When seen in the context of the doctrine of physiognomics, it comes as no surprise that Porta authored a book on ciphers, as he believed himself endowed with a special ingenuity for decoding all forms of texts. Renaissance cryptographers in general had a penchant for mystery and the preternatural, as evident from Johannes Trithemius’s Steganography, for example. Trithemius, the Abbot of Sponheim, got in trouble with his ecclesiastical censors because he used a complex numerological series of dem