Sidenote: In the past, if you were wealthy and powerful, or nationalistic, you'd try to trace your ancestry or your people's lineage back to Troy. Caesar did i

Sidenote: In the past, if you were wealthy and powerful, or nationalistic, you'd try to trace your ancestry or your people's lineage back to Troy. Caesar did it, the Habsburgs did it, and so did Trithemius, for some reason. That is Johannes Trithemius, a 14th and 15th century librarian and abbot with a marked interest in the occult. (Turns out he was also an early practitioner of cryptography.) Early on, Trithemius built an awesome library at his monastery, but then they split up and he became a counselor to the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian. The Emperor was of Habsburg descent, and the Habsburgs and other Franks were claiming Trojan ancestry... so Trithemius wrote an elaborate fake history of the Franks, leading back to Troy, and had it published. There's a lot more to this guy than just that. He wrote "Steganographia" and "Polygraphia", which are dripping with occult influence but turn out to be a combination of fake alphabets and substitution ciphers. But because of his man-crush on Maximilian, he committed this extremely intricate forgery and obliterated his reputation. That's how significant the Trojan War was in the 1500s. Fun fact: Polygraphia's fake alphabets include Theban, which Wiccans now use to write spells, and two fake Frank languages (one that he said was used by a fake Frank philosopher) to bolster his fake Frank history. Oh and he invented the bibliography. Here's one now. https://books.google.com/books?id=6lE-OdAQPJsC&lpg=PA59&ots=WkWL16iQfa&dq=trithemius%20conjures%20the%20past&pg=PA56#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=6lE-OdAQPJsC&lpg=PA59&ots=... http://microcosmographia.com/2012/12/15/johannes-trithemius-and-the-orthographies-of-invention/ http://microcosmographia.com/2012/12/15/johannes-trithemius-... https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10943192_00496.html?zoom=0.5&numScans=2 https://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/... http://old.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19980629bspirit1.asp http://old.post-gazette.com/healthscience/19980629bspirit1.a...