The Secrets of the Copiale Cipher
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jrff.v2i2.314Keywords:
cipher, decipherment, masonry, occultistsAbstract
The Copiale Cipher is a105-pages long, hand-written encrypted manuscript from the mid-eighteenth century. Its code was cracked and the text was deciphered by using modern computational technology combined with philological methods. We describe the book, the features of the text, and give a brief summary of the method by which we deciphered it. Finally, we present the content and the secret society, namely the Oculists, who were hiding behind the cipher.
References
Copiale webpage URL: http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale
‘Des Gesetzbuchs der hocherleuchteten [Oculisten-Gesellschaft]’ digitized manuscript retrieved from URL stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale150.pdf [accessed 29 February 2012]. The owner of the original manuscript wishes to remain anonymous.
Henning, Aloys, ‘Eine frühe Loge des 18. Jahrhunderts: Die “Hocherleuchtete Oculisten-Gesellschaft” in Wolfenbüttel’, Europa in der frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift für Günther Mühlpfordt. Bd. 5 Aufklärung in Europa. hsgg. von Erich Donnert (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau-Verlag, 1999).
Knight, Kevin, Anish Nair, Nishit Rathod, and Kenji Yamada, ‘Unsupervised Analysis for Decipherment Problems’. In: Proceedings of ACL-COLING (Sydney: Association for Computational Lingusitics, 2006).
Knight, Kevin, Beáta Megyesi, and Christiane Schaefer, ‘The Copiale Cipher’. In: Proceedings of ACL 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC) (Portland, OR: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011).
‘Des Gesetzbuchs der hocherleuchteten [Oculisten-Gesellschaft]’ digitized manuscript retrieved from URL stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale150.pdf [accessed 29 February 2012]. The owner of the original manuscript wishes to remain anonymous.
Henning, Aloys, ‘Eine frühe Loge des 18. Jahrhunderts: Die “Hocherleuchtete Oculisten-Gesellschaft” in Wolfenbüttel’, Europa in der frühen Neuzeit. Festschrift für Günther Mühlpfordt. Bd. 5 Aufklärung in Europa. hsgg. von Erich Donnert (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau-Verlag, 1999).
Knight, Kevin, Anish Nair, Nishit Rathod, and Kenji Yamada, ‘Unsupervised Analysis for Decipherment Problems’. In: Proceedings of ACL-COLING (Sydney: Association for Computational Lingusitics, 2006).
Knight, Kevin, Beáta Megyesi, and Christiane Schaefer, ‘The Copiale Cipher’. In: Proceedings of ACL 4th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC) (Portland, OR: Association for Computational Linguistics, 2011).
Published
2012-05-02
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Knight, K., Megyesi, B., & Schaefer, C. (2012). The Secrets of the Copiale Cipher. Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, 2(2), 314-324. https://doi.org/10.1558/jrff.v2i2.314
