Читать книгу The Queen’s Conjuror: The Life and Magic of Dr. Dee - Benjamin Woolley - Страница 19

Soon after Elizabeth’s coronation, Dee vanished. For nearly five years, he is absent from all historical records.¹ All that can be divined was that he spent much of his time abroad, continued collecting books and started to explore a new field of research: the Cabala.

The Cabala was a potent combination of language, mathematics and mysticism based around Hebrew. Dee had taught himself the language, and acquired his first Hebrew texts around this time. Thanks to the influence of humanists such as John Cheke, there had been a growth of interest in Hebrew, because of its potential to release the knowledge contained in ancient texts. But for the Cabalists, Hebrew was much more than another language, because they believed encoded within it were the secrets of the universe.

‘In the beginning was the Word,’ as St John put it. Dee and his contemporaries assumed that Word to have been in Hebrew, or rather its original pure form before it became corrupted by Adam’s Fall. Thus, an analysis of Hebrew was a way of discovering the structure that underlay God’s creation. The laws of nature were its grammar, the stuff of physical reality its nouns.²

Cabalism’s obscure origins go back to first century Palestine. By the sixteenth century, it was regarded in orthodox academic circles with the same suspicion as mathematics, with which it shared many features. Among the multiplicity of methods it used to study language was Gematria, which involved searching for numbers which could be substituted for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. By then performing arithmetical operations with these numbers, for example by ‘adding’ two words together, it was hoped to find a mathematical relationship underlying the language which would show how one phrase related to another.

Another feature of the Cabala was its numerological preoccupation with angels. Indeed, one of the purposes of Gematria was to work out how many there were (as many as 301,655,172 according to some calculations).³ It also provided a means for working out their names and relationships to one another. For example, it identified the seventy-two angels who provide a route to understanding the ‘sephiroth’ – the ‘ten names most common to God’ which together make his ‘one great name’. The names of such angels were derived from the Hebrew description of their function, suffixed with an ending such as ‘el’ or ‘iah’.

These angels exist at the top, divine level of the Cabala’s three-tiered universe. Below them lay the celestial level of the stars, and at the bottom the elemental level of the physical world. This structure is reflected in the Hebrew language itself, in the three parts of Hebrew speech and the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, which divided into two groups of nine letters and one of four, corresponding to the nine orders of angels, nine spheres and four elements.

Such correspondences strike the modern mind as meaningless. Meric Casaubon, who published Dee’s spiritual diaries a century later, warned that ‘some men come into the world with Cabalistical Brains, their heads are full of mysteries… Out of the very ABC that children are taught…they will fetch all the Secrets of God’s Wisdom’.⁴ But to Dee, it provided a crucial link between language and the mathematical basis of nature.

The Cabala also had a practical, magical side. Since language was tied into the formation of the universe, words had the potential to change it. Cabalism provided a technology for engineering incantations that could summon spirits and influence events, as prayers are supposed to do, but formulated according to systematic, almost scientific principles. And, unlike prayers, such incantations would work whether you were Catholic or Protestant.⁵

There is no evidence that Dee tried to use the Cabala in this way at this stage in his career. He was, however, fascinated by another practical use, an application of particular interest in the tense atmosphere of Reformation Europe, where governments were eager to find ways of preserving their own secrets and discovering those of their rivals – the creation of secret codes and ciphers.

In February 1563, Dee reappears in the busy merchant town of Antwerp, staying at the sign of the Golden Angel. Still engaged in his endless, expensive search for works to add to his library, he was about to make what he considered to be the find of his life.

Antwerp was filled with the clatter of printing presses. It boasted one of the world’s most important publishing firms, founded by Christopher Plantin, whose ‘Officina Plantiniana’ workshop turned out thousands of Christian and humanist works distributed across Europe and as far afield as the Spanish colonies in Mexico and South America. But Plantin also produced several heretical works, notably those of Hendrick Niclaes, founder of the ‘family of love’. This secretive sect, whose members came to be called ‘Familists’, included Dee’s friend the mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, and the Birkmanns, a powerful bookselling family based in Cologne. Dee patronised their London shop continuously over forty years, falling into conversation with anyone who happened to be there.⁶ The familists invited all ‘lovers of truth…of what nation and religion soever they be, Christian, Jews, Mahomites, or Turks, and heathen,’ to become part of a learned brotherhood.⁷ They believed that members could show allegiance to any prevailing religious doctrine in order to promote the movement’s aims of developing an all-embracing theology. This reflected Dee’s own view, and it is likely he knew of and was sympathetic to the sect.⁸

During the winter of 1563, Dee heard rumours that a copy of one of the most precious manuscripts in circulation, for which scholars from all over Europe had been searching for over sixty years, had turned up in Antwerp. It was called Steganographia, and had been written by Johannes Trithemius.

Trithemius was one of the founders of modern cryptography. He wrote the first published work on the subject, Polygraphia, which appeared in 1518. Born in 1462, he took his name from Trittenheim, a town on the left bank of the Moselle in Germany. He claimed to be unable to read until he was fifteen. At that age he had a dream in which he was presented with two tablets, one inscribed with writing, the other with pictures. Told to choose between them, he picked the tablet with writing because of his ‘longing for knowledge of Scripture’.⁹

He later joined the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim, which was then ‘poor, undisciplined, ruinous, and virtually without furniture’. In July 1483, he was appointed abbot, and embarked on a complete renovation of the place, transforming it into a centre of learning. He built a lodge for visiting scholars, decorating the walls with classical and contemporary prose and poetry. He also rebuilt the library, increasing it from just forty-eight books to two thousand.

Trithemius’s book-collecting drew him towards the study of the Cabala, and his work became a strong influence for many of the great mystic scholars of the early sixteenth century, notably Henry Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim, who was his pupil. Agrippa was the leading writer on mysticism and magic of the Renaissance. His shadow ‘made all Europe honour him’, Marlowe wrote in Dr Faustus.

As with Dee, Trithemius’s interest in such subjects led to his being accused of ‘trafficking’ with demons. It was even said he conjured up the bride of Maximilian I soon after her death so the Emperor could see her once more. As Trithemius kept his work increasingly secret, so these accusations became ever more insistent and threatening.

Dee knew of the accusations against Trithemius, placing him alongside Socrates and Pico della Mirandola (pioneer of a Christian form of the Cabala) as a victim of intolerance. Like Dee, Trithemius drew a sharp division between magic and superstition. Magic was about knowledge, the study of the hidden forces – spiritual as well as physical – that rule nature. Superstition exploited ignorance. Thus Trithemius called for witches and wizards to be rooted out, and attacked the sort of fortune-telling which was practised by Dee’s contemporaries like Nostradamus as ‘empty and foolish’.

Trithemius summed up his career: ‘I always wanted to know what was knowable in the world…But it was not within my power to satisfy the desire as I wished.’ This was a sentiment Dee would one day echo. But for the moment, with his growing library, knowledge of languages and science, his influence at court and friendships with Europe’s leading intellectuals, Dee seemed at the threshold of complete success. And now he had a copy of Steganographia within his grasp.

Trithemius had started work on the book between 1499 and 1500. He sent a letter to his friend Arnold Bostius, a Carmelite monk in Ghent, in which he boasted that once finished it would be a ‘great work… that, if it should ever be published (which God forbid), the whole world will wonder at’. He promised that it would contain a host of hidden writing systems, a way of transmitting messages over great distances using fire, a method of teaching Latin in two hours and a form of communication that can be achieved while eating, sitting or walking without speech, facial expressions or signs. Unfortunately Bostius died before the letter arrived and it was read with horror by his brother Carmelites, who circulated it in an attempt to discredit Trithemius.

A further setback came when Trithemius was visited by an officious dignitary called Carolus Bovillus in 1500. Bovillus later reported that ‘I hoped that I would enjoy a pleasing visit with a philosopher; but I discovered him to be a magician.’ It was his perusal of the Steganographia, in particular its lists of the ‘barbarous and strange names of spirits’ in languages he did not recognise, that convinced him of this.¹⁰

Trithemius then abandoned the work, dying in 1516. But the Steganographia lived on, thanks to its advance publicity: manuscript copies of three of the four books mentioned by Bovillus were thought to have survived. They soon acquired mythical status and became as sought after as Aristotle’s lost dialogues.

Dee was intensely excited when he heard of the existence of a copy of the manuscript in Antwerp. Getting his hands on it proved difficult. It involved spending all his travelling money, some twenty pounds, and working through an intermediary, a mysterious ‘nobleman of Hungary’, who in return demanded that Dee ‘pleasure him…with such points of science as… he requireth’.¹¹ Even then, he was only allowed to keep the manuscript for ten days.

Tucked away in his lodgings at the sign of the Golden Angel, he began transcribing the work. It was a difficult task. Ignoring any problems of legibility, the manuscript was a difficult one to copy. It was filled with tables of numbers and endless lists of nearly identical and apparently meaningless names. Dee had to work round the clock to get the job done in time.

On 16 February 1563, he forced his tired fingers to pen one more document: a letter to William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s key minister, reporting the discovery of this, ‘the most precious jewel that I have yet of other men’s travails recovered’, and begging for some recompense for his costs, which had left him virtually penniless.¹² This discovery demonstrated why Elizabeth’s regime needed someone with his contacts and understanding scouring the Continent for new texts and ideas, and why it was worth paying him to allow him to continue.

When Dee wrote his letter, he knew that it was about to embark on a long and perilous journey that could last a few days or several weeks with no means of knowing when or even if it would reach its destination.

As every sixteenth-century prince and general knew, distance was the first enemy. Roads were often impassable, ‘noisome sloughs’, ‘so gulled with the fall of water that passengers cannot pass’.¹³ Despite such barriers and discomforts, despite the enormous cost, Tudor nobles, scholars and merchants were determined to travel. There was constant traffic of people and goods across Europe and as a result growing interdependence between regions. A system that promised instant communications over unlimited distances was of obvious importance, and that was one of many innovations that Trithemius had boasted to Bostius the Steganographia contained. When Dee finally managed to read the manuscript for himself, he found that Trithemius was apparently equal to his word. The Steganographia was divided into three books, the last incomplete and of a rather different nature to the first two. Books I and II describe an enormously elaborate system for sending messages between two people using incantations.

Trithemius gave several examples of how the system would work. For instance, the sender of a message first writes it out, using any language he chooses, after a preamble of paternosters and other supplications. He then speaks a special formula to summon one of the many spirits identified by Trithemius, say, Padiel:

Padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas peludyn malpreaxo. Condusen, vlearo thersephi bayl merphon, paroys gebuly mailthomyon ilthear tamarson acrimy Ion peatha Casmy Chertiel, medony reabdo, lasonti iaciel mal arti bulomeon abry pathulmon theoma pathormyn.¹⁴

Padiel should then appear, whereupon the sender hands over the message. The spirit takes it to the recipient, who must speak another incantation, and the meaning of the message becomes clear.

To complicate matters further, the sender must learn the ‘places, names, and signs of the principal spirits, lest through ignorance one calls from the north a spirit dwelling in the south; which would not only hinder the purpose but might also injure the operator’.¹⁵ There are hundreds of thousands of spirits – some of which appear in the day, others of which prefer the dark of the night, some subordinate to others – each with its own sign. Books I and II list many of them, giving details of their powers and peculiarities and the conjurations needed to call them.

Book III, which is incomplete, is very different. It begins by promising even greater feats of communication than the first two, which are based on the discoveries of an ancient (apparently fictional) philosopher called Menastor. In the tradition of occult knowledge, the findings have been, Trithemius warns, presented in a way so that ‘to men of learning and men deeply engaged in the study of magic, it might, by the Grace of God, be in some degree intelligible’ but not to ‘thick-skinned turnip-eaters’.¹⁶

Instead of endless epistles, Book III is filled with tables. They are messily laid out, except for the one which appears in the book’s preface. This assigns numerical values for twenty-one spirits, each of which is associated with one of the seven planets. There will, Trithemius promises, be seven chapters in the following book, one for each planet. Chapter 1, which is the only one to survive, duly follows with a description of how to call on the help of Saturn to communicate with a fellow adept. It is accompanied by a series of numerical tables which are apparently to be used to perform astronomical calculations.

It would be another forty years before the manuscript that Dee now had in his possession was published. It appeared in Frankfurt in 1606, together with a shorter work called the Clavis (or ‘key’) to the Steganographia. It was the Clavis that revealed Trithemius’s true purpose. The apparently nonsensical spiritual incantations of the first two books turned out to be coded messages. For example, in the case of the call for Padiel:

Padiel aporsy mesarpon omeuas peludyn malpreaxo

the message, or ‘plain text’ as cryptographers now call it, was encoded in alternate letters of alternate words:

padiel aPoRsY mesarpon oMeUaS peludyn mAlPrEaXo

which yields the words ‘Primus apex’ (the first summit). The Clavis thus showed that Books I and II of the Steganographia were not really about magic. They were full of sample ciphers. However, the Clavis did not include a key for Book III. Did this mean it was really a work of magic or a code book too? The question remained unresolved for centuries. Gustavus Selenus (the pseudonym of Duke August II of Brunswick-Lüneburg) reprinted Book III in his definitive 1624 study Cryptomenytices et Cryptographiae, establishing Trithemius’s position as a founding father of modern cryptography, but offered no solution. W. E. Heidel claimed to have cracked the code in 1676, but published his results in the form of a series of equally indecipherable cryptograms, thereby managing merely to add to the mystery.

By the late twentieth century, most scholars seem to have given up, and had consigned the work to the occult.¹⁷ Then, in the late 1990s, two people settled the matter once and for all, one in 1993, the other in 1996. The first to succeed was a German linguist called Thomas Ernst.¹⁸ The second, who had no idea of Ernst’s success until he had published his own paper, was Jim Reeds, working in the Mathematics and Cryptography Research Department at AT&T. Reeds’s diligent efforts at analysing this and other mysterious texts associated with Dee have proved extraordinarily successful.

Ernst and Reeds discovered that the third book of the Steganographia did indeed contain a code. There were hints as to how it might work in the tables and the text. For example, Reeds noticed that the first column of the table in the preface contained multiples of twenty-five. What was the significance of this number? There was also a passage in the first chapter that seemed suggestive:

If you wish to operate in Steganography… you must first of all acquaint yourself with [Saturn’s] various and diverse motions; and first the various motions, pure, proper, mixed, direct, retrograde and perplexed.

With a combination of skill and guesswork, Reeds worked out that the numbers in the tables represented letters of an alphabet, with each letter being a number added to a multiple of twenty-five. Lengthy analysis revealed the alphabet to comprise twenty-two of the Roman characters (A to Z minus J, K and W), supplemented by three other symbols. It was also in reverse order, which was perhaps what Trithemius was hinting at in his reference to the ‘retrograde’ motions of Saturn.

Reeds tested the key by trying it out on various sections of the book. For example, a series of numbers in the first table spelt out ‘Ioannes’, the Latin form of John, Trithemius’s first name. A selection of words in one of the tables in chapter 1 contained German words which translate into the phrase ‘the bringer of this letter is a bad rogue and a thief’. Reeds found another puzzling phrase, this one in Latin. It was repeated several times: ‘Gaza frequens Libycos duxit Carthago triumphos’. It turns out to be a pangram, a phrase that contains all the letters of the alphabet (like ‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’).¹⁹ Presumably these phrases were chosen to demonstrate the capabilities of the cipher.

Having broken the code, the tables yielded up the secrets they had hoarded for five hundred years. Unfortunately these proved uninformative: besides one or two gnomic phrases, the remainder of the plain text seemed unintelligible. This may be because the plain text is itself encoded in some further way, or because the tables became corrupted over years of underground circulation in manuscript form. Nevertheless, the discovery of the true purpose of Book III of the Steganographia was a breakthrough, because it proved for the first time that it was primarily a work of cryptography, not magic.

But whether Dee realised that the Steganographia was a code book remains unclear. He may not have seen the Clavis, the key to Books I and II. So, when he so excitedly commended the work to William Cecil as ‘meeter’ (more suitable or useful) and ‘more behoveful’ (more beneficial) to ‘your honor or a Prince’ (Queen Elizabeth) than any other, what did he mean? Spiritual communication is a possibility – but unlikely. Cecil was both very practical and conservative, and, though he undoubtedly accepted the existence of spirits, was unlikely to have been persuaded to practise the elaborate rituals Trithemius described.²⁰

Dee was fascinated by, and evidently expert in, cryptography. He owned several copies of Trithemius’s Polygraphia, which was explicitly about codes, and studied other key texts on the subject, notably Jacques Gohorry’s De Usu et Mysteriis Notarum and Jacopo Silvestri’s Opus Novum, the latter of which Dee used to practise writing in cipher for himself.²¹ Thus, when he promised Cecil that the book would advance the ‘secret sciences’, he was not necessarily referring to the occult. When Dee sent his letter, Cecil was just beginning to put in place the espionage network which, under Francis Walsingham, his successor as spymaster, would become one of the most formidable and effective in Europe. This network came to rely heavily on codes.²²

Dee did not see the Stegonographia as merely a political or diplomatic tool, considering the text to have other, more esoteric uses. Cryptography, particularly of the sort practised by Trithemius, was closely connected to the Cabala and it was conceivable that the same techniques used in the Steganographia could be used to decipher other texts written in forgotten or corrupted languages. One that would arouse particular excitement was called The Book of Soyga, an anonymous tome which Dee came to believe contained an ancient message written in the language originally spoken by Adam – in other words the true, unspoiled word of God. Another was a mysterious volume attributed to Roger Bacon which in coming centuries became notorious among cryptanalysts as the Voynich Manuscript.²³ It has yet to be deciphered. The study of codes, which was also the study of the structure of language, might yield the magic key to decoding such texts and revealing the messages they contained.

Beyond even that, Dee commended the Steganographia to Cecil as an example of the intellectual treasures the Continent held and that England so conspicuously lacked. In his letter, he deplored the lack of an English philosopher able to produce works ‘in the Science De Numeris formalibus, the Science De Ponderibus mysticis, and ye Science De Mensuris diuinis: (by which three, the huge frame of this world is fashioned…)’. His travels, learning and access to rare texts and Europe’s leading thinkers meant that he could be just such a philosopher, opening up the riches of the Renaissance to the English court.