Johannes Trithemius

Trithemius is the historical scholar whose cryptographic writings become the technical hinge of Colonel Ardenti’s supposed discovery of a Templar message. His systems make a sequence of nonsensical syllables appear decodable, but the novel ultimately shows how a real code can be made to support a false history when its date, provenance, and interpretive assumptions go unexamined.

Identity and Work

Ardenti describes Trithemius as a late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Benedictine abbot of Spannheim, learned in Hebrew, Chaldean, and other languages, including Tartar. He presents him as a correspondent of theologians, cabalists, and alchemists, and says that Trithemius concealed disclosures about secret writing behind magical explanations. His Steganographia, published in Frankfurt in 1606, concerns communicating one’s thoughts to absent recipients through secret writing; although framed in occult terms, many of its examples are military dispatches, and Ardenti calls it one of the first serious studies of cryptography.

This double register—occult spectacle on the surface, technical procedure underneath—makes Trithemius especially useful to Ardenti’s argument. The angels named in the book are presented as aids to decoding, while the examples themselves can be read as cryptographic systems. The distinction matters: Trithemius’s documented interest in codes supplies a plausible historical resource, but it does not by itself establish that the medieval Templars used his methods.

Ardenti’s Decoding

Ardenti says he encountered a Trithemius book by chance and recognized a resemblance between one of its coded messages and the first, apparently demoniacal text on the page he had found among Ingolf’s papers. That text was described as a parody of a Semitic language. Ardenti then located the 1606 edition of the Steganographia in Paris and treated the resemblance as a clue to the supposed Templar document’s meaning.

His decoding proceeds in stages. First, he applies one of Trithemius’s forty major systems, assuming that only the first letter of each word matters. The resulting sequence remains unintelligible, so he turns to the ten minor systems, which use cipher wheels. In the simplest wheel, each letter is replaced by the preceding one in the alphabet; decoding reverses the operation, replacing each coded letter with the following letter. Ardenti says this yields the French sentence “Les 36 inuisibles separez en six bandes,” announcing thirty-six invisibles divided into six groups. The mechanical operation is concrete, but the interpretation of the sentence as evidence for a Templar group is a further—and less secure—step.

The Manuscript and the Claim of Authenticity

Trithemius’s name enters a chain of documents whose status is disputed from the outset. Ardenti says that Ingolf had taken the original parchment to Paris and that the sheet found in an old book was a copy. The surviving page shown to Casaubon and Belbo is itself a photocopy, which Ardenti says he uses to avoid further wear to the original. Casaubon objects that Ingolf might have made transcription errors. Ardenti answers that, because he sees no way the truth could be otherwise, Ingolf’s transcription must count as the original.

That exchange exposes the difference between a reproducible decoding procedure and an unverified claim about the document’s history. The existence of a cipher wheel does not authenticate the parchment, prove who wrote the text, or establish when its wording entered the manuscript. Ardenti’s certainty substitutes conviction for the missing links in the chain of transmission; the copy becomes “original” by assertion precisely where independent confirmation is absent.

Chronology Reverses the Inference

Much later, Lia examines the message’s wording and turns Ardenti’s reasoning around. The French expression about the thirty-six invisibles, she observes, belongs to seventeenth-century usage and appeared in a pamphlet associated with the Rosicrucians’ appearance in Paris. If the message uses a Trithemius cipher and quotes an expression current in Rosicrucian circles, that does not prove Trithemius inherited a Templar code or that the Rosicrucian plan was the Templars’ plan. It suggests instead that the text was composed after Trithemius—and, given the phrase, potentially after the seventeenth century.

Lia offers a simpler possible history: Ingolf, himself interested in hermetic messages and cryptography, may have connected the numbers thirty-six and one hundred and twenty with Rosicrucian ideas, then encoded a Rosicrucian-sounding sentence using a Trithemius system as an exercise. Her account is not presented as conclusively proved, but it dismantles the apparent force of Ardenti’s chronology. Trithemius’s genuine cryptographic work can be used to manufacture the appearance of an older secret just as readily as to reveal one.

Narrative Significance

Trithemius is not a participant in the present-day action so much as an authority invoked within it. Ardenti’s account converts the scholar’s real methods into a bridge across centuries, linking an alleged medieval document to the Templars and their supposed succession. The later reassessment separates the code from the story built around it: a decipherable message is not automatically an ancient message, and a historical technique is not proof of historical continuity.

The novel’s treatment of Trithemius thus makes the act of reading part of the plot’s evidentiary problem. A code seems to promise a hidden truth, yet its solution depends on choices about which letters count, which cipher to try, and what historical context should govern the result. Once those choices are exposed, the same technical clue that appeared to confirm the Plan can instead reveal how the Plan was assembled.