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    Default Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society

    Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society Ceremonies Of Initiation

    The manuscript seems straight out of fiction: a strange handwritten message in abstract symbols and Roman letters meticulously covering 105 yellowing pages, hidden in the depths of an academic archive.

    Now, more than three centuries after it was devised, the 75,000-character "Copiale Cipher" has finally been broken.

    The mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, reveals the rituals and political leanings of a 18th-century secret society in Germany. The rituals detailed in the document indicate the secret society had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology, though it seems members of the secret society were not themselves eye doctors.

    These are pages from the "Copiale Cipher," a mysterious cryptogram, bound in gold and green brocade paper, that was finally cracked by an international team of cryptographers



    "This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," said computer scientist Kevin Knight of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, part of the international team that finally cracked the Copiale Cipher. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

    To break the Copiale Cipher, Knight and colleagues Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden tracked down the original manuscript, which was found in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and is now in a private collection. They then transcribed a machine-readable version of the text, using a computer program created by Knight to help quantify the co-occurrences of certain symbols and other patterns.

    "When you get a new code and look at it, the possibilities are nearly infinite," Knight said. "Once you come up with a hypothesis based on your intuition as a human, you can turn over a lot of grunt work to the computer."

    With the Copiale Cipher, the codebreaking team began not even knowing the language of the encrypted document. But they had a hunch about the Roman and Greek characters distributed throughout the manuscript, so they isolated these from the abstract symbols and attacked it as the true code.

    "It took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure," Knight says.

    For more information about the method of decipherment, visit http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/

    The Cipher Key


    After trying 80 languages, the cryptography team realized the Roman characters were "nulls," intended to mislead to reader. It was the abstract symbols that held the message.

    The team then tested the hypothesis that abstract symbols with similar shapes represented the same letter, or groups of letters. Eventually, the first meaningful words of German emerged: "Ceremonies of Initiation," followed by "Secret Section

    Book cover for Copiale Cipher


    Knight is now targeting other coded messages, including ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, a serial murderer who sent taunting messages to the press and has never been caught. Knight is also applying his computer-assisted codebreaking software to other famous unsolved codes such as the last section of "Kryptos," an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of CIA headquarters, and the Voynich Manuscript, a medieval document that has baffled professional cryptographers for decades.


    Krytos Sculpture At CIA Headquarters


    But for Knight, the trickiest language puzzle of all is still everyday speech. A senior research scientist in the Intelligent Systems Division of the USC Information Sciences Institute, Knight is one of the world's leading experts on machine translation -- teaching computers to turn Chinese into English or Arabic into Korean. "Translation remains a tough challenge for artificial intelligence," said Knight, whose translation software has been adopted by companies such as Apple and Intel.

    With researcher Sujith Ravi, who received a PhD in computer science from USC in 2011, Knight has been approaching translation as a cryptographic problem, which could not only improve human language translation but could also be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages and animal communication.

    The National Science Foundation funds Knight's cryptography and translation research. The Copiale Cipher work was presented as part of an invited presentation at the 2011 Association for Computational Linguistics meeting.

    http://beforeitsnews.com/story/1278/...nitiation.html
    Last edited by The One; 25th October 2011 at 20:43.

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    Default Re: Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society

    hi One

    Very, very, interesting, thank you, will read it now.

    regards to you
    roman

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    Default Re: Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society

    I see this in the cover of that book....



    but then, I see it a lot of places....


    & it certainly seems important (to me)

    Hard times create strong men, Strong men create good times, Good times create weak men, Weak men create hard times.
    Where are you?

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    Default Re: Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society

    • The Mystery of the Copiale Cipher:
    No need to follow anyone, only consider broadening (y)our horizon of possibilities ...

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    Lightbulb Re: Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society

    An amulet and the encrypted manuscript 'Copiale Cipher' from the Order of Oculus (Eye), a secret society of Master Masons from 1740's Germany. Notice the Saturnian hexagram above the Architect Compass on the amulet, and the high priest breastplate of Solomon's Temple with the 12 Tribe gemstones.



    In a critical section of the Copiale cipher, there's explicit talk about slaying a tyrannical "three-headed monster" who "deprives man of his natural freedom." There's even a call for a "general revolt" of humanity. It makes me wonder: a rebellion against what?

    If the "three-headed monster" represents the Triune God who "deprives man of his natural freedom", then this would be even more tangible proof of the secret primary agenda of universal Freemasonry being that of carnal Jovian/Satanic rebellion against the interdimensional Father God represented by them as the 6th planet Saturn!
    • "Star of David" ??? that is a Hexagram - a symbol that dates back to the Sumerians and beyond.
    • "God" Remphan (or Raephan) was an Assyrian/Babylonian god of the planet Saturn. According to some sources, this star was used in connection to the child sacrifice, and we see Greek god Cronus (who is Saturn) depicted in reliefs as eating children.
    • Not every hexagram instantly relates to Saturn. Those guys are obsessed with asabovebelow so those two triangles together in that instance probably represents Alpha and Omega
    • In the Freemasonic KJV right in the first few pages it says that Heaven is represented by a circle and the number 3 and that Earth is represented by a square and the number 4. That’s why on the cover of that version of the Bible and also such a recognizable symbol of Freemasonry is the Compass and Square with a “G” in the middle. That symbol not only represents the “As Above, So Below” principle/ idea, but also the marriage of Heaven and Earth, 3 (Heaven) + 4 (Earth) = 7. “G” being the 7th letter of the alphabet. (Not a representation of the 6th planet) (The shape of the letter “G” is even a circle with a square/right angle in it.) The “G” represents (at least according to the Freemasons), not God trapped in a cube, but rather each and every individual’s role here. That’s why almost every spiritual tradition had this self-realization idea referred to as “Squaring the Circle”, realizing that mankind, and more personally, you and I are the marriage of heaven and earth. That’s just my two cents. And not even that I agree with it, just that straight out of the horses mouth, right in the Bible that they give out for free at their lodges they tell you exactly what the compass and square mean.
    Last edited by ExomatrixTV; 26th November 2021 at 19:31.
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    Lightbulb Re: Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society

    • The Oculists and the Copiale Cipher
    • The Oculists and the Copiale Cipher by Bryan Godwin, Tiler #ccmasons
    Ciphers, cryptography, secret codes, modes of recognition; these are all some of the more fascinating and genuinely hidden parts of the Masonic tradition. Indeed, much information and misinformation surrounding our fraternity has stemmed from our use of ciphers to communicate and keep record of our ritual. Freemasons of course are not the only group or society that has used this method of written obfuscation throughout history. Many cryptographic codes and ciphers have eluded translation through the centuries, having lost the necessary oral tradition that is often the key to translating these seemingly obscure texts.

    One such complex example is the “Copiale Manuscript”. This is a tome consisting of 75,000 words, spread over 105 pages or leaves (photographic examples are shown at the conclusion of this article). It is filled with abstract symbols, and characters that appear to be Greek, and Roman. In addition to the ciphered text, the book ends with the plain text; “Copiales 3” and “Philipp 1866” written in the cover. Other than alluding to an owner of the book, and “Copiales” loosely translating to “copy #3” there were no other clues to the code. Discovered in an East German library around 1970, the Copiale cipher had puzzled many cryptographers over the last four decades, and was considered unbreakable, or even a hoax.

    In spring of 2011 two cryptographers, Kevin Knight, a local USC specialist in machine translation, and Swedish scientist, Christiane Schaefer, met at a conference on computer learning. Schaefer had received the manuscript some years earlier from a friend as something of a challenge, but like those before her, she had no luck in extracting its secrets. Seeing Knight’s passion for cryptography and his unique approach to the computer based learning of symbols and languages, Schaefer slipped Knight a copy of the Copiale Cipher, along with the note “Here comes the top-secret manuscript!!” “It seemed more suitable for long dark Swedish winter nights than for sunny California days!”

    Knight got to work. First, he began the painstaking work of transcribing the key symbols by hand into a format that a computer could read. Next, the machines got to work applying his algorithm. Eventually, as he continued to hand transcribe the first 16 pages of the tome into his software, some patterns began to emerge. Finding 10 unique character clusters that repeated through these pages, Knight realized this was not a complex hoax; there was hope of a solution. He continued to work nights on the puzzle, writing down possible cracks in the cipher’s armor. Adding to the complexity, Knight didn’t know a lick of German, the likely language he was working to decipher. But that detail didn’t matter to the computers, or his algorithm.

    On March 26th, Knight reviewed his work. The first phrase had revealed itself: “Der candidat antwortet”.

    The biggest breakthrough was the realization that the Roman letters scattered throughout the manuscript were not actually meant to be translated. They were indicators of spaces or breaks between words, intended to throw the reader “off the scent.” With that piece of critical information, and one phrase, the brick wall of code began to crumble.

    What was revealed was a substitution cipher. Not a “one to one” substitution, but rather a homophonic code. Each ciphertext character does represent a clear, plaintext character, but several glyphs or characters could represent the same word, or multiple words. Some singular ciphertext characters might even stand for an entire word. This may sound familiar to some readers of this column.

    The apparent details of a secret society called “The Oculists” began to emerge. Seemingly, a fraternal, operative order focusing on the use of optical instruments and surgical procedures to represent ways of bringing “light” to a prospective member began to manifest. The following describes a section of the translation.

    “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 Master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read.” says the Master. It is an impossible task. The page is blank. Told not to panic; there is hope for his vision to improve. The Master wipes the candidate’s eyes with a cloth and orders the surgery to commence. The members on the sidelines raise their candles high, and the master begins to pluck at the eyebrows of the candidate. “Try reading again.” The first page is replaced with another during the procedure, filled with text. Congratulations, my brother. Now you can see.”

    This is just a small section of the translated ritual contained in the Copiale Cipher, possibly a glimpse at one of the many secret societies of the time, and their use of tools to educate their candidates in ways of their order.

    Or perhaps there was something more… as most Masons know, even the words used in our ritual can be a bit of a cypher themselves. Words like “Tiler”, “Deacon”, “Trestleboard” or even “Worshipful” have profoundly different meanings in a Masonic ritual than they have to the average person. The team members that so skillfully decoded this cipher were not members of “The Oculists” or any other fraternal society. They didn’t even speak German… and particularly the Old High German that would have been spoken in the 1730’s. Ritual manuscripts are often used to communicate concepts that are only completely understood after having heard their contents communicated verbally; hence, the difficulty in the overall translation.

    After reading the complete translation of the Oculist ritual, it was clear, even to me, that this was more than just some forgotten guild of eye doctors. Clear references to particularly styled staircases, columns, chalk and charcoal drawings, checkered floors with jagged edges, and specific details of columns abound in the translation. This was not just another fraternal order, but likely an offshoot of Freemasonry, or perhaps even a ritual designed by a Mason. This was certainly missed by the codebreakers who had no background in our ritual, and who certainly were without a background in early German Masonic rituals.

    Fortunately Illustrious Arturo de Hoyos, 33°, and Grand Archivist of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of the Southern Jurisdiction, who just happens to have been reading 18th century German since the early 70’s, also noticed these similarities. Ill. Bro. de Hoyos suggests that if one starts to replace some of the translations such as “Eye Doctor” or “Oculist,” with “Maurer” the 18th century German word for “Mason” (which is still in use), a different picture is revealed. With this knowledge, it is possible that the Copiale manuscript is actually a blind of sorts, meant to hide the contents of an older Masonic ritual to evade the prying eyes of anti-Masonic governments. Blinds have been used throughout history by Masons, Rosicrucians, Alchemists and members many other traditions who have endeavored to keep the deeper meanings of their writing hidden, adding to the complex problem of tracing our fraternity’s history and heritage.

    The hidden meaning behind the hidden meaning is a theme throughout our ritual, and is exactly what we mean by “esoteric”. The Copiale manuscript is an amazing example of how we can peel back layers and layers of these historic and esoteric documents to reveal deeper truths.

    Even to cryptographic experts and Masons alike, not all is what it seems to the naked eye.

    Fraternally,
    Brother Bryan Godwin
    #ccmasons
    Last edited by ExomatrixTV; 26th November 2021 at 19:40.
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    Default Re: Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society

    • The Secret Society of 'The Oculists': Enlightened Pioneers or Covert Freemasons?
    The Highly Enlightened Society of Oculists, founded in Germany by Friedrich August von Veltheim in the Eighteenth Century, has until recently remained an elusive and little known entity. Presumed to be a society for ophthalmic pioneers, with a ‘light hand’ a prerequisite for membership, recent evidence suggests its roots lay in Freemasonry and the practice of Masonic rites banned by Pope Clement XII.

    In 2012, the mysterious Copiale Cipher, an encrypted manuscript of the Oculist Society, was decoded by an American and Swedish cryptographer. This film explores the world of the Oculist Society through the decoding of this pivotal manuscript.

    Presenter/Interviewer: Richard Packard (UK) introduces this video from Masara Laginaf (UK)
    Last edited by ExomatrixTV; 26th November 2021 at 19:46.
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    Lightbulb Re: Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher' Cracked After 300 Years, 18th Century Secret Society

    • ESCRS Video Of The Month, February 2019: The secret society of the oculists enlightened pioneers.

    Some people will go to any length to read a book. Kevin Knight, a senior research scientist and fellow at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USC), was intrigued by an 18th century document known as The Copiale Cipher. He was curious about it because no one could read it.

    Named for one of just two non-coded inscriptions in the document, this mysterious manuscript is 105 pages long and is bound in gold and green brocade paper. The manuscript consists of roughly 75,000 characters. These characters are handwritten very neatly but consist of a perplexing mix of upper- and lower-case Roman letters, along with a large assortment of more abstract symbols. In total, the Cipher contains 90 distinct characters, including 26 unaccented Roman letters. Adding to the confusion is the lack of spacing between words.

    Dr Knight, who primarily conducts research in computational linguistics and machine translation, doesn’t have much experience in cryptography. But undeterred, he began collaborating this year with two Swedish linguists, Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University, with the goal to decipher The Copiale Cipher.

    After a few dead-ends, the team realised that the Roman characters designated spaces between words whilst the abstract symbols contained the actual information. They also discovered that a colon indicated that the previous consonant is duplicated. After they predicted that the Cipher was an encryption of the German language and then subjected the Cipher to a word-frequency analysis, things quickly fell into place. The team could finally read the text of the Cipher.

    Dr Knight and his colleagues found that The Copiale Cipher describes the rituals and some of the political ideals of a German secret society from the 1730s. They also learned that this society was fascinated by eye surgery and ophthalmology, although none of its members were practitioners.

    But why should we care about a dusty old book that no one could read that was written by members of a German secret society?

    “This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies”, says Dr Knight. He cites several modern examples of challenging ciphers, such as the communications from the still-unidentified Zodiac Killer to the California police in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Kryptos sculpture, located on grounds of the C.I.A. headquarters in the United States, which has been only partly decoded.

    Dr Knight also points out that there are other such ancient enciphered texts, particularly the famous Voynich Manuscript, a 240-page volume that has confounded cryptographers for centuries. This document was recently dated back to the early 1400s.

    “There are these books and ancient languages of real historical value that contain historical information that we just can’t get out yet, and that’s of interest to a lot of people,” Dr Knight explains in the video interview embedded below. For example, historians think that secret societies played a role in revolutions, but their importance is not known at this time because so many documents are enciphered.
    • USC Scientist Cracks Mysterious "Copiale Cipher"

    USC's Professor Kevin Knight is part of an international team that finally cracked the "Copiale Cipher," a strange, 105-page message handwritten in abstract symbols and Latin letters revealing the rituals and political leanings of a 18th-century secret society in Germany. Knight, a computer scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute, is now targeting other famous unsolved codes, such as the last section of "Kryptos," an encrypted message carved into a granite sculpture on the grounds of the CIA headquarters.

    Currently, Dr Knight is collaborating with his former graduate student, Sujith Ravi, who just received his PhD in computer science from USC this year. Together, they are working on translation as a cryptographic problem, an approach that could improve human language translation and may also be useful in translating languages that are not currently spoken by humans, including ancient languages. (Fans of ancient texts will want to check out similar work on the Indus Script by Dr Rajesh Rao.) In my opinion, possibly the most exciting application of this technology is the potential for deciphering animal communication.
    • sources:
    Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi, and Christiane Schaefer (2011). The Copiale Cipher (free PDF). You can download the original scanned text of the entire book (free PDF) and, for English readers, here’s the full English language translation (free PDF).
    Last edited by ExomatrixTV; 26th November 2021 at 19:57.
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