New details on the Copiale 18th century cipher

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

It turned out that in addition to the decrypted text, the individual characters of the decrypted manuscript mean the numbers that make up the other, separate cipher, and have not yet been able to decrypt it.

Copiale Cipher is a 105-page manuscript of the end of the 18th century, found among the scientific archives of the GDR. A skilful volume in 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 scales, large ovals and pentagrams. The only understandable words are Philipp 1866 at the beginning and Copiales 3 at the end.
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Swedish linguist Christina Schaefer (Christiane Schaefer) tried to decipher this text since 1998, but to no avail. The breakthrough came in January 2011 when she met 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 simply a set of cryptographic symbols in which English words are encrypted. Kevin Knight has already achieved some outstanding results in her field, so Christina turned to him.

Kevin Knight began working on the cipher on weekends. It took two weeks only to develop a scheme for writing handwritten characters in digital form. In total, the book turned 88 different characters. Then he manually entered the first 16 pages of the manuscript into his statistical analysis program. She showed that there are precisely regularities in the text - it became clear that this is not a duck, but a real cipher.

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 alphabet without dots in the text plays the role of spaces, and the colons indicate a doubling of the previous consonant letter. Kevin Knight also suggested that different characters in the cipher could correspond to the same symbol of the original - this guess was also true. As a result, after a month of work, Kevin Knight received the first line of the text, which, however, he could not understand because of ignorance of the German language:

die der bruder, diesel schlag id der 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 the linguists helped him advance further in his work. With the help of colleagues and his frequency analysis program, Kevin Knight was able to translate the text almost completely into German.



Unfortunately, the decoding 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. On the first pages of the text, the ritual of initiation into members of the secret society of the “Great Educational Organization - the Order of Oculists” is described, the sign of which was an open eye, as a symbol of what a person is enlightened and begins to see. Vision for them was a symbol of knowledge, and they performed real eye surgery and were the first in the world to learn how to treat cataracts. It is believed that the Order of Optometrists laid the foundation of modern ophthalmology. The last pages of the manuscript contain a comment about inalienable human rights.

The pentagrams remain undeciphered, which themselves are the 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 write the manuscript.

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

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

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

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



According to experts, in the 1740s, agents of the Order of Oculists were able to penetrate deeply into another, larger secret society of masons and learn their secrets and rituals (masons themselves had no right to record rituals). There is an opinion that the Order of Optometrists was specially created for the intelligence of the Masonic organization, this is indicated by the order's emblem: two cats watching the mouse. Or it could be a special unit that was engaged in the protection and preservation of Masonic secrets.


Seal of the Order of the Optometrist