The Copiale Cipher

The Copiale Cipher is a 105 pages manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters. Beautifully bound in green and gold brocade cover, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks, the manuscript can be dated back to around 1730. Apart from what is obviously an owner's mark (“Philipp 1866”) and a note in the end of the last page (“Copiales 3”), the manuscript is completely encoded. The cipher employed consists of 100 different symbols, comprising all from Latin and Greek letters, to diacritics and graphic signs such as Zodiac and alchemical symbols. Catchwords used to mark page numbering are written at the bottom of left–hand pages.

The cipher was decoded by Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer.

Transcription, transliteration and decipherment brought to light a German text created by an 18th century secret society, namely the "oculist order”. A parallel manuscript is located at the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Staatsarchiv Wolfenbüttel, Germany.

Downloads

• Copiale book:  first half (13554 Kb) , second half (12632 Kb)
• book cover: front cover (3350 Kb) back cover (2959 Kb)
• watermarks: watermark 1 (5508 Kb)   watermark 2 (4754 Kb)
• text in transcription (237 Kb)  
• deciphered German text (87 Kb)
• English translation (79 Kb)  

Extra pages from the Oculist's archive in Wolfenbüttel (added February 2012):
Documents from the Masters of the Oculists:

• transliteration master: txt  (10 Kb)  
• deciphered German text master (8 Kb)

Extra file from the Oculists about their rituals and rules (not corrected):

• extra transcription (9 Kb)
• Extra deciphered German text: (4 Kb)

Publications

Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer (2011), The Copiale Cipher presented as part of invited talk. In Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora. 

Full text available here

Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer (2011), "The Secrets of the Copiale Cipher", Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism, Volume 2, No 2.

The Secrets of the Copiale Cipher (435 Kb)

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Wilfried Fiedler, Meißen and Wolfgang Hock, Berlin for making the manuscript available to us, Per Cullhed, Carolina Library, Uppsala University for helping us dating the book, Jan Casserstedt for helping us transcribing part of the manuscript, and Eugenie Csakli for the English translation. Finally, we would like to thank Andreas Önnerfors for proof reading and his expertise.

This work was supported in part by the US National Foundation grant 0904684, and in part by Uppsala University Vice Chancellor's special grant as well as the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University.

In the press

A collection of articles published about the Copiale Cipher:

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