Divinity Atlas
One Occult Alphabet's Authorship Question Is Asked Twenty Six Times Over
History of the Book and Codicology, two disciplines in this atlas, carry its two largest open-question clusters, 29 and 27 questions. Read individually they look like an enormous body of unresolved scholarship. Read together, 26 of both turn out to be the identical question, asked once for every letter of one occult alphabet, because the atlas stores the underlying fact separately on each letter rather than once for the whole script.
One Uncorroborated Sixteenth Century Credit
Johannes Trithemius published the Theban script in Polygraphiae libri sex in 1518, crediting it to Honorius of Thebes on the authority of Pietro d'Abano. The credit has never been corroborated: it is not known to appear in any writing attributed to d'Abano himself, the script is not known to appear in any manuscript of Honorius except British Library Sloane 3853, which names Agrippa, not Honorius, as its own source, and no publication before 1518 has ever been found to carry it. A Trithemius era invention is widely assumed but has never been demonstrated, and no rival candidate for the script's actual origin has ever been named, which is why the atlas records this as unknown rather than as debated. The atlas stores that single finding once per letter, twenty four separate times across the alphabet, which is why one uncorroborated claim from 1518 produces two of the largest question tallies this atlas holds.
Two Letters That Did Not Exist Yet in 1518
I and J, and U and V, were each a single letter of the Latin alphabet Trithemius was ciphering in 1518, so the earliest Theban sets carry one sign covering each pair. The separate Theban J and the separate Theban U now in ordinary use are later supplements, conventionally described as adapted from the I and the V, but nobody has identified the chart or edition in which either first appears, or the hand that made it. What would resolve the whole cluster, the alphabet wide attribution and the two later supplements alike, is the same piece of work: a bibliographic collation of printed Theban charts in sequence, from Polygraphiae in 1518 and Agrippa's De Occulta Philosophia in 1533, through the eighteenth and nineteenth century grimoire reprints, to the twentieth century witchcraft revival, to locate the earliest surviving witness of each sign and name the edition that introduced it. One dated witness earlier than 1518 would settle the priority question outright; a surviving draft, letter or working paper from Trithemius's own circle would settle the authorship.