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Deciphering a 250-Year-Old Mysterious Cipher

And how it uncovered a secret society of freemasons

By Kamna KirtiPublished 2 years ago 4 min read
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A 250-year-old cipher that concealed the arcane rituals of an ancient order. Cracking the code only deepened the mystery. Source-Wikipedia

In the fall of 1998, Dr. Christiane Schaefer, professor at the department of linguistics and philology, was moving from Germany to Uppsala University. During her farewell, one of her colleagues gave her an old green-colored book as a parting gift.

The book appeared to be a handwritten manuscript with bizarre symbols and language. Clearly, it was incomprehensible and some kind of a cipher. While Dr. Schaefer was in Uppsala, she tried to get her hands on the book. Every time she tried to decode the fifty symbols, she lost track and couldn't move forward.

The two words Dr. Schaefer could decrypt were "Philipp 1866" at the start of the manuscript and "Copiales III" at the end that looked like a Latin word for "to copy". She concluded that the book was written around 1760 and 1780 and the book was called "The Copiale cipher".

Considering the arcane language of the book, it was kept dust-ridden in the pile of books until 2011.

This article would delve into deciphering the 250-year old mysterious book and its contents.

Deciphering the Copiale cipher

In 2011, almost after 13 years, Professor Keven Knight visited Uppsala University for a guest lecture. He is an expert in machine translation and developed algorithms in automatically translating one language into another. Previously, he developed algorithms that would translate Dante's Inferno based on meter and rhyme scheme.

Dr. Schaefer discussed the book with Professor Knight and he agreed to decode the unintelligible symbols in the book.

• For the first two weeks, Knight tried to analyze the symbols and convert them into machine-readable text. He almost decoded 88 symbols and gave them a unique name.

• After decoding few symbols, Knight wanted to know the original language of the manuscript. With some intensive computational analysis, the computer matched the manuscript to be in German. Given the name "Philipp" in the manuscript, the match almost seemed to be accurate to Knight. Although Knight did not speak a word in German, he knew learning the basic rules of the language would help - which letters appeared in what frequency and the machine would take care of the rest.

• Knight studied common German letter combinations and found that 'C' is mostly followed by 'H' and 'CH' is often followed by 'T' like Licht(light) and Macht(power). This became a major breakthrough and he could steadily decipher more letters and symbols.

• Knight updated about his progress to Schaefer and sent the readable format including two lines from the cipher: dieser schlag id das zeiche und der anfang de jenige vertraulichheit die der bruder von jetzo an als geselle von uns zunerwar …

• Schaefer, who spent dozen years in decoding the book was astonished by the progress and sent back the English translation to Knight: "This stroke is the sign/the symbol and the beginning of the confidentiality/familiarity that the brother, from now on companion, can expect of us …"

• Schaefer, and her Hungarian boss, Megyesi were happy moving in the right direction but they were still clueless about the major symbols like "the lip". As time passed, Schaefer found a phrase in Copiale "light hand required to be a master of the society". Schaefer found the phrase familiar and referenced it from an academic article and Megyesi concluded the "lip" symbol to be an "eye". And voila, it was a eureka moment for them.

What does Copiale contain?

Schaefer and Megyesi came to know about the secret society in Germany that called itself "The Great Enlightened Society of Oculists". The "light hand" was mentioned in their bylaws. This society apparently lived in the town of Wolfenbüttel, Germany, and the Oculists made remarkable progress in the field of ophthalmology.

Schaefer further contacted the state archives that housed the collection of Oculist materials and found the same coded text as the Copiale. Schaefer was now interested in digging further and connecting the dots. So she met a historian, Andreas Önnerfors, called knight from California, and discussed this in detail.

Önnerfors explained, during the 18th century, hundreds of secret societies were formed in Europe, that were incubators of science, democracy, and ecumenical religion. They discussed ideas that were a direct threat to the Church and the biggest group out of them was Freemasonry - an implicit threat to the authority of the Church. In 1738, Pope Clement XII banned the Freemasons for further spreading the Masonic rites.

Last thoughts

Although cracking the arcane text was a significant achievement and helped to know about the existence of Oculists and other secret societies abandoned by the Church, it deepened the mystery as nothing more could be determined.

Knight's code-cracking techniques were praised and a flood of media attention followed after deciphering the Copiale cipher.

References-

1.They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside

2. The Mystery of the Copiale Cipher

Historical
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About the Creator

Kamna Kirti

Art enthusiast. I engage with art at a deep level. I also share insights about entrepreneurship, founders & nascent technologies.

https://linktr.ee/kamnakirti

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