefully chosen recipients. His cryptographic systems do not merely discuss that principle—they put it into practice. Then Agrippa arrives at Würzburg, discusses natural magic with him, places the early De occulta philosophia before him, and receives encouragement from the Benedictine abbot. Modern scholarship regards that encounter as crucial to Agrippa’s intellectual development.

At that point, quite frankly, the titles and ecclesiastical offices of these men cease to impress me. Scripture does not tell believers to submit truth to the authority of abbots, philosophers or occult theorists; it says, “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29, KJV). And when a system can employ prayers, the language of Christ, saints and devotion as an outward covering for something entirely different underneath, the Christian is entitled to ask what exactly is being concealed by the religious appearance. Paul warned that men would give heed to “seducing spirits, and doctrines of devils” (1 Timothy 4:1). That does not permit us to declare without evidence that Trithemius was literally worshipping demons, but neither should clerical clothing, Latin prayer or the word Christian prevent the operation itself from being tested against Scripture.

So the uncomfortable question is not, “Was every churchman secretly a witch?” The evidence does not establish that. The more defensible and disturbing question is: how did men occupying positions of Christian authority become transmitters of systems involving natural magic, celestial intelligences, occult secrecy and texts in which Christian prayer itself could be used as camouflage? If the outward form can be Christian while the concealed purpose is something else, then the robe, the title and the prayer cannot be our test. The test has to be the one Scripture gives us: what is actually being taught, invoked and practised beneath the appearance?

This is why Trithemius matters far beyond the history of codes.

He stands at a junction.

Behind him lie monastic learning, medieval angelology, Latin Christianity, classical mnemonic and shorthand traditions, astrology, Cabala, theories of celestial mediation and the recovery of ancient texts.

Beside him stand princes who want secure communications and ecclesiastics debating what constitutes legitimate hidden knowledge.

In front of him stands Agrippa.

And beyond Agrippa lies a vast stream of Western occult philosophy in which letters, numbers, names, planets, angels, characters, seals and correspondences become elements of an integrated magical universe.

Trithemius should therefore neither be excused into irrelevance nor condemned beyond what his texts establish.

He cannot be reduced to “just a cryptographer,” because his independent celestial-intelligence writings and his documented relationship with Agrippa prevent that simplification.

He cannot responsibly be called a proven demon-conjurer, because cryptanalysis has shown that some of the very passages which look most like spirit magic conceal mechanical cipher instructions. Taylor & Francis Online

He cannot simply be presented as representative of “the Church,” because churchmen disagreed about him.

And yet neither can the Christian setting be treated as incidental.

He was an abbot.

He wrote the codes as an abbot.

He wrote the prayers as an abbot.

He wrote on celestial intelligences as an abbot.

He received Agrippa as an abbot.

He read and encouraged Agrippa's early occult philosophy as an abbot.

That tension is the story.

The most disturbing evidence is therefore not a sensational allegation that Trithemius secretly worshipped demons. It is the quieter thing he actually demonstrates: Christian appearance and intended meaning can be separated. A page can look like devotion and function as intelligence. An invocation can look like spirit magic and contain a cipher. A strange celestial system can appear in one text as camouflage and in another as an independently discussed cosmology. The same man can denounce demonic magic and yet cultivate an esoteric intellectual system which later occult philosophers could inherit and develop.

For a Christian reader the correct test is therefore not the costume.

It is the operation.

Where does the knowledge come from?

What is being invoked?

Who is being addressed?

What authority is claimed?

What is the purpose of the characters, words or names?

Is the “spirit” merely part of a code, or is an actual spiritual intelligence being asked to act?

Is prayer directed to God, or is Christian language functioning as the religious wrapper around some other operation?

Scripture repeatedly requires that distinction. “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God” is not an instruction to accept an operation because it sounds Christian. It is precisely an instruction to examine what lies behind the appearance.

And that is why Trithemius deserves examination rather than either automatic acquittal or careless accusation.

His surviving writings show that by the beginning of the sixteenth century a Benedictine abbot could stand at the intersection of institutional Christianity, cryptography, celestial philosophy and the emerging Renaissance occult synthesis. He could write Christian prayer and simultaneously make prayer into camouflage. He could denounce demons while presenting systems populated by spirit-princes. He could warn against dangerous knowledge while teaching methods for concealing it. He could condemn superstition while discussing natural magic with the man who would become the most famous systematic expositor of Renaissance occult philosophy.

The question left for the reader is therefore sharper than “Was Trithemius a magician?”

It is this:

How much can Christian terminology prove when the very man using it has taught us, in painstaking detail, how sacred-looking language may conceal another meaning underneath?

That does not prove “doctrines of devils.”

But it does destroy the argument that Christian vocabulary, clerical office or devotional appearance is sufficient evidence that an operation is Christian.

And once Polygraphia, Steganographia, De Septem Secundeis and the Trithemius–Agrippa correspondence are read together, the historical problem can no longer be brushed aside as a few eccentric ciphers written by a harmless old monk. It is evidence of a much deeper intellectual boundary—one being negotiated inside the ecclesiastical world itself—between revelation and secret knowledge, prayer and formula, angelology and spirit-operation, ordinary writing and hidden writing, and Christianity and the developing occult philosophy of the Renaissance.

Revelation 18:4, KJV

“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”

Revelation 18:23, KJV

“And the light of a candle shall shine no more at all in thee; and the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride shall be heard no more at all in thee: for thy merchants were the great men of the earth; for by thy sorceries were all nations deceived.”

The Greek word behind “sorceries” in Revelation 18:23 is φαρμακεία (pharmakeia), which can refer to sorcery, magic, enchantment, or magical arts. In context, Revelation presents Babylon as deceiving the nations through those practices.

Here's my translation, forgive the lack of alignment I rushed it. Below see the original Latin