Threefold General Key to Steganography

JOHANNES TRITHEMIUS, ABBOT OF SPONHEIM

...conjurations of Demons Trithemius famously disguised his cryptographic methods as "demonic magic" or conjurations to hide their true purpose and protect the secrets from those without the "key.", in which our secrets are hidden, and revealed only to those who know our rules and seals term: seals (sigilla); here meaning the specific cryptographic symbols or keys used to unlock the message.. And let the following sentence serve as an example for you; just as it can be written through all the previously mentioned rules, so it has pleased us to set it down here according to the first mode.

"Have mercy, almighty God, on the souls of your servants resting piously in you" original Latin: "Miserere omnipotens Deus animabus famulorum tuorum in te pie requiescentium", which sentence through the first mode becomes: Mdscrcrc fmndpftcns icgs bndmbags obmglfrgm tgfrgm dn te pdc rcqgdcsecntdgm, and so forth. And if indeed, due to the lack of vowels, no word is given to you here that signifies anything when mixed into our book, we have followed this rule of the following example among so many consonants and vowels, namely by taking the aforementioned consonants:

and of these letters, only the first or initial one is meaningful for you, while that which follows immediately is meaningless or "vacant," and so they alternate, just as the dots noted above the meaningful letters demonstrate to you. And here below, for the sake of brevity, all the rules and variations will be demonstrated through numbers, in which examples the o sign or arithmetic zero original: "zccr arithmeticum," likely a printer's error or archaic spelling for "cifra" or "zero," referring to the placeholder used in mathematics, as often as it is placed...