October 2026

Hail! For our installment this month sealed tomes will be broken open! Secrets shall be profaned! Encrypted ciphers decoded! Welcome back Codex Hermeticus readers!!

Concerning seals, we have ‘broken’ the threshold of October, which means we are unavoidably heading, nay – falling! into Autumn. The leaves have *just* barely begun to turn color here and I so look forward (as I do every year) to seeing them litter the nearby Amsterdam canals.

For Codex this month, we have just two contributions. The first is the second piece composed by Kavi Tiwary, a research intern who spent time with us over the summer who contributed last month as well. His research into cryptography from the September Codex continues with his piece this month in an amazingly lucid article concerning ‘Esoteric’ versus ‘Exoteric’ cryptography in the Renaissance period. In particular, he pays a special focus on the magus and polymath John Dee.

The theme of enciphering and deciphering introduced in Kavi’s article is (in a way) continued in mine. I (Corey) have submitted a contribution on an exceedingly amusing piece of Rosicrucian history, namely a small ‘sealed’ booklet called ‘The Secret Heritage’ from 1935. Amazingly, the booklet is literally sealed, and, in distinction to needing a cryptographic key to access it, I simply needed to rip open the page preventing my curiosity and proceed accordingly. Could I do such a thing? Irreversibly break open the binding to read it? Find out below!

With warmest regards and sincere thanks for your continued attention,

Corey

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"Speak of things public to the public, but of things lofty and secret only to the loftiest and most private of your friends. Hay to the ox and sugar to the parrot." — Attributed to Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516), Benedictine abbot, occultist, and founder of modern cryptography.

Each issue of the Codex contains a selection of articles written by our contributors, exploring the themes and traditions at the heart of the hermetic world.