In a more practical way, this was how Doctor Dee often encoded: he kept a huge number of stock phrases in various languages, which would be substituted for the key words of the secret message. The word “bad” could be enciphered by “Pallas is blessed of charm” or “You are admired of women, Astarte,” or “A god of grace enthroned.” If the same phrase were in Greek, it meant a different thing: “crown” perhaps, or “stealthily.” Whole fictions could be constructed out of these phrases, they were designed to fit together with standard couplings to yield long tedious and half-intelligible allegorical fantasies that actually meant something brief and fatal: The Duke dies at midnight. In fact the great trouble of the method was that the encoding was always so much longer than the message.
Late at night, unraveling such a one, Doctor Dee would sometimes think: All creation is a huge, ornate, imaginary, and unintended fiction; if it could be deciphered it would yield a single shocking word.
–John Crowley, Ægypt
