New 18th Century Copiale Cipher Details



    Wired magazine published a wonderful story about how machine translation specialists together with linguists managed to find the key to the code of the Masonic manuscript of the 1760-1780s, which no one could read since its discovery in 1970 and which was considered one of the most difficult ciphers in the world. The decryption of the manuscript was reported a year ago - in October 2011 , then the first 16 pages of the text were deciphered. Since then, scientists have made significant advances in understanding this unique document compiled by members of the Oculist Order.

    It turned out that in addition to the decrypted text, the individual characters of the decrypted manuscript mean the numbers that make up another, separate cipher program, and it has not yet been decrypted.

    Copiale cipher- a handwritten 105-page manuscript of the late XVIII century, discovered among the scientific archives of the GDR. The artfully crafted volume of gold and green brocade contains 75,000 characters of text. It contains mathematical symbols and Roman letters, symbols of Saturn and Venus, Greek letters like pi and gamma, large ovals and pentagrams. The only clear words are Philipp 1866 at the beginning and Copiales 3 at the end. The Swedish linguist Christiane Schaefer has tried to decipher this text since 1998, but to no avail. The breakthrough came in January 2011 when she met Kevin Knight



    (Kevin Knight), a machine translation specialist from the University of Southern California. He was one of the best specialists in his field - one of those who consider foreign languages ​​as ciphers. For example, the Russian language for them is just a set of cryptographic characters in which English words are encrypted. Kevin Knight has already achieved some outstanding results in his field, so Christina turned to him.

    Kevin Knight began working on the cipher on the weekend. Two weeks were spent only on the development of a scheme for writing handwritten characters in digital form. In total, the book contained 88 different characters. He then manually entered the first 16 pages of the manuscript into his statistical analysis program. She showed that there are definitely patterns in the text - it became clear that this is not a duck, but a real code.

    It was clear that the substitution cipher was used. But even the original language was incomprehensible. In addition, the authors of the manuscript resorted to a number of tricks to complicate the task of cryptanalysis. It turned out that the Latin without dots in the text plays the role of spaces, and the colons indicate a doubling of the previous consonant. Kevin Knight also suggested that one character of the original may correspond to different characters in the cipher - this guess also turned out to be true. As a result, after a month of work, Kevin Knight received the first line of text, which he, however, could not understand due to his lack of knowledge of the German language:

    dieser schlag id das zeiche und der anfang de jenige vertraulichheit die der bruder von jetzo an als geselle von uns zunerwar ...

    He sent a letter to Christiana Schaefer and her boss Beate Medyashi - and linguists helped him move forward in his work. With the help of colleagues and his frequency analysis program, Kevin Knight was able to almost completely translate the text into German.



    Unfortunately, the decryption of the manuscript did not reveal the secrets of secret societies of the 18th century. Quite the contrary - there are more new questions than answers. The first pages of the text describe the ritual of initiation into a secret society of the "Great Educational Organization - the Order of the Optometrists", the sign of which was an open eye, as a symbol of what a person is enlightening and begins to see. Vision for them was a symbol of knowledge, while they performed real surgical operations on the eyes and were the first in the world to learn how to treat cataracts. It is believed that the Order of Oculists laid the foundation for modern ophthalmology. The last pages of the manuscript contain commentary on inalienable human rights.

    Pentagrams remained unencrypted, which in themselves are encrypted signs of certain people and organizations. In general, members of secret societies of the 18th century very carefully approached the protection of their information. It could take several years to prepare such a cipher and to write the manuscript.

    Interestingly, secret societies were very fashionable in 18th century Europe. For example, in Sweden alone there were more than a hundred orders. It was often found that even noble people entered one or another secret society.

    Over the past year, having figured out the decrypted text, scientists learned a lot about the Order of the Oculists. It turned out that this was one of the most extreme groups among secret societies, advocating a revolution and the liberation of mankind from the yoke of the "three-headed monster", which violates the "natural freedoms of man."

    Secret society experts believe that the text of the manuscript was written in the 1740s, 30 years before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence of the United States and long before the French Revolution. Probably, such secret societies gave rise to the entire revolutionary movement in Europe and the United States.

    In the middle of the manuscript there was a discourse about people who “seek to learn something only because it must be kept secret”. Allegedly, someone exploits human curiosity and for the sake of a joke founded a brotherhood, all members of which must pretend that they keep a great secret. They called it a "great psychological experiment" called "Freemasonry." From page 27 to page 78 contains a detailed description of Masonic rituals, using skulls, coffins and other artifacts.



    According to experts, in the 1740s, agents of the Order of the Optometrists were able to penetrate deeply into another, larger, secret society of Masons and learn their secrets and rituals (the Masons themselves did not have the right to record rituals). It is believed that the Order of the Oculists was specially created for the intelligence of the Masonic organization, as indicated by the emblem of the order: two cats watching the mouse. Or it could be a special unit that was involved in protecting and preserving Masonic secrets. Seal of the Order of the Optometrist



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