They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside
http://www.wired.com/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/For more than 200 years, this book concealed the arcane rituals of an ancient order. But cracking the code only deepened the mystery. Image courtesy: Uppsala University
For more than 260 years, the contents of that pageand the details of this ritualremained a secret. They were hidden in a coded manuscript, one of thousands produced by secret societies in the 18th and 19th centuries. At the peak of their power, these clandestine organizations, most notably the Freemasons, had hundreds of thousands of adherents, from colonial New York to imperial St. Petersburg. Dismissed today as fodder for conspiracy theorists and History Channel specials, they once served an important purpose: Their lodges were safe houses where freethinkers could explore everything from the laws of physics to the rights of man to the nature of God, all hidden from the oppressive, authoritarian eyes of church and state. But largely because they were so secretive, little is known about most of these organizations. Membership in all but the biggest died out over a century ago, and many of their encrypted texts have remained uncracked, dismissed by historians as impenetrable novelties.
It was actually an accident that brought to light the symbolic sight-restoring ritual. The decoding effort started as a sort of game between two friends that eventually engulfed a team of experts in disciplines ranging from machine translation to intellectual history. Its significance goes far beyond the contents of a single cipher. Hidden within coded manuscripts like these is a secret history of how esoteric, often radical notions of science, politics, and religion spread underground. At least thats what experts believe. The only way to know for sure is to break the codes.
In this case, as it happens, the cracking began in a restaurant in Germany....
IT IS A FASCINATING STORY...AND NOT YET FINISHED
retrowire
(10,345 posts)Dustlawyer
(10,495 posts)Freaky, early, Opthamalogist spies!
We had four brothers who were eye doctors, the Rodgers brothers, come to our town and founded TSO, Texas State Opticle. Before they died they owned half of our town, part of the Vegas Strip, and were all billionaires. One had a hobby of collecting antique Rolls Royce's. Maybe they had help no one knew about?
snagglepuss
(12,704 posts)thx for posting
k and r
DrBulldog
(841 posts). . . I had an oculist appointment.
DrBulldog
(841 posts)... the Republicans have been saying all along.
LiberalElite
(14,691 posts)Flying Squirrel
(3,041 posts)Somebody had to say it.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Wonder how many DU members are old enough to get this.
Midnight Writer
(21,753 posts)While the initiate lies in a coffin recounting his sexual history, the other members surround him in a circle and jack off.
Of course, this could be a complete fabrication, with their stuff being so secret and all.
Fuddnik
(8,846 posts)Maybe you're right.