The Cipher Lab
Interactive tools built on Trithemius’s actual tables — encode and decode messages through the Polygraphia’s verbal-substitution ciphers, explore the tabula recta, and consult the Steganographia’s catalogue of spirits.
Encoder & Decoder
Type a message and watch it become a pious Latin sentence through the Ave Maria cipher — each plaintext letter is replaced by a real word from the Polygraphia’s substitution columns, rotating by position.
Tabula Recta
The 24×24 alphabet-rotation grid — the polyalphabetic table that prefigures the Vigenère cipher. Click a row and column to highlight the cipher letter.
Side-by-side Comparison
One plaintext, encoded four ways — to see why Trithemius escalated the complexity across his books.
Numerical Letters
Trithemius’s positional letter-codes for numbers (units a–i, tens k–r, hundreds, and w-suffixed magnitudes).
Some codes collide in the OCR’d source (e.g. cw, bw);
ambiguous results are flagged.
Spirit Index — Steganographia
The sixteen cardinal princes of the winds, from the Table of Direction.