secret Masonic book deciphered

Copiale book cover

An encrypted book written by German Freemasons in the 1700s can now finally be read! and now expectations are high of what secrets it might reveal, this thanks to three researchers, two Swedes and an American. The so-called Copiale-cipher has been giving historians and scientists headaches trying to decipher it since it was found in East Berlin after the Cold War.

The 280 year old book is handwritten with lines full of neatly plotted Latin characters, of various sizes. All in one long sequence without the slightest space between the words, in addition to the Latin letters it also consists of 64 unknown geometric characters. A total of 75,000 letters fill the books 105 pages.

sample text of the Copial cipher

Professor Kevin Knight of the Science Institute at the University of Southern California who is an expert in computer language and machine translations, but have no experience of cryptic writings was contacted by two Swedish linguists, Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University.

And the cooperation soon gave results. After several failed attempts the group soon realized that the Latin letters were in fact spaces between words, and suddenly the text became more easy to understand. The next discovery was that a colon meant that a consonant that stood there was in fact to be read as double character.

the Trio quickly understood the text was essentially written in German, and after an analysis of how often certain combinations of words was used it suddenly became pretty easy for them to read it all

The strange text appeared to describe the rituals and political ideals developed by a secret society, "The occultist order" a branch of the free masons in Germany sometime in the 1730s. The Society was also found to have been overly fascinated with the human eye. and contains large writings of it´s diseases and how to operate in the human eye.

strange initiation rituals are described:
one where the new members open eyes was washed with a cloth and hair from the eyelids where pulled out

it also contains political philosophy. below a direct quote from the book:

"As I was born from my mother's womb, that is free, not a servant and subjected to no human law, but obedient only to that of God"

this new successful partly computerized method now offers hope that several more mystical writings can be deciphered. one of the first on that list is expected to be the so-called Voynich manuscript from the mid 1600s. where all previous attempts of deciphering has been unfruitful

This opens new doors to study the history and ideas of this kind of secret societies, let´s just hope the complete results gets publicly released without any censoring. an incomplete rough translation is available in pdf here: Copiale cipher