They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found A Secret Society Inside

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They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside
BY NOAH SHACHTMAN 11.16.12
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For more than 200 years, this book concealed the arcane rituals of an ancient order. But cracking the code only deepened the mystery. Image courtesy: Uppsala University
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The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun. The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. Read, the master commands. The candidate squints, but its an impossible task. The page is blank. The candidate is told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to improve. The master wipes the candidates eyes with a cloth and orders preparation for the surgery to commence. He selects a pair of tweezers from the table. The other members in attendance raise their candles. The master starts plucking hairs from the candidates eyebrow. This is a ritualistic procedure; no flesh is cut. But these are symbolic actions out of which none are without meaning, the master assures the candidate. The candidate places his hand on the masters amulet. Try reading again, the master says, replacing the first page with another. This page is filled with handwritten text. Congratulations, brother, the members say. Now you can see.
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For more than 260 years, the contents of that pageand the details of this ritualremained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy
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theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties. It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic sight-restoring ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread underground. At least thats what experts believe. The only way to know for sure is to break the codes. In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany. For years, Christiane Schaefer and Wolfgang Hock would meet regularly at an Italian bistro in Berlin. He would order pizza, and she would get the penne allarrabbiata. The two philologistsexperts in ancient writingswould talk for hours about dead languages and obscure manuscripts. It was the fall of 1998, and Schaefer was about to leave Berlin to take a job in the linguistics department at Uppsala University, north of Stockholm. Hock announced that he had a going-away present for Schaefer. She was a little surpriseda parting gift seemed an oddly personal gesture for such a reserved colleague. Still more surprising was the present itself: a large brown paper envelope marked with the words top secret and a series of strange symbols. Schaefer opened it. Inside was a note that read, Something for those long Swedish winter nights. It was paper-clipped to 100 or so photocopied pages filled with a handwritten script that made no sense to her whatsoever:
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Arrows, shapes, and runes. Mathematical symbols and Roman letters, alternately accented and unadorned. Clearly it was some kind of cipher. Schaefer pelted Hock with questions about the manuscripts contents. Hock deflected her with laughter, mentioning only that the original text might be Albanian. Other than that, Hock said, shed have to find her own answers. A few days later, on the train to Uppsala, Schaefer turned to her present again. The ciphers complexity was overwhelming: symbols for Saturn and Venus, Greek letters like pi and gamma, oversize ovals and pentagrams. Only two phrases were left unencoded: Philipp 1866, written at the start of the manuscript, and Copiales 3 at the end. Philipp was traditionally how Germans spelled the name. Copiales looked like a variation of the Latin word for to copy. Schaefer had no idea what to make of these clues. She tried a few times to catalog the symbols, in hopes of figuring out how often each one appeared. This kind of frequency analysis is one of the most basic techniques for deciphering a coded alphabet. But after 40 or 50 symbols, shed lose track. After a few months, Schaefer put the cipher on a shelf. Thirteen years later, in January 2011, Schaefer attended an Uppsala conference on computational linguistics. Ordinarily talks like this gave her a headache. She preferred musty books to new technologies and didnt even have an Internet connection at home. But this lecture was different. The featured speaker was Kevin Knight, a University of Southern California specialist in machine translation the use of algorithms to automatically translate one language into another. With his stylish rectangular glasses, mop of prematurely white hair, and wiry surfers build, he didnt look like a typical quant. Knight spoke in a near whisper yet with intensity and passion. His projects were endearingly quirky too. He built an algorithm that would translate Dantes Inferno based on the users choice of meter and rhyme scheme. Soon he hoped to cook up software that could understand the meaning of poems and even generate verses of its own. Knight was part of an extremely small group of machine-translation researchers who treated foreign
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languages like ciphersas if Russian, for example, were just a series of cryptological symbols representing English words. In code-breaking, he explained, the central job is to figure out the set of rules for turning the ciphers text into plain words: which letters should be swapped, when to turn a phrase on its head, when to ignore a word altogether. Establishing that type of rule set, or key, is the main goal of machine translators too. Except that the key for translating Russian into English is far more complex. Words have multiple meanings, depending on context. Grammar varies widely from language to language. And there are billions of possible word combinations. But there are ways to make all of this more manageable. We know the rules and statistics of English: which words go together, which sounds the language employs, and which pairs of letters appear most often. (Q is usually followed by a u, for example, and quiet is rarely followed by bulldozer.) There are only so many translation schemes that will work with these grammatical parameters. That narrows the number of possible keys from billions to merely millions. The next step is to take a whole lot of educated guesses about what the key might be. Knight uses whats called an expectation-maximization algorithm to do that. Instead of relying on a predefined dictionary, it runs through every possible English translation of those Russian words, no matter how ridiculous; itll interpret as yes, horse, to break dance, and quiet! Then, for each one of those possible interpretations, the algorithm invents a key for transforming an entire document into English what would the text look like if meant break dancing? The algorithms first few thousand attempts are always way, way off. But with every pass, it figures out a few words. And those isolated answers inch the algorithm closer and closer to the correct key. Eventually the computer finds the most statistically likely set of translation rules, the one that properly interprets as yes and as quiet. The algorithm can also help break codes, Knight told the Uppsala conferencegenerally, the longer the cipher, the better they perform. So he casually told the audience, If youve got a long coded text to share, let me know. Funny, Schaefer said to Knight at a reception afterward. I have just the thing.
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Ablindfold that allows the wearer to see, worn by members of the society who wrote the Copiale cipher. Photo: Nieders Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbttel
A copy of the cipher arrived at Knights office a few weeks later. Despite his comments at the conference, Knight was hesitant to start the project; alleged ciphers often turned out to be hoaxes. But Schaefers note stapled to the coded pages was hard to resist. Here comes the top-secret manuscript!! she wrote. It seems more suitable for long dark Swedish winter nights than for sunny California daysbut then youve got your hardworking and patient machines! Unfortunately for Knight, there was a lot of human grunt work to do first. For the next two weeks, he went through the cipher, developing a scheme to transcribe the coded script into easy-to-type, machine-readable text. He found 88 symbols and gave them each a unique code: became lip, became o.., became zs. By early March he had entered the first 16 pages of the cipher into his computer. Next Knight turned to his expectation-maximization algorithm. He asked the program what the manuscripts symbols had in common. It generated clusters of letters that behaved alikeappearing in similar contexts. For example, letters with circumflexes ( ) were usually preceded by or . There were at least 10 identifiable character clusters that repeated throughout the document. The only way groups of letters would look and act largely the same was if this was a genuine cipherone
he could break. This is not a hoax; this is not random. I can solve this one, he told himself. A particular cluster caught his eye: the ciphers unaccented Roman letters used by English, Spanish, and other European languages. Knight did a separate frequency analysis to see which of those letters appeared most often. The results were typical for a Western language. It suggested that this document might be the most basic of ciphers, in which one letter is swapped for anothera kids decoder ring, basically. Maybe, Knight thought, the real code was in the Roman alphabet, and all the funny astronomical signs and accented letters were there just to throw the reader off the scent. Of course, a substitution cipher was only simple if you knew what language it was in. The German Philipp, the Latin copiales, and Hocks allusion to Albanian all hinted at different tongues. Knight asked his algorithm to guess the manuscripts original language. Five times, it compared the entire cryptotext to 80 languages. The results were slow in comingthe algorithm is so computationally intense that each language comparison took five hours. Finally the computer gave the slightest preference for German. Given the spelling of Philipp, that seemed as good an assumption as any. Knight didnt speak a word of German, but he didnt need to. As long as he could learn some basic rules about the languagewhich letters appeared in what frequencythe machine would do the rest. While his family got ready for spring vacationa history tour of the East CoastKnight looked for patterns in the cipher. He saw that one common cipher letter, , was often followed by a second symbol, . They appeared together 99 times; a frequently came after: .
Knight reviewed common German letter combinations. He noticed that C is almost always followed by H, and CH is often followed by T. This sequence is used all the time in German words like licht (light) and macht (power). , Knight guessed, might be cht. It was his first major break.
During his vacation, as his daughters played on their iPads at night in the hotel room, Knight scribbled in his orange notebook, tinkering with possible solutions to the cipher. So far what he had was a simple substitution code. But that left scores of cipher symbols with no German equivalent. So one evening Knight shifted his approach. He tried assuming that the manuscript used a more complex codeone that used multiple symbols to stand for a single German letter. Knight put his theory to the test. He assumed, for example, that , , and all stood for I. It worked. , or
He found others, and soon he started assembling small words, like candidat, followed by secrecy was crumbling.
or der (the in German),
which Knight recognized from World War II movies. Then he got his first big word:
, or antwortet (the candidate answers). The ciphers wall of
But some of the ciphers symbolsespecially iconic ones like , , and remained baffling. Worse, he couldnt get German translations for any of the ciphers standard Roman letters. On March 26, Knight reviewed his notebook. The words of his first phraseDer candidat antwortetwere separated by an and an . That made no sense if the coded and stood for German letters. Thats when Knight realized how wrong his initial assumption had been. The unaccented Roman letters didnt spell out the code. They were the spaces that separated the words of the real message, which was actually written in the glyphs and accented text.
Atrio of handwritten notes, each from an aristocrat asking to be admitted into the society. Photo: Nieders Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbttel
On March 31, Knight sent an email to Schaefer and her boss, Beta Megyesi, head of Uppsalas department of linguistics and philology, who was also interested in the manuscript. I think Ive been making some progress, he wrote, and included 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 stared at the screen. She had spent a dozen years with the cipher. Knight had broken the whole thing open in just a few weeks. The message in these two lines was almost as remarkable. Schaefer made a few tweaks and sent back a tentative translation: 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 It was an initiation ritual, Schaefer said. Geselle literally means a companion. But she knew the term was also used in fraternal ordersclandestine societies like the Freemasons. In this context, a geselle was a rank in a secret society. Schaefers boss, Megyesia 41-year-old Hungarian migrwas especially taken by the ciphers contents. I would not mind being chased by a secret org, she emailed Knight. At night, after she was done managing her department of 450 courses and 25 professors and after she put her twins to bed, Megyesi sat at the computer, turning the symbols into text. She and Knight started emailing multiple times a day about the cipherand signing their emails in Copiale cipher text. But they still hadnt cracked the codes big symbolsespecially , which they transcribed as lip. Megyesi and Schaefer were pretty sure it stood for a word, not a letter. But they werent sure what word it meant. Then one night in the middle of April, while Megyesi was working late in her office, she stared absentmindedly at the neatly arranged folders on her desk. She looked at a page containing the lip symbol. Schaefer walked into her office just as she was thinking about this. Megyesi looked up. This symbol, Megyesi said to Schaefer, its not a lip. Its an eye.
The Oculists seal, featuring a cataract needle, a pair of pince-nez, and two cats watching over mice. Photo: Nieders Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbttel
As it turned out, Schaefer had made a discovery of her own. A phrase in the Copiale text, a reference to the light hand required to be a master of the society, had seemed familiar to her. So she dug up an academic article she had read some time before about a secret order in Germany that called itself the Great Enlightened Society of Oculists. The light hand was mentioned in their bylaws. It was a massive breakthrough. Active in the mid-18th century, the Oculists fixated on both the anatomy and symbolism of the eye. They focused on sight as a metaphor for knowledge. And they performed surgery on the eye. We exceed all other [healers] by being able to pierce all cataracts, whether theyre fully developed or not, the group boasted in its publicand uncodedbylaws. Centered in the town of Wolfenbttel, Germany, the Oculists, it was believed, played the role of gatekeepers to the burgeoning field of ophthalmology. They kept out the charlatans who could cause someone to lose their eyesight forever. On their crest, the Oculists featured a cataract needle and three cats (which, of course, can see in near darkness). In their bylaws, the Oculists emphasis on the masters light hand seemed to be a reference to members surgical skill. And they appeared to have a rather progressive attitude; women could be Oculists, just like men. Schaefer contacted the state archives in Wolfenbttel, which housed a collection of Oculist materials. The archives had a coded text just like the Copialeand some cool amulets too. Megyesi plunged even deeper into the cipher. But the text confused her. The weird rituals it described didnt exactly seem like medical school classes. Although the Copiale mentioned the masters light hand, Megyesi couldnt find anything in the coded text about eye surgery or cataracts. Instead the Copiale noted that the master had to show his skill in reading and writing of our cipher. These Oculists might have been presenting themselves as ophthalmologists in public. But inside the orders chambers, the light hand must have meant something else. Could it have been about keeping secrets through cryptology? Even with its code broken, the Copiales swirl of ritual and double-talk was getting harder and harder to followespecially for someone whose experience with secret orders was drawn mainly from cheesy movies. Megyesi knew she needed help figuring out what these societies were all about. So she asked around for someone who could tell her what really happened in those candlelit initiation rooms. Officially, Andreas nnerfors is a historian
Officially, Andreas nnerfors is a historian of ideas. But he spends a lot of his time as one of 50 or so university researchers in the world seriously examining the historical and cultural impact of secret societies. When Megyesi contacted him, nnerfors readily agreed to read this newly decoded document from a clandestine order. Like the kid who sees candies, I could not resist, he says, tugging gently at his ascot. Plus, my boss wasnt there. They agreed to meet in September in the castlelike university library in Lund, nnerfors cobblestoned hometown in southern Sweden. Megyesi and Schaefer came down from Uppsala with the Copiale manuscript. Knight flew in from California. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans belonged to secret societies in the 18th century, nnerfors explained to Megyesi; in Sweden alone, there were more than a hundred orders. Though they were clandestine, they were often remarkably inclusive. Many welcomed noblemen and The cover of the Copiale cipher. merchants alikea rare egalitarian Image: courtesy of Uppsala University practice in an era of strict social hierarchies. That made the orders dangerous to the state. They also frequently didnt care about their adherents Christian denomination, making these ordersespecially the biggest of them, Freemasonryan implicit threat to the authority of the Catholic Church. In 1738 Pope Clement XII forbade all Catholics from joining a Masonic lodge. Others implied that the male-only groups might be hotbeds of sodomy. Not long after, rumors started that members of these orders actually worshipped the devil. These societies were the incubators of democracy, modern science, and ecumenical religion. They elected their own leaders and drew up constitutions to govern their operations. It wasnt an accident that Voltaire, George Washington, and Ben Franklin were all active members. And just like todays networked radicals, much of their power was wrapped up in their ability to stay anonymous and keep their communications secret. After reading the Oculists cipher, nnerfors suggested that it described one of the more extreme groups. Forget the implicit threats to the state or church. In part of the Copiale, theres explicit talk about slaying the tyrannical three-headed monster who deprive[s] man of his natural freedom. Theres even a call for a general revolt. Remember, nnerfors told the code-breakers, this book was written in the 1740s30 years before the Declaration of Independence. To someone at the time, he added, this would be like reading a manifesto from a terrorist organization. To nnerfors, decoding the Copiale was a significant achievement. Traditionally, historians have just ignored documents like this, because they dont have the tools to make sense of them. Thats why the Oculists passed as early surgeons for so long. But there are scores of these enciphered documents many in Lund alone. Some concern new rites of a fraternal order; others could detail political movements. Theres no way to tell for sure, because theyre cryptologically sealed. Theres a whole secret history of the West waiting to be told. There are so many more codes.
DECODING THE COPIALE

Cracking the so-called Copiale cipher was a three-step process. First the characters had to be rendered as machine-readable text: became eh, and became lip. Next, software analyzed the behavior of the cipher letters and guessed that the Copiales original language was German. The code-breaking team then was able to translate the text into German and finally into English, revealing a secret manual of an esoteric society. Heres how it worked.
SAMPLE OF ORIGINAL TEXT
MACHINE-READABLE TEXT
z ns eh n hd iot hk tri j ns ah b mal tri nu h z ih plus c ni three bar d r. ki mu del oh s z uh three zs lip o.. pi iot oh r g zzz ni x. ns ah j iot del gam zzz y.. lam l iot hk p z eh plus f plus uu cross c. iot bas uu c del grr cross c. oh arr lam f h. nu x. uh : j sqp lam e m. ns r. gs m. c. : uu h tri sqi : lam gs grr y.. ru ah ds bar p. arr uh b m. oh c. : uu h tri sqi c. tri bar n z grr bar m. ah x. uu o m. grr iot c. n bar ns uh c x. ih hd zzz y.. plus zs del eh hd n. c. lam uu
GERMAN RESULTS
die historie von dem ursprunge der *lip* *o..* die neugierigkeit ist dem meNschlicheN geschlecht an geerbt wir wolleN offt eine sache wisseN blos des wegeN weil sie geheim gehalteN
ENGLISH TRANSLATION
The history of the origin of the Oculist society. Curiosity is the inheritance of mankind. Frequently we want to know something only because it needs to be kept secret.
These unaccented Roman letters appeared with the frequency youd expect in a European language. But they dont represent letters they mark the spaces between words.
Algorithmic analysis showed that letters that looked alike also acted alike. These all actually stand for the letter E. Its a way to confuse codebreakers.
The Copiales more unusual symbols denote words, not lettersin this case, Oculist and society.
On October 25, 2011, The New York Times published a story about the Copiale, focusing on Knights code-cracking techniques. A flood of media attention followedalong with hundreds of emails from people who claimed to have ancient ciphers of their own. In December, when I visited Knight, he had just received a picture from Yemen. Some Bedouins had found a stone with an unknown, squarish script. Perhaps Knight could tell them what it said? This was unfamiliar turf. Knight and the other members of the Copiale team werent used to such attention. And not all of it was positive: There were also miffed Masons telling him he didnt understand the full picture, and warnings from the fringe set telling them to stop spilling dusty secrets or claiming that Lucifer was really the Freemason god. Back in Lund, nnerfors grew surprised too as he continued to plumb the Copiale. In the midst of the descriptions about Oculist rituals, the document took a narrative turn. It described a meeting of a few good friends who talked about peoples desire to know something only because it needs to be kept secret. The friends decided to use this curiosity to play a little prank. They set up a fraternity and would agree immediately as they would like to pretend that a great secret would be behind their unification. They called this farce, this hoax, this grand psychological experiment Freemasonry. In other words, the Oculists were making an outrageous claim: that they founded Freemasonry as a joke. That certainly wasnt true, but at the very least the Oculists seemed to be watching Freemasonrys every move. Starting on page 27 and continuing for the remaining 78 pages, the cipher detailed the rituals performed by the highest degrees of the Masonic orderrites unknown to ordinary Masons at the time. Nothing was omitted from the Copiales descriptions of these top-level rituals. Not the skulls. Not the coffins. Not removal of undergarments nor the nooses nor the veneration of Hiram Abiff, builder of the Great Temple of Jerusalem, whose decomposed body became the alchemical emblem for turning something rotten into something miraculous and golden. Decades later, most of these practices became widely known as the Freemasons secrets seeped out. But in the 1740s they were still well concealedexcept to the Oculists. The Oculists were a secret
society that had burrowed deep into another secret society. nnerfors noted that the cats on the Oculists insignia were watching over mice. It could be another Oculist joke or a sign that they were spies.
Anote from October 30, 1775 reads, This box concerns the Oculist Order, and is not to be opened until special order of the Duke. Photo: Nieders Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbttel
Before their cipher was broken, the Oculists were practically unknown. The main thing historians in Wolfenbttel knew about the group was that it was led by a count named Friedrich August von Veltheim, who died in April 1775. Like many aristocrats of his day, he belonged to multiple secret societies, including an Order of the Golden Poodles, which likely sounded as goofy back then as it does today. But in his will, his Oculist heirlooms merited special instructions. He had locked all of the Oculists objects in a leather trunk and ordered his son to make sure the seals remained unbroken until the local duke (or one of the dukes descendants) said otherwise. If the counts goal was to make sure that whatever was inside that trunk faded into obscurity, he succeeded. The trunk wasnt opened until 1918. Its contentsnow at the state archives in Wolfenbttelhave rarely been examined since. After months of talking about the Oculists with Knight, Schaefer, Megyesi, and nnerfors, I decided this past winter to see Count von Veltheims trove for myself. Unable to make the trip personally,nnerfors arranged for his mentora professor named Jan Snoek to meet me at the archives. Snoek is a high-degree Mason who has designed his own rituals for the order. We met at the archives in Wolfenbttel and found a series of rectangular boxes waiting for us. Snoek and I took them into a private reading room with circular windows that overlooked a browning forest. Inside the first box was the silver-dollar-sized seal of the Oculists; its watchful cats and pince-nez perfectly preserved thanks to almost two and a half centuries of near isolation. Another box revealed a bone-handled cataract needle and the luminescent green aprons that members wore. Inside a third box were five oval amulets bearing raised blue eyes so anatomically correct I half expected them to wink. There was also a tiny cylinder, covered in jade and goldthe colors of the Copiale itself. I screwed it open to find a tortoise-shell cup holding an eye made of ivory and horn. The model came apart like a Russian doll: pupil inside lens, iris on top of pupil, cornea resting on iris. Each layer was more exquisite than the next.
In this Oculist text, the coded symbols seem to stand for numbers, not letters. Photo: Nieders Landesarchiv-Staatsarchiv Wolfenbttel
The artifacts laid out in the reading room also undercut the idea that the Oculists were sleeper agents on a mission to expose Freemasonry. Why would spies need all these extra rituals? Or be so interested in anatomy? Put yourself in a Masons shoes, Snoek explained. The Catholic Church has outlawed your orderand every other secret society. You dont want to give up your Freemasonry, but you dont want to be accused of sodomy. Even in a largely Protestant country like Germany, that was a withering accusation at the time. So you hide it in a veil, Snoek said. You start a new set of rituals, to layer on top of the old and make it impregnable to Vatican attacks. Perhaps the Oculists werent spying on Freemasonry so much as keeping it alive. As a Mason you are not allowed to write downlet alone publishyour rituals, Snoek said. So how do you spread your ideas? You publish esoteric rites as if they are exposurespublic outings of Masonry. Except you publish in code, so only an elite cadre of fellow Masons can read the dangerous things you have to say. And when your mission is over, you stuff all the evidence into a box that doesnt get opened for nearly 150 years. The Oculists guarded and transmitted the Masons deepest secrets, Snoek believes, using a mixture of ritual, misdirection, and cryptography. Eventually we turned to the last items in the Oculist trove: nine copies of a four-page document written in a mixture of old German, Latin, and the Copiales coded script. The message was more or less identical in every set. Die Algebra, it said at the top of page one, a primer on the old way of calculating. Rows of cipher letters lay beneath. The document seemed to add them up as if they were numbers. The third page mentioned the Jewish Cabalathe mystical system in which meaning is derived from the numerical value of letters. It would appear that the Copiale symbols dont represent just words and letters, they stand for numbers too. But if they do, Knight, Megyesi, and Schaefer havent been able to tease out the meaning. The Oculist master apparently understood these coded documents in a way that todays interpreters do not. Despite years worth of attacks on their cipher, the Oculists secrets have not been pried loose, at least not fully. What they saw in their initiation chambers may never again be seen. Contributing editor Noah Shachtman (noah.shachtman@gmail.com) wrote about Russian cybersecurity mogul Eugene Kaspersky in issue 20.08. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 View All RELATED YOU MIGHT LIKE
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Noah Shachtman is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution and the editor of this little blog right here. Follow him on Facebook and Google+. Read more by Noah Shachtman Follow @dangerroom on Twitter. Tags: Andreas nnerfors, Beata Megyesi, Christiane Schaefer, Copiale Cipher, crypto, Jan Snoek, Kevin Knight, Oculists Post Comment | 111 Comments | Permalink
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8 days ago
RavingArmy
191
See, this is the sort of awesome sauce that I love about Wired. Excellent story.
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Trappp
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RavingArmy 5 days ago
Agree wholeheartedly. Notice the complete absence of politics. Yes!!!!!

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wallypalo
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Trappp a day ago
I found it very useful, politically. We are living in a time when political opposition is met with all the resources of the omnipotent State. I wonder if the Freemasons get around to talking about secession.
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_Angel_Rolando
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yeah but News about it are more than a year old... just wondering
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JeramieH3
1
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The CougarAce article was how I found Wired, and this article is why I keep reading it.
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Brendan Wilkins
111 1
9 days ago
A really well written and riveting article. Is there a book to follow? I hope so!
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duckyreads
46
7 days ago
Now I just want someone to translate the Voynich Manuscript

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The Doctor
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duckyreads 6 days ago
"Never gonna give you up" "Never gonna let you down" "Never gonna..." aww, you know the cypher already. ;)
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Jacob Ellinger
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The Doctor 4 days ago
^Ca-ca-ca-ca COMBO breaker^

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Joshua Bivens
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duckyreads 4 days ago
And the Zodiac. Any news on that?

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Joanna
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5 days ago
*waits for inevitable Nicholas Cage movie*
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John Foster
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Joanna 4 days ago
haha :)
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Max Shron
8 days ago
Great article, one nitpick on the bit of Jewish terminology at the end. Cabala (usually spelled Kabbalah) is a very big, diverse set of mystical Jewish teachings. Gematria is the name for the bit about words being changed to numbers and those numbers having esoteric meaning. I completely believe that an 18th or 19th century occultist would mix up the two, but in our modern informed age it would be best to keep the terms separate.
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coolit10
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Max Shron a day ago Reply
Oculist is not the same as occultist. One deals with eyes, the other, the weird.
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Al Jigong Billings
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Max Shron 4 days ago
As a former non-Jewish qabalist (to use a spelling common for non-Jewish forms), the forms of it in use by non-Jews since at least the mid-19th century don't differentiate heavily, focusing largely on the Tree of Life and Gematria, though often in English or other European languages. You'll find Masonic references to such things, such as those by Pike, do not differentiate things the way that Jews do. This is not surprising given how, often, it is hundreds of years removed from actual Jewish involvement in these circumstances. I will note that the proper English dictionary form, going back a long time, is "cabala."
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Guest
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Max Shron 3 hours ago
In modern esotericism, it's common to spell the word differently depending on which form you practice. Normally, Kabbalah is the Jewish variant, Cabalah is the Christian form of it, and Qabalah is the Hermetic form. Each has unique beliefs, myths, practices, and objectives.
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Not Assange
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Max Shron 3 hours ago
In modern esotericism, it's common to spell the word differently depending on which form you practice. Normally, Kabbalah is the Jewish variant, Cabalah is the Christian form of it, and Qabalah is the Hermetic form. Each has unique beliefs, myths, practices, and objectives.
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sleepless
7 days ago
GERMAN RESULTS die historie von dem ursprunge der *lip* *o..* die neugierigkeit ist dem meNschlicheN geschlecht an geerbt wir wolleN offt eine sache wisseN blos des wegeN weil sie geheim gehalteN ENGLISH TRANSLATION The history of the origin of the Oculist society. Curiosity is the inheritance of mankind. Frequently we want to know something only because it **is** kept secret. !!! Note is *IS* - the english translation in the article is not semantically correct. Source: me being a german native speaker.
Source: me being a german native speaker.

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cepr
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sleepless 5 days ago
Depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

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sleepless
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cepr 5 days ago
IIRC "is" is a form of "be" ;) "only because it needs to be kept secret" does not really make sense, especially if the author of the text opposes that notion. but maybe the german text is truncated - maybe is really sais "weil sie geheim gehalten werden *mssen*" - which would translate to "because they need to be kept secret"
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fonseca898
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I think cepr was making a Clinton joke.

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Cthonctic
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In Middle High German there are lots of figures such as this one where the trailing "werden" is simply omitted. I guess that is one of the factors about breaking old cyphers with modern means: not only do you need to know the source language but also the style of that language which changes a lot depending on the form of a text and throughout time.
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sleepless
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Cthonctic 4 days ago
but "mssen" is the word for the semantically important "need to/have to" translaion. The "werden", as pointed out, is left out, but I reintroduced it so the "mssen" could be correctly added.
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Jason
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muessen isn't necessary. "weil sie geheim gehalten werden" ~= "because the are kept secret". ..rereading.. ah well yeah muessen would be necessary to come up with their english translation. side :D
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Fanandala
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Jason 15 hours ago
I would go with your translation

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Dedwrekka
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They already mentioned in the article that they didn't do direct translations. They translated for language and dialect, then translated for understandability.
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Soylent Green Is People

70 6
9 days ago
I'm not saying it was aliens...but...ALIENS!!!

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nightscout13
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Soylent Green Is People 4 days ago
Ok Giorgio A. Tsoukalos
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IceTrey
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4 days ago
Thanks for the pictures of the exquisite model eye! Oh wait...never mind.
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Cris Christian
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IceTrey 10 hours ago
My thoughts exactly....oh, well!

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Evan Pugh
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8 days ago
Great article! Have you seen the online Copiale encoder? http://www.copiale.net/
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Howard Wong
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8 days ago
Very well written. Entertaining and informative, while not assaulting us with tons of facts that would otherwise bury the intent of this article.
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Joe Carr
4 days ago
Best article I have read in MONTHS!!!! at first I was like "damn ill never make it thru an article this long" and was thirsty for more after the article came to an end... I would love to have seen some photos of the objects found inside the box!!!! CMON!!
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Stuart Clayton
7 days ago
Commenter "sleepless" is right. The English translation should be "... because it **is** kept secret", not "... needs to be kept secret". The German sentence shows a kind of ellipsis (omission of final "ist" in a final subordinate clause) that was used more frequently (but not always) in texts from the 19C and earlier.
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gfish3000
9 days ago
Interestingly enough, there were also plenty of hoaxes injected into encoded occult literature of the day while Enlightenment Era versions of Alex Jones and Jim Marrs wrote hyperventilating treatises on how these occult societies are conspiring to rule the world. Fast forward 250 years and not much seems to have changed in that regard except that occultists no longer feel the need to publish their ideas in ciphers, even is said ideas read like descriptions of an acid trip (see Max Heindel's work).
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Dedwrekka
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gfish3000 4 days ago
At the time the only ways to spread "dangerous" ideas was hidden writing and secure meetings. That's no longer the case. You could publish an e-book of your entire belief system and rituals without drawing any more notice than the people in your group.
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coolit10
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gfish3000 a day ago
Oculist or occult? Are they the same? The Catholic church was and is the problem.
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Daniel Zswaves
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coolit10 in 11 hours Share
There are some who would say the Catholic church is the true oculist.
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alias: Hizoka Andou
7 days ago
Great article!!
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CygnusXII CygnusXII
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7 days ago
Google-Fu'd the Copiale Doc's in case some a wondering where they are. http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/...
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CygnusXII CygnusXII
7 days ago
What a wonderful piece. I was rapt with attention. I wish they had included links to the whole document and it's translation. I am sure that a little google-fu will make it handy.
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Viral Videos
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8 days ago
That was a great article!

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Jim Walker
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4 days ago
One of the better wired articles I've read over the past five years. Kudos!
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Andrew Eather
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5 days ago
Top stuff! Very interesting article.

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Dev Basu
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7 days ago
What a brilliant and captivating piece. I love the little innuendos in the texts, all encrypted to form the ultimate insider's joke.
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Chris Griswold
8 days ago
my personal belief is that masons go to a place filled with waxed bricks, it's a huge complex with a sunlit mall-like feel. huge corridors with shops and restaurants and in that likeness. i saw it in a dream. someone i knew was content there, but scared, and it wasn't heaven.
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GarthBock
5 days ago
What a great article ! This beats National Treasure ! After reading several of the excellent comments here (Max and Sleepless) maybe the remainder of the cypher and others could be crowd sourced. Also..thanks Doctor for a good chuckle and kind of scary that Rick Rollin' could exist in ancient times....
ancient times....
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Eduardo Apolinario
5 1
7 days ago
What about the Voynich manuscript? Can those techniques be used to break it too?
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Pierre Clouthier
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Eduardo Apolinario 6 days ago Share
Excellent suggestion! I'd love to see the Voynich cranked through this process.
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thelondonco cadle
7 days ago
maybe you guy's should be looking at the washington monument as it was designed prigianally by mills look at the design with Washington in a chariot what he's roman now and then the actual one His design called for a tall obeliskan upright, four-sided pillar that tapers as it riseswith a nearly flat top. He surrounded the obelisk with a circular colonnade, the top of which would feature Washington standing in a chariot. Inside the colonnade would be statues of 30 prominent Revolutionary War heroes. One part of Mills' elaborate design that was built was the doorway surmounted by an Egyptian-style Winged sun. The winged sun is a symbol associated with divinity, royalty and power in the Ancient Near East (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Persia). The symbol has also been found in the records of ancient cultures residing in various regions of South America as well as Australia. It was removed when construction resumed after 1884. A photo can be seen in The Egyptian Revival by Richard G. Carrot.[19] the the know nothing partie it's well worth researching this part of history
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They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found A Secret Society Inside

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RavingArmy 5 days ago

Agree wholeheartedly. Notice the complete absence of politics. Yes!!!!!

Trappp a day ago

RavingArmy 4 days ago

RavingArmy 4 days ago

Now I just want someone to translate the Voynich Manuscript

duckyreads 6 days ago

The Doctor 4 days ago

^Ca-ca-ca-ca COMBO breaker^

duckyreads 4 days ago

And the Zodiac. Any news on that?

*waits for inevitable Nicholas Cage movie*

Joanna 4 days ago

Max Shron a day ago Reply

Max Shron 4 days ago

Max Shron 3 hours ago

Max Shron 3 hours ago

Source: me being a german native speaker.

sleepless 5 days ago

Depends on what the meaning of "is" is.

cepr 5 days ago

sleepless 4 days ago

I think cepr was making a Clinton joke.

sleepless 4 days ago

Cthonctic 4 days ago

sleepless 4 days ago

Jason 15 hours ago

I would go with your translation

sleepless 4 days ago

Soylent Green Is People

I'm not saying it was aliens...but...ALIENS!!!

Soylent Green Is People 4 days ago

IceTrey 10 hours ago

My thoughts exactly....oh, well!

gfish3000 4 days ago

gfish3000 a day ago

coolit10 in 11 hours Share

alias: Hizoka Andou

That was a great article!

Top stuff! Very interesting article.

Eduardo Apolinario 6 days ago Share

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waits for inevitable Nicholas Cage movie