Trithemius
The son of a German vine-grower, named
Heidenberg, received his Latinized appellation from.
Trittheim, a village in the electorate of Treves, where he was born in 1462. He might reasonably be included among those earnest and enthusiastic souls who have persevered in the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties; for his mother, marrying a second time, had no love for the offspring of her first marriage. The young Trithemius was ill-fed, illclothed, and over-worked. All day he toiled in the vineyards; but the nights he was able to devote to the acquisition of knowledge, and then he stole away from his miserable home, and perused what books he could beg or borrow, by the light of the moon. As his mind expanded he became sensible of the vast stores of learning to which his circumstances denied him access. He could not rest content with the few grains of sand he had picked up on the seashore. Extorting his small share of the patrimony bequeathed by his father, he wandered away to Treves, entered himself a student of its celebrated University, and assumed the name of Trithemius. His progress was now as rapid as might be inferred probable from the intensity of his aspirations and the keenness of his intellect. At the Tumah age of twenty he had acquired the reputation of a scholara reputation which was of greater advantage in the 15th than it is in the 20th century. He was now desirous of once more seeing the mother whom he did not love the less because she had ill-used him, and in the winter of 1482 he quitted the cloistered shade of Treves on a solitary journey to Trittheim. It was a dark day, ending in a gloomy, fast-snowing night, and the good student, on his arrival near Spannheim, found the roads impassable. He sought refuge in a neighbouring monastery. There the weather imprisoned him for several days. The imprisonment proved so much to the liking of Trithemius, that he voluntarily took the monastic vows, and retired from the world. In the course of two years he was elected abbot, and devoting all his little fortune to the repair and improvement of the monastery, he gained the love and reverence of the brotherhood, whom he inspired with his own love of learning. But after a rule of one-and-twenty years, the monks forgot all his benefits, and remembered only the severity of his discipline. They broke out in revolt, and elected another abbot. The deposed Trithemius quitted Spannheim, and wandered from place to place, until finally elected Abbot of St. James of Wurzburg, where he died in 1516.
His fame as a magician rests on very innocent foundations He devised a species of short-hand called steoganographia, which the ignorant stigmatized as a cabalistical and necromantic writing, concealing the most fearful secrets. He wrote a treatise on the subject; another upon the supposed administration of the world by its guardian angels-a revival of the good and evil geniuses of the Ancientswhich William Lilly translated into English in 1647; a third upon Geomancy, or divination by means of lines and circles on the ground; a fourth upon Sorcery; and a fifth upon Alchemy. In his work upon Sorcery he makes the earliest mention of the popular story of Dr. Faustus, and records the torments he himself occasionally suffered from the malice of a spirit named Hudekin. He is said to have gratified the Emperor Maximilian with a vision of his deceased wife, the beautiful Mary of Burgundy, and was reputed to have defrayed the expenses of his monastic establishment at Spannheim by the resources which the Philosopher's Stone put at his disposal. His writings show him to have been an amiable and credulous enthusiast but his sincere and ardent passion for knowledge may well incline us to forgive the follies which he only shared with most of the scholars and wise men of his age.