S4 Ep48: Say What Now? The Copiales 3 Cipher
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Did you ever fantasize about being a codebreaker? Did you write letters and lemon juice for your friends to hold over candlelight to read? Did you love getting secret messages or long for a little orphan Annie decoder ring like a real-life spy or double agent would surely have?

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. When I was little, I wanted to be a spy in the fashion of Harriet the Spy. I loved those spy activity books you could pick up at freeway rest stops, and I was absolutely gaga over the old computer game Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

These days, I like escape rooms and still go for video games that involve puzzle solving. But when it comes to code breaking, I need that shit to not have more symbols than there are letters in the English alphabet. My brain can only keep track of so much before it starts to wander and think about when I can take a nap. Plus, the decoded message better be clear and straightforward. If I spend all that time decoding only to find a weird message I still can't really understand, I'm going to be pissed.

Fortunately for everyone, I did not become a spy or any kind of master decoder. I became the guy who tells the stories of the spy and the master decoder. Today's story is about a coded message whose answers seem to mostly reveal more questions. ♪

The Copialli Cipher is a codex, that is, a whole book written in code, that dates back to the 1730s. It is a small volume with an ornate green cover, inside which the handwritten text consists of 75,000 characters filling 105 pages.

The script inside the book is virtually unintelligible. It includes abstract symbols and letters from both the Greek and Roman alphabets. The only easily readable part of the book is the cover, where Philip 1866 appears and Copialis III at the end, from which the title has been taken. Copialis is a Latin word relating to the modern word code, and it is thought that the number three refers to the version of the book.

Copialis III is a cipher, but not just any cipher. It is a cipher that for over two centuries could not be broken. For 260 years, this little book kept its secrets as all attempts to reveal its message were foiled. It sat mutely on the shelf and mocked codebreakers for generations, never answering the many questions that frustrated all who tried.

Who wrote the book? Why was it written in this encoded language? How did the writer create a cipher so sophisticated that even brilliant modern codebreakers couldn't solve it with all the resources and technology available to them? Or at least that was the case until everything changed.

In 1998, Dr. Christiane Schaefer, a professor at the Department of Linguistics and Philology in Germany, took a position at a university in Sweden. One of her colleagues gave her an old green book as a farewell gift. The book had apparently been found in the library at the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1970 and had been written off as some kind of hoax by some and was generally thought to be indecipherable.

Schaefer was mystified by the bizarre symbols and strange language in the book. She attempted to decode it, but made little headway, and eventually she gave up. The book was relegated to a shelf in her house where it sat, mostly forgotten, for the next 13 years.

Then, in 2011, Schaefer brought the book to a computer scientist at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Kevin Knight is a cryptographer who specializes in natural language processing and machine translations, and the two scholars, with the help of Beata Magiesi, a professor of computational linguistics in Sweden, worked together to crack the two-and-a-half-century-old, previously unbreakable code.

The Little Green Book itself was a bound copy of the cipher believed to date back to 1866. Its handwritten text was orderly and neat with no word spacing, with indented paragraphs and some centered lines.

The researchers noted double quotes at the beginning of each line in some sections. Throughout the text, paragraphs and section titles always began with a capitalized Roman letter, and the bottom left of each page contained catchwords that act as a little preview for the next page, presumably to help printers validate the order of pages when they folded and stacked them.

The team's first effort at decoding the text was based on the idea that all the meaning in the text was coded in the Roman letters, so they took everything else out and tried a simple substitution cipher using German, English, Latin, and then 40 other languages both in and out of Europe. Of this effort, Knight said, quote, it took quite a long time and resulted in complete failure, end quote.

So the cryptologists forged on. A 2011 article in today.usc.edu says the team, quote, 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, end quote.

The team started out not even knowing the language the text was encrypted from. Knight hand-transcribed the entire text into a format a computer could read. The team noticed 10 unique character clusters repeating throughout, and other patterns within the text. They tried 80 languages in all, and eventually figured out that the Roman characters were nulls, a null in code as a character intended to mislead. Once this was clear, they knew they should be looking at the abstract symbols—

They decided to test out the idea that abstract symbols in the text with similar shapes might represent the same letter or groups of letters. Which honestly just sounds like throwing proverbial spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. But somehow that proverbial spaghetti stuck. In March 2011, they deciphered their first phrase. Der Kandidat antworten. German for the candidate answers. ♪

From there, more words emerged. Ceremonies of initiation, followed by secret section, all in German. So they knew that the code was an encrypted German text —

They did what any self-respecting codebreaker would do and applied a homophonic cipher. Not to be confused with a homophobic cider, which is something I got at a local apple orchard once before realizing the owners had a sign reading Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, over the register at the checkout counter. Yikes.

Anyway, what? You don't know what a homophonic cipher is? LOL, where have you been? Let me explain it to you. Or rather, let crypto.interactivemaths.com explain it to you. Quote,

End quote. Duh.

They further explain, quote,

Some people even design artistic symbols to use. End quote. Anyone else need a nap? I guess now we all know why I didn't become a spy. The site goes on to say, quote,

However, we assign multiple spaces to some letters, using the key phrase, 18 fresh tomatoes and 29 cucumbers, end quote.

I'm sorry, tomatoes? Cucumbers? Is this explanation in code as well? Are people who are into code breaking just kind of drawn to code? Do they naturally make everything seem encrypted? Because I don't understand this and just feel weird each time I read it. And by weird, I mean dumb. Let's try this again.

Here is the explanation from the Practical Cryptography website. "The homophonic substitution cipher is a substitution cipher in which single plain text letters can be replaced by any of several different ciphertext letters. They are generally much more difficult to break than standard substitution ciphers. Breaking homophonic substitution ciphers can be very difficult if the number of homophones is high.

The usual method is some sort of hill climbing similar to that used in breaking substitution ciphers. In addition to finding which letters map to which others, we also need to determine how many letters each plain text letter can become. This is handled in this attempt by having two layers of nested hill climbing, an outer layer to determine the number of symbols each letter maps to, then an inner layer to determine the exact mapping."

What? Are we hiking now? I'm lost. Whatever. They used this method to decipher the code into German text and figured out that the first 16 pages of the document, which contained 10,840 letters, describe an oculist initiation ceremony. Ooh, plot twist.

Yes, stranger, you heard that right. The complicated, confounding, 260-year-old, previously indecipherable text was written by and for none other than the oculists. Dun, dun, dun! Not the oculists like a union of concerned eye doctors, but the oculists, like the strangely eyewear-obsessed secret society inside of a secret society, the Freemasons.

It was the Illuminati all along! Ah-ha! Actually, it was the Great Enlightened Society of Oculists, founded by a German mineralogist and geologist from an aristocratic family.

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JimdoFree.com describes the oculus this way, quote, The Great Enlightened Society of Oculists is a Freemasonry society founded 1742 in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, by Count Friedrich August von Weltheim. The goal of the Great Enlightened Society of Oculists is a global, peaceful coexistence of all nations, races, and religions on Earth. End quote.

The group was thought to gatekeep the beginnings of ophthalmology by only allowing the most skilled to join them. I read in a few places that the group's actual name was the High Enlightened Oculist Order of Wolfenbüttel. Or, as I like to call them, Hiaw, because it sounds like a sound a German cat might make.

The oculists, he-ow, were, according to Brian Godwin of CulverCityMasons.org, quote, a fraternal operative order focusing on the use of optical instruments and surgical procedures to represent ways of bringing light to a prospective member, end quote. Surgical procedures? Don't worry, I'll get to that in a minute.

While the first oculists were actual ophthalmologists, today the society is open to anyone. Listen, it is not clear to me why a mineralogist formed a secret society of ophthalmologists to create peace on Earth. But hey, I've talked about weirder things on this podcast, so I'm just going to go with it. But in the interest of making sure you and I are on the same page of the encrypted document, let me define a few things for you, stranger.

First, let me talk a little about secret societies. You've got your Freemasons. They come up a lot in your run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories and stories of historical political intrigue. This might have something to do with the fact that 13 of the signers of the Constitution were Masons. They are considered the oldest of the secret societies, dating back to the Middle Ages when local craftsmen traveling from city to city used the signs of their trade to identify each other.

In 1717, the Freemasons, as we know them today, formed when four lodges, or super cool clubhouses, in London merged to create the first Grand Lodge. Members are encouraged to believe in God in some form, but the Freemasons still found themselves at odds with powerful organizations such as the Catholic Church, which probably felt like the Masons were poaching their members. ♪

The Masons were first condemned by the Catholic Church in 1738 when the church issued no fewer than 20 decrees against them. Later, the anti-Masonic Party was the first significant third party in U.S. politics.

The Shriners were founded in 1870 at Knickerbocker College in New York City and became the public face of the Masons, softening their reputation as a skull-and-bones kind of secret society. The Freemasons allow any male 21 or older to join. Women have a sister group called the Order of the Eastern Star. Prospective members must request to join. There is no recruitment, and membership is probably largely made up of wives and family members of male Freemasons.

There are many out there that believe the image of the all-seeing eye is a Masonic symbol. This symbol is also thought of as relating to the secret society known as the Illuminati, a group founded in Bavaria in 1776 with the goal of illumination through reason instead of religion.

The founder was a former Jesuit who adopted ideas of Catholic mysticism, as well as borrowing philosophy from the Freemasons and Kabbalah, among others. In 1787, an edict was issued that made being in the Illuminati punishable by death. So that was pretty much the end of that. Or was it?

The George Washington Masonic National Memorial says the all-seeing eye is a symbol of the watchful eye of the supreme architect. And maybe with the eye and all, it does relate to our offshoot group known as the oculists, with which the Copioli 3 cipher seems to be mostly concerned. Once the information about the Copioli 3 cipher came to light and the team continued its work, more details began to emerge.

The cryptologists didn't speak Old High German of the 1730s, and they weren't, as far as I can tell, Freemasons or members of the oculus, so they could only tell us what the translation says, but not what it means. And apparently words sometimes have different meanings in Masonic rituals than they do in regular speech. Kinda like how on the internet we call a snake a danger noodle, maybe? I don't know why this is the analogy that popped into my head. Brain rot is real, I guess.

Brian Godwin, on the other hand, an actual Freemason, has written about what he sees as the Masonic significance within the Code. Quote, "...as most Masons know, even the words used in our ritual can be a bit of a cipher themselves. Words like Tyler, 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 oculus or any other fraternal society. They didn't even speak German, and particularly the old High German that would have been spoken in the 1730s. Ritual manuscripts are often used to communicate concepts that are only completely understood after having heard the contents communicated verbally, hence the difficulty in overall translation.

After reading the complete translation of the Oculus Ritual, it was clear, even to me, that this was more than just some forgotten guild of eye doctors. Clear reference 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."

So what about those surgical procedures? If you put the words secret society and surgical procedures together, I'm instantly going to assume you mean torture. Either that, or those people who get their ears or tongues surgically altered to look more like elves or snakes or whatever. Whatever gets you through the day, I guess. Except a surgical procedure in question is pretty non-invasive. It's not a surgical procedure, it's a surgical procedure in question.

An NBCNews.com article from 2011 printed the deciphered portion which describes the procedure for initiating new members of the society. Quote,

"'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. End quote. Surgical procedure my eye. See what I did there? If that's a surgical procedure, then I get surgery in the bathroom once a week. Maybe I should take medical leave for hair removal. How long do one's eyebrows have to be to impede one's vision? Are we talking Eugene Levy or the Mentots from David Lynch's Dune?

Anywho, after the Oculus would pluck a new member's eyebrows, the first 16 pages of the translated text continued to describe the rituals around Freemason membership, and after that, everything just fell into place and took just a few weeks to completely decipher the document. They used freetranslation.com to test their translation and to make necessary adjustments. Some symbols that the team struggled to decipher were determined to be names of people or organizations.

Parts of the Copiolis Three read like a manifesto, declaring the rule and government of monarchies as three-headed monsters depriving man of his natural freedom. And honestly, maybe I should become a Freemason. I mean, the language in the cipher is not that different from some of the lofty language found in the Declaration of Independence. I can get behind a group that thinks all men are born free, especially if they are willing to expand that to include women and non-binary people.

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The popularity of secret societies peaked in the 17 and 1800s and served as a safe space to speak openly about anything and everything without the church or government watching slash listening. Noah Schachtman of Wired magazine in a 2011 article called secret societies, quote, incubators of democracy, modern science and ecumenical religion, end quote, and said that, quote, secret orders offered a breeding ground for new thoughts and ideas, end quote.

But cool as that may be, is the Copialis III document really about Freemasons? As is so often the case, it seems the more we learn, the less we know.

On the surface, the decrypted text tells us about initiation rites and membership and practices of the oculus. But contemporary Freemasons who have reviewed the text have asked why a community of eye doctors went to the trouble to create one of the most complicated ciphers in history. And if they did do it, why would they include so much Masonic content in the text, including a segment which seems to be critical of the Freemasons?

Brian Godwin, Freemason, and Tyler reviewed the text and had some doubts that he shared in a piece on freemasonlifestyle.com detailing the content of the manuscript. Quote, "...the second section of the manuscript is the most fascinating. It is a first-person stream of politics and sensational anti-Masonic secrets. This section claims that the true secret of the Order is the truth about the formation of Masonic lodges."

It begins with a story of four lodges getting together at a tavern. Where this document diverges from our traditional history is that it claims that these men convened to see just how far they could go in creating a secret society, whose allure and intrigue would be based on the fact that people will join anything just to find out their secrets.

Furthermore, that they would create an arbitrary system of signs, handshakes, ceremonies, and modes of recognition to see what people would promise to do and be bound to in order to join this society, end quote. These questions are not easily answered. Suffice to say, most now agree that the cipher most likely existed as a way for the oculus society to pass along important Masonic rites that had been banned by Pope Clement XII, who was the pope until 1740.

Arturo de Hoyas is a scholar, linguist, historian, and author, but more importantly, he is Grand Archivist and Grand Historian at the Supreme Council, 33rd Degree, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, SJUSA, Member of the Board and Chairman of Publications, Scottish Rite Research Society, Grand Archivist and Chairman of Publications, Grand College of Rites USA, and the

making him one of the world's leading authorities on the history, philosophy, rituals, symbolism, and purposes of Freemasonry. Which is to say, he is a big ol' Freemason. He also happens to be well-versed in 18th century German. Because of his unique qualifications, he was invited to look at Copialis III. He was the guy who found the word mopsin on page 2 of the document and knew the word had been mistranslated as thieves.

It was De Hoyas who made the connection to Mopsis, which he called a pseudo-Masonic Catholic co-ed fraternity founded in 1740 after Pope Clement XII's 1738 bill denounced Freemasonry.

De Hoyas also said that the logogram that was interpreted to mean eye doctor would be better translated as mason. This lends credence to the idea that the manuscript really was a true Freemason document and not some kind of dummy or double-encoded distraction. Since its decryption, Dr. Andreas Anefors, a professor of history of sciences and ideas at University of Gothenburg in Sweden, uses the manuscript as part of his research.

On ResearchGate.net, Dr. Andreas Lonefer's bio says, quote, Since 2020, I am full professor in intellectual history. My main research focus lies on people, media, mobility, and encounters from a transgressive, predominantly early modern perspective. I have specialized in the European dimensions of press history, translation, and organized sociability. Over the last years, I've been working on radicalization and conspiracy theories, end quote.

The professor has divided the cipher into five sections. The Oculist Order, Masonic Degrees 1-3, Scottish Master, Key Lodge, and Alchemical Lodges.

There is the section on initiation and degree ceremonies for the group discussed earlier. Section 2 is some kind of rant against Masons. And when I say some kind of rant, I mean that the translation is so dense, it's honestly hard to really even grasp what the hell is being discussed at all. Here's the direct translation. Quote,

First of all, we want to keep the snobbish Freemason within bounds so that they will not be presumptuous regarding their claimed science and not to boast so much regarding the importance of their secret.

Perhaps to give their own curiosity something to do, and with that measurement, with which they measure others, we show on our part that they are not capable to mislead us neither to curiosity nor impertinence. Have the Freemason walked behind us modestly, they should remain dear and valued.

Secondly, by the propagation of our society shall the secret of the Freemason be known secretly so that there should not be so many false judgment and nonsensical gossip in those communities.

Thirdly, we want thus to hinder the afflux of the curious into the Freemason and therefore to turn away the power from the idle oath. But fourthly, to have the pleasure to practice this workmanship to all people, even to those unknowing Freemason. Fifth, to enjoy beforehand that calmness as we stand in consideration of the Freemason's secret in

in front of so many thousand people, to delight ourselves in complete silence amongst ourselves. End quote. If you understood any of that, congratulations. I have no idea what the hell is going on. The rest of the sections expose the secrets of Freemasons. The Masonic degrees 1 to 3 are Apprentice, Fellow, and Master. Following those comes the Scottish Master, a fourth degree level.

Then, the Key Lodge is a variation on the Scottish Master's Degree, Consolation or Alchemical Lodges, where alchemy is practiced. The main theme of the Key Lodge section is that tyrants have taken man's liberty and the Freemasons or Oculus are the ones that will get it back. Hear, hear. I mean, we kind of need a hero right now. Why not a brave optometrist ready to pluck the bushy white eyebrow over the orange face of a tyrant?

I also read that some people thought the Freemasons were a secret homosexual cult, and I think that might be the only cult I would be interested in joining, especially if they have the twin commitments of 20/20 vision and human liberty.

Onofors found a reference in the manuscript to the natural rights of man, which is a common theme not only in Freemasonry, but also in secret societies from the 1700s, and thought of as a key part of the French and American revolutions. Dr. Onofors is interested in the ways that secret societies feed into and assist social movements and even revolution. So already Copialis III has found a place of significance in political philosophy and scholarly thought.

And I am sure Dr. Andreas Onifers is not the only one studying Copiolus III. Such a fresh translation is no doubt being studied both by parties interested in code-breaking, as well as those interested in its Masonic connections, and everyone in between. Hopefully someone will come along and translate the translation into something actually readable. Because as it stands right now, that thing is a slog.

Even though Knight, Schaefer, and Megiesi translated the document and were able to do things like identify its date of origin and reasonably attribute it to the Freemasons, the exact author of the Codex remains a mystery. It could have truly been the Oculists as a fraternal society, or that could have all been a smokescreen for a different society. A code within a code, if you will. Either way, what individual or individuals wrote or transcribed the text that was encoded?

Who is Philip, whose name is inscribed on the cover? Is 1866 the year of publication? Knight's team knows the document dates back farther than that, so why is that the date on the manuscript? There was a man called Philip Frederick Steinhill who was a German diplomat and who also happened to be the first master of the Frankfurt Lodge of Union. Perhaps Copialis III came into his possession in 1866, and that is the source of the date.

Also, while we know the word copialis connects to the Latin word for code, some theorize that it could extend from the Galatian or early Spanish word for copy, referring to the idea that this translated document might be the third copy of an original document. And most researchers believe the 1866 date was added later because it is inscribed in a different style of handwriting than the rest of Copialis III.

Now that he and his team have translated a famously indecipherable document, what is Knight up to now? Well, he keeps busy, it would seem. The cryptologist is supposedly helping with the Zodiac Cipher, a code language used by the Zodiac serial killer responsible for at least seven victims around San Francisco Bay in the 1960s and 70s. He is also working on the Voynich Manuscript, a 15th century illustrated codex handwritten in an unknown script.

And like probably every other cryptanalysist in the world, Knight hopes to decode the fourth message in the Crypto Cipher, the sculpture by artist Jim Sanborn that was dedicated in 1990 and is located on the grounds of the CIA headquarters. It is said that a fifth message will reveal itself after the first four are solved.

Knight's technology is working to improve machine translation of things like Chinese to English or Arabic into Korean, and even more ambitious, to improve translation of human languages, ancient languages, and even animal communications.

And what about Copialis 3 itself? The actual transcript is now privately owned, but there is a copy at Stadtarchiv Wolfenbüttel, the state archive in Wolfenbüttel, and the decrypted text can be found on the internet. Also, if you visit Cypher's decoder, you can translate any phrase you want into the Copialis code. For fun, I ran strange and unexplained through the translator, and this was the code it gave me.

Say that five times fast. What the Copialis III leaves with me is a prevailing sense that the mystery of humankind runs deep, and that over the decades, centuries, and millennia, we will continue to surprise ourselves and each other.

Also, there are no thresholds that human ingenuity and curiosity cannot cross. Sometimes we just need a group of supportive souls to make that crossing. Sometimes, when we keep working on things that vex us, hard things, troubling things, we discover the key and solutions just click into place.

I find the notion comforting that if I keep working on something, even if it seems impossible or unsolvable, an answer could still reveal itself. But I also think that with answers always comes new questions, and we all have to be prepared to face the strange and unexplained. Next time on Strange and Unexplained. In 1912, a four-year-old boy went missing during a family fishing trip.

Seven months later, people believe they found him in another state with a stranger. Somehow, both sets of parents weren't sure for certain if the boy was theirs. The Curious Case of Bobby Dunbar. ♪

Strange and Unexplained is a production of Three Goose Entertainment with help from Grab Bag Collab. This episode was written by Eve Kerrigan and me, Daisy Egan, with research by Keely Hyes. Sound design and engineering by Jeff Devine. Music by Epidemic and Blue Dot Sessions. If you have an idea for an episode, head to our website, strangeandunexplainedpod.com, and fill out the contact form. I will write back.

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