Kevin Knight, Beáta Megyesi, Christiane Schaefer

The Copiale Cipher is a 105 pages manuscript containing all in all around 75 000 characters. Beautifully bound in green and gold brocade paper, written on high quality paper with two different watermarks, the manuscript can be dated back to 1760-1780. 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 90 different characters, comprising all from Roman and Greek letters, to diacritics and abstract symbols. Catchwords (preview fragments) of one to three or four characters are written at the bottom of left–hand pages.

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

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

Documents from the Masters of the Oculists:

transliteration: txt, docx, pdf



deciphered German text: txt, docx, pdf

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

transliteration: txt, docx, pdf



deciphered German text: txt, docx, pdf

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Acknowledgements

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.