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thank you
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all right
foreign
so today at Bitcoin another
cryptocurrency of turn hingers into
money back in the 90s when TGT was
bringing a strong crypto to the masses
integers were classified as Munitions by
a government who who sought to control
who wielded them uh and before that one
could say that integers were just math
but in the 1500s integers were Magic
this presentation is about cryptography
and medieval and early modern Europe
from the 13th century through the
Renaissance into the middle of the 1700s
and the use of cryptography by magicians
Alchemists and occultists
but why you asked because so many
discussions on the history of
cryptography skipped straight from the
ancient world to the 19th century
touching only briefly if at all on the
numerous developments in between
by paying attention to this overlooked
Middle Ground we can uncover some of the
most interesting stories cryptography
has taught has played a part in uh I
chose to focus on the use of crypto by
non-nation state actors because when you
step away from examining how
nation-states use crypto and look at how
individuals Kept Secrets it becomes much
more personal and to me that often makes
for more interesting stories and I
specifically chose to examine how
magicians Alchemists and other
subversives use crypto during this time
both because they intrinsically had
something to hide and because I find
them to be some of history's most
colorful characters
we're going to start with steganography
which probably seems like an odd place
for a presentation covering a time
period centuries before computers were
invented most of us probably know
steganography as a modern Capture the
Flag stable you have a standard image
file and by manipulating the binary data
within the image you can conceal text or
other files of it or inside of it and
not know that anything is contained
within it unless you know that something
is hiding within if you know that an
image is serving as a carrier for a
stego payload you can extract it but the
trick is knowing that the data is hidden
there in the first place so why would
you want to do this well cryptography
stands out a lot it's obvious when data
is encrypted and sometimes you want to
fly under the radar I mean look at how
uncomfortable that person in the
background looks awkward this is your
conspicuously encrypted traffic on a
common medium
steganography on the other hand is like
burying a needle in a haystack except
the needle is also made of hay the
Secret's hidden in plain sight
now I'm talking about stego right now
because the origin of both the idea and
the term steganography are much older
than digital image carriers well an
article on steganography talks about its
history it usually talks about ancient
Greece and Persia in one story and as it
was carved into the wood beneath the wax
on a writing tablet and then covered
over with wax again so it could be
smuggled across the border on notice in
another story a message was tattooed
onto the shaved head of a slave who was
sent to deliver the message once his
hair grew back but it's surprising how
often discussions of steganography's
History completely ignore the source
that the term steganography actually
came from
the word steganography was invented by
Johannes strathemius a Benedictine
Abbott in the German County of sponheim
trademius was a prolific historian a
cryptographer and a nicultist and
magician he wrote the steganographia
where he first coined the term in 1499.
the stegnography is trithinius's most
famous work or perhaps his most infamous
although he wrote it in 1499 it wasn't
published until 1606 and it was placed
on the index of prohibited books just
three years later while tredemius was
still alive rumor of the book spread
outside of the abbeyan game gained him a
notorious reputation For Better or For
Worse the second of Gracia was written
in three volumes and on its surface it
was a book of magic instructing the
reader about various angels to invoke in
order to transmit messages over long
distances but there were also other
texts hidden Within These instructions
the key to uncovering the stego payloads
in the first two volumes was published
in 1606 along with the rest of the word
the key to uncovering the stego payloads
within the third book wouldn't be
uncovered until 1996 almost three
centuries later when two researchers
independently discovered its secrets
the mingling of magic and Mathematics of
cryptography and Conjuring wasn't unique
to the stigma gracio it was a common
feature in Renaissance European Magic
why might a Renaissance magician like to
hide secret messages and otherwise
unassuming text gee I don't know maybe
because Cipher alphabets look super
obvious whereas the steganographic
technique such as the Ave Maria Cipher
results in text that just looks like a
bad Latin poem or hem and people who
would give you the side eye when they
see your super occult looking ciphers
aren't going to spare a second glance at
your crappy Church poetry
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after in the first two volumes of the
steganographia discusses a single Spirit
the initial letters of certain words
spell out the hidden text the specific
words that are significant change in
each chapter
the hidden text in each chapter details
a different method of cryptography these
range from what are positioned ciphers
to alphabet shifts similar to the Caesar
cipher book three which consists of a
single chapter covers substitution
ciphers via numeric tables given that
you had the these texts of angelic magic
which claim to tell people how to
mystically communicate messages over
long distances and these texts in turn
can steal other instructions on how to
write hidden messages so that they can
be sent to others in secret at a certain
point when discussing the steganographia
you have to ask the question is this
book a work of Occult Philosophy and
technique or is it primarily a work of
cryptography merely disguised as Angel
magic
the answer is it turns out is yes
even posing this question as a binary
either or either or a choice is a
modernist and anachronistic View and the
dichotomy would have been foreign the
pre-modern sensibility is oftenius's era
we construct our ideas of Truth today
based on exclusion there's one truth
which excludes there being any others
but ideas of Truth in meeting and
pre-modernity were much more
multi-layered in nuanced than we give
them credit for
if the Stango Gracia were only a work of
cryptography truthemias could easily
have exonerated himself against his
unsavory reputation as a magician so his
failure to do so leads us to consider
that perhaps something more was going on
here furthermore his documented
corresponds with Heinrich Cornelius
Agrippa author of The even more
notorious Three Books of Occult
Philosophy which is a genuine
and if you remember that the pre-modern
worldview didn't look at things the same
way that we do today for example how
many of you who have heard of the
doctrine of signatures
any any does any of that ring a bell
from science class back in you know
early High School Middle School
the doctrine of signatures was this idea
that hidden meanings are concealed in
nature and that by looking at the
appearance or correspondences of certain
plants rocks herbs and the like you
could tell what those items would be
good for for example it used to be
thought that walnuts were good for
disorders or diseases of the brain
because walnuts look a little like a
brain in their appearance
seems ridiculous to us today right but
back then this method seemed as pride
and tested for the best scientific minds
of the day as anything modern science
has to offer and people back then were
no less intelligent or astute than they
are today they just had a different
philosophical foundation for how to
construct knowledge
the fact of the matter is that early
science was heavily influenced by
Imagine magic and occultism and the two
continued to have a much more
complicated and less distinct or
separate relationship for quite some
time when people today generally think
this Viewpoint was apparently Universal
at least within the esoteric worldview
which was also largely the world view of
Renaissance humanism and early science
This Magic versus science dichotomy the
idea that these two are somehow separate
is a modern idea and it wasn't shared by
Renaissance thinkers these subtleties
mean that the assumptions we bring to
the table with our modern perspectives
can often lead us to incorrect
conclusions or at least incomplete ones
when we look at pre-modern culture even
when we're talking about something like
cryptography so keep that in mind as we
turn to look to another Mainstay of
medieval and Renaissance magic the
cipher alphabet
these are some of the cipher alphabets
that were commonplace in the 16th
century and earlier they occur
frequently in magical texts of the time
some of you may even recognize Eben
which was first published in Johannes
krithemia's polygraphia in 1518 from its
modern use in Wicca and other flavors of
neopic and religion most of these
ciphers work helped on specific
alphabets which is to say that the
characters of the cipher alphabet mapped
directly onto the characters of a given
language and medieval and Renaissance
magic that was generally Latin Hebrew or
Arabic
the witch hunts in Europe had their
birth in the 1420s and 1430s with the
most famous of the witch-hunting manuals
malius malachikara or witch's hammer
having them published in 1487. in light
of this it seems unsurprising The
Magicians would want to collect their
books with ciphers that would allow them
to disguise the nature of the texts and
conceal them from the authorities and
from others who were hostile to Natural
Pursuits and indeed these ciphers occur
frequently in natural texts at the time
but it's curious that these ciphers seem
to be exclusively mono-alphabetic at a
time when frequency analysis was well
known having first been documented by
alkindi himself a magician around the
start of the 10th century and when
homophonic and nomenclature ciphers were
state of the art for protecting secrets
one could argue this was less of an
issue in time when literacy wasn't
widespread and the printing press was
still new while literacy is very
difficult to Define for the time period
and equally difficult to estimate the
Latin literacy rate at the time was
maybe about two percent or so and prior
to the invention of the printing press
in 1440 even University libraries seldom
had more than a thousand books in their
collections Monastery libraries were
only a fraction of this size by contrast
the uw-milwaukee library holds over 2.7
million physical volumes and the
University of Minnesota libraries house
over 8.2 million depending on which
estimate you go with that number may
have equaled or exceeded the total
number of books printed across the
entirety of Western Europe by the year
1500. if the techniques of frequency
analysis weren't widely disseminated due
to the scarce availability of books on
the subject this might have mitigated
the risk inherent in using an easily
broken Cipher until well in the 16th
century or at the very least made The
Magicians who were trying to conceal
their secrets less likely to be aware of
such techniques
but regardless if the authorities are a
part of your threat model
this still isn't an effective way to
hide from them and this also doesn't fit
with what we know about how these
ciphers were actually used in practice
rather than being used to obfuscate
entire texts in practice the ciphers
were used rather sparingly they were
used within magical books primarily for
the names of spirits for the texted
invocations and for characters to be
inscribed on talismans the rest of the
text is generally open and clearly
reveals the nature of the Cyber text
passages moreover the diagrams contained
in these books are clearly magical in
nature if you're trying to conceal the
purpose of the text you're definitely
not fooling anybody
so if using ciphers in your magical text
doesn't keep you from getting banned
what's the point of using it in the
first place in other words why go to the
trouble of secrecy if you aren't keeping
a secret
given this evidence one of sports the
entertain the idea that perhaps the
secret isn't the text itself
when creating a Talisman that stands
apart from the book it would be entirely
in ciphertext but this still doesn't
explain why implications would be in
Cypher and the talismans produced from a
book of magic would be just as clearly
magical in nature as the diagrams within
the book itself
if magical ciphers don't serve an obsec
related function then why use them we
could entertain the idea that they serve
a social function that they serve to
Mark someone as part of an in-group for
example and reinforce social cohesion
but that doesn't fit very well here
either in order to see that motivation
at work we have to look at the
Alchemists which we'll do in just a
moment
so what then Marcia alayade one of the
most influential Scholars of religion of
the 20th century proposed a dichotomy
between the sacred and the profane or
the mundane a non-sacred world he argued
that the primary attribute that makes
something sacred is that it's set apart
from everyday life in order to connect
to what he called a space outside of
space and a time outside of time and
that setting apart holds power in
pre-modern societies as well as for our
own you can see this tendency in action
today still in the use of archaic or
culturally foreign elements both in
Magic and in mainstream religion for
example the use of the and thou and
liturgical language and the continuing
use of the Latin Mass
an alphabet which is used only for the
purpose of the Sacred sets it apart from
Everyday Use the use of the cipher is
therefore itself a magical Act
I said that we'd look at the Alchemists
and I'm going to jump into that by
starting at what may seem like an odd
place namely Isaac Newton Newton was a
luminary of modern science he did
groundbreaking work in physics Optics
and Mathematics he was responsible for
calculus the law of universal
gravitation and classical mechanics
he was also a devout Alchemist
who obsessed over stories from ancient
Greek mythology looking for hidden
messages that he could use to create his
own chemical recipes
the way Newton engaged with Alchemy in
both language and perspective was
characteristic of the entirety of
European Alchemy dating back to at least
the 12th century while we might not see
the connection today when you go back
far enough early science and Magic
become difficult to distinguish from
each other
by name this time the two had begun to
diverge more completely but things were
still Messier in this regard than many
would like to admit alchemical thought
holds the belief that everything is a
cipher remember we can see this as well
in the doctrine of signatures and in the
priscosapiantia that we discussed when
talking about the steganographia this
belief pervaded the entire intellectual
tradition of esoteric magical and early
scientific thought it was also reflected
in the way Alchemists used language to
hide meanings and conceal the secrets of
their art
The Alchemist viewed all of creation as
a cipher to be decoded with meanings
hidden everywhere this experience of
reality as a riddle is reflected in the
language they use to talk about alchemy
the language and Alchemist is more
properly called on Argo in other words
an intentionally opaque jargon and
relied on certain locutions or
roundabout speech using this jargon to
conceal their true meanings
the biggest characteristic about
chemical discourse and the thing that
interested me here was its extensive use
of ciphers to communicate alchemical
jargon is often laid out in what are
called dekname which is a German term
meaning a cover name think of deknomin
as like word equivalents of cover files
for stego images in this case however a
lot of the time knowing the payload
still doesn't get you a lot closer to
understanding knowing that
hermaphroditical body is a deck Nama for
regulus Martis for example doesn't tell
you a lot you further have to understand
that regularly Smarties or the regulus
of Mars is itself jargon Mars refers to
iron the metal metal associated with
Mars and irregulus is a massive metal
formed beneath the slag and smelting and
reducing orders so regulus Marty so the
hermaphroditical body refers in effect
to a compound of the antimony
similarly alchemical Concepts were often
presented in images rather like mandalas
so if you've ever had to learn
subnetting for example take some comfort
it could be worse you could have just
been presented with diagrams of TCP
packets and layer 3 transport and told
to meditate on it until you figure it
out which isn't all that different from
how a lot of the secrets of alchemy were
transmitted
there were some attempts to de-obiscate
the terminology however the early
American Alchemist George Starkey
1628-1665 wrote a letter to Robert Boyle
in 1651 in which he included a key into
antimony which served as a decoder ring
for the alchemical language contained in
starkey's work marrow of alchemy
in order to understand why elephants use
this coded language in the first place
though it helps to consider that
Alchemists and magicians were the
hackers of their era they were inventors
makers tinkerers and yes subversives
working in their own ways to understand
what makes the universe tick and then
leveraging that unique understanding to
try and get privilege escalation on
their own existence
but mostly they did it for the love of
the puzzle and the thrill of discovery
sound familiar
just like hacking how come he was a
secret knowledge that wasn't actually
all that secret the knowledge was
available in books if you could read and
had access to them and the Argo was used
in a consistent if not necessarily
precise or straightforward manner for
example the green lion is pretty much
always going to refer to antimony but if
you try and count on your hands the
number of words that can be used for
Quicksilver you're going to need a few
extra hands
the books varied in quality and
sensationalism of course as one might
expect though there were a lot fewer
gratuitous stock images of Alchemists
and hoodies in the paintings in the
woodcuts of the day
but even though the knowledge wasn't
secret it was still sexy and the general
populace including certain heads of
government had a concept of alchemy that
bears about as much as as about about as
much resemblance to the actual pursuit
of the Philosopher's Stone as an episode
of CSI cyber does to real world digital
forensics
in other words turning lead into gold
was basically the early modern
equivalent of hacking the Gibson
and while the end goal of alchemy was to
produce the Philosopher's Stone which
was supposed to be able to turn base
Metals into gold that's really one of
its least interesting reputed properties
it was said to be able to cure all ills
bring dead plants back to life restore
Youth and Grant immortality and these
properties may even have been entirely
allegorical if we know that the pursuit
of the Philosopher's Stone was a
religious Pursuit and the healing of the
healing and immortality it may or may
not have been conceived of in a physical
sense in addition to a spiritual one the
spiritual hearing of the operator was
seen as inherently linked to the results
of their experiments and it's possible
the production of the actual stone was
merely a heuristic a physical sign to
say you've done the thing
congratulations
but either way whether the fruits of the
Alchemist is great work or material or
primarily spiritual in nature the
capabilities they brought were powerful
or at least the Alchemists thought so at
the very least they were precious to
those who sought them out alchemical
literature is full of stern admonitions
to keep the knowledge secret passing it
along to perhaps one worthy successor
and to prevent the sacred wisdom from
being tarnished by falling into the
hands of unworthy individuals
but most people didn't care about the
spiritual pursuit of the Alchemists they
just wanted to turn lead into gold
because they were all about the
Benjamins or the elizabeths as the case
may be
so you had people who reported their
heart into Alchemy as a passion and you
had the people who just wanted to use
the end results of their labor the
recipes they made to serve their own
Petty interests in other words they were
Renaissance script kitties the
Alchemists had disdain for these people
or just as hackers turned their noses up
as kids today
secrecy inherently creates an in-group
and an out group centered around those
who are in on the secret versus those
who aren't hacker culture formed its own
Argo which was designed to reinforce its
cultural values strengthen group
cohesion and create a barrier to entry
that one had to work in order to now
the willingness to do the work at least
in theory for the Love of the Game is
maybe the primary distinction between
hackers and script kitties and The
Alchemist Argo served all these same
functions because of this it was the
secrecy the act of keeping secrets
rather than the secrets themselves that
served the end goal Alchemist secrecy
strengthened and preserved a group
identity and safeguarded it against a
perceived threat which would dilute or
debase the group and its values it's
telling in this respect that few
alchemical texts use actual actual
crypto which would create a much more
substantive barrier to Discerning the
information the text concealed instead
they provide riddles they simultaneously
invited those who were in on the secret
excluded those who weren't willing to
work to uncover it in this respect
whereas using a homophonic or
polyalphabetic Cipher to safeguard one's
Secrets was the early modern equivalent
of encrypting it with the pgp key
alchemical Argo was more like a crypto
challenge it presented the appearance of
being impenetrable but at the end of the
day the riddle like the crypto challenge
is designed to be solved
now there are a few exceptions to that
rule that we have out in the sport where
we can see a different mode in play than
the social one for example while Robert
Boyle was an advocate of Greater
openness in alchemy and attempted to
break down some of the cultural barriers
that were presented by the Reliance upon
Argo he himself used mono-alphabetic
ciphers along with name substitution and
code words to safeguard his own private
documents in this case however he had an
entirely different threat model Boyle
was protecting himself against an
evil-made attack or at least an attack
by his literate and presumably overly
inquisitive assistance who he didn't
wish to be pretty to the contents of his
nose
so far we talked about substitution
ciphers that weren't used to hide
anything an alchemist whose cryptic
writing was more about keeping their
knowledge than actually keeping it
secret we're talking about magicians and
others who had a tenuous relationship
with the authorities people who did
unquestionably have secrets to hide so
where's the juicy crypto in all this
good news I've saved the best for last
it's the middle of the 1700s there's a
conspiracy afoot a secret society
working in the shadows a group of
subversives plotting a Revolt a
nation-state threat model and the cipher
that wasn't broken until more than two
and a half centuries later
all hiding behind the facade of a
professional organization of mild
mannered ophthalmologists
okay
to start innocently enough the great
Enlightenment Society of oculus was
founded around 1745 in Germany by count
Friedrich August von feldheim it claimed
to be a professional Society of eye
doctors which admitted both men and
women and performed groundbreaking work
in the field of eye surgeries and
cataract removals they also did their
best to maintain the reputation of the
emerging profession by keeping out the
charlatans who could cause someone to
lose their eyesight forever but things
began to seem Stranger Than first
expected when the society's founder died
30 years later in 1775. he had locked
away all of his materials pertaining to
the Oculus and a trunk
in his will he ordered his son to keep
the trunk locked with the seals unbroken
until the local duke or one of his
descendants said otherwise when the
trunk was finally opened in 1918 almost
150 years later things got even more
puzzling
alongside the Oculus seal aprons and
amulets worn by Society members a
painstakingly detailed anatomical
anatomical model of the eye and other
artifacts there was a strange manuscript
handwritten on watermarked paper with a
golden green binding the manuscript was
105 pages long and written entirely in
cyber the only plain text to be found
was an owner's mark on the first page
and an abbreviated signature next to a
note reading copy LS3 on the last page
which gave the copy outside for its name
everything in between was a mystery
it wasn't until 2011 that the cipher was
finally decoded by an international
group of researchers using
computer-assisted cryptanalysis
techniques the code itself was a
homophonic Cipher meaning that multiple
ciphertext characters were used for
certain plain text characters it also
used nomenclares where individual cycle
text characters that represented entire
Words which occurred frequently in the
text it refers to here as logon
logograms
the cipher used a total of 97 different
symbols taken from Roman and Greek
alphabets diacritical marks grammatical
characters planetary symbols and a
number of symbols which didn't
correspond to any known language
at the time it was created this type of
encryption was state-of-the-art
homophonic nomenclature ciphers were
used by Regents diplomats and Generals
to guard their state secrets unlike the
monoalphabetic ciphers used in magical
texts or alchemical jargon used to
separate the old hackers from the old
script kitties this Cipher was
definitely intended to hide something
and to hide it well against a determined
and capable adversary but what Secrets
would a group of eye doctors need to
protect with a military-grade cipher who
are they protecting these secrets from
and why was it so important that the
Trump containing the manuscript remain
locked and sealed clearly there was more
to the Oculus Society than meets the eye
the decipher text was divided in three
parts the first part represented the
secret counterpart of the Oculus
societies published bylaws detailing the
origin of the society its initiation
rituals and instructions for recognizing
and identifying oneself to other members
instructions that seem more at home in a
Cold War era spy movie than in a
fraternal organization
it also laid out the teachings of the
Oculus society that were concealed from
the public eye
the deciphered text is politically
subversive calling for a general revolt
against a tyrannical government which
gives insight into what the threat model
was and who the society was trying to
hide its secrets from it gives highly
detailed information on the rituals and
symbolism of Freemasonry to a degree
that wouldn't be widely known until much
later it's also been hypothesized that
the Oculus were spying on the Freemasons
it's worth noting that membership in a
Freemasonry was forbidden by the
Catholic church around a decade prior to
the founding of the Oculus and
Freemasonry was criticized at the time
for poor betting of membership and then
inability to keep secrets it appears
that the Oculus were founded to carry on
the secrets and traditions of
Freemasonry under a different name with
a different craft with a much greater
emphasis on selectivity in keeping
secrets hidden and possibly with a more
politically subversive motive the role
of Freemasons
oh wow party time
all right
well let's give this a second otherwise
I'll just keep going
okay Live Theater it's always exciting
isn't it
here so yeah the role of Freemasons in
the near the American and French
revolutions is really well documented
the egalitarian ethos of Freemasonry
mesh seamlessly with the Liberty
equality fraternity revolutionary ethos
and so once again we see the
relationship between the form of the
cryptography being used and the secrets
it contains
earlier in this presentation we looked
at ciphers from magical texts that were
used primarily by scattered
practitioners and the language used by a
loose and geographically diverse culture
of Alchemists to shore up their societal
walls and exclude those they saw as
Unworthy of their knowledge in this case
a style of Cipher that was more
frequently used to conceal government
secrets was used by a tight-knit group
of networked radicals who apparently
sought to overthrow those governments
and to avoid the mistakes of shoddy
offseck they saw in mainstream
Freemasonry while preserving its Secrets
at its subversive goals
given that the period we've covered
zeldom or see as much attention in
discussions of cryptography's History
these stories all certainly illustrate
how much depth and richness gets
overlooked as a result the medieval and
early modern periods were times with
huge cultural change about people both
politically and intellectually
cryptography grew up in this chaotic sea
bit of culture just as much as many of
the other early scientists did and
probably evolved during this time faster
than any other period until the dawn of
the 20th century if we can resist the
urge to skip Straight From The Classical
period to the modern era as we talk
about historical cryptography we have so
many more stories we can tell I hope you
found some of these stories as
interesting as I have and going forward
I hope you'll pick up the torch and tell
some of these stories with me
any questions
all right well thank you very much
right here
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