April 3, 2018
Do talismans hold secret messages and aren't really meant to control demons? Is the Voynich Manuscript just a pile of random crap that Dee and Kelley sold to someone for money? Is it some private message that holds the secret of the crown of England? Who knows but we can speculate about it.
When I was young I took a liking to a book about codes and ciphers at the library. I believe the book was called the First Book of Codes and Ciphers.
I got a couple of more books from the scholastic line in relation to codes and ciphers. It was kind of an interest or hobby that stuck with me. Over the years, I've collected codes from all kinds of books. Freemasonry, Rosicrucian and other codes have been a pastime. As a previous computer operator, I had the boring job of tape backups for a major U.S. manufacturer. I used to create codes on a daily basis just for my amusement. I felt one could construct cryptography from calculus, differential equations, imaginary numbers, geometry or statistics. At that time, I was trying to figure out a way to write several layers of messages on top of each other. I was working on 3 layers. Could it be done?
I felt my greatest achievement was the 1/100 code as I called it. Splices of messages could be sent through the internet, emails and the old mail system (snail mail) containing just ones and zeros. If all the splices were intercepted the ones would have to be added that were in the same position on all sheets. For example, say, there were 100 splices (pages) of the message all sent through different mediums and all were intercepted to find 65 sheets had the number one on them and the rest of the sheets had zeroes in that same position it would denote the letter 'A' according to American Standard Code (or ASCII). The trick to the code was to find the entire message! Later in 2005, I took an obsession to the Voynich Manuscript. I consider it one of
John Dee's finest scripts. You can check the blogs and forums on line, but no one has really mentioned that the cryptography seems to have some close cousins found in the code in the book,
Hidden Codes & Grand Designs by Pierre Berloquin. I've found it similar to the cipher found in the Mary Queen of Scotts. It is almost a sure sign it comes from the same period of time. There is a similarity to the Duke of Montmorency code as well. Close examination shows the number characters 4, 8 and 9 are used in all 3 sets of codes. I lost most of the fascination for the Voynich Manuscript as I examined the Enochian language more closely. The Voynich Manuscript secret is probably known by British intelligence. After all, Dee worked for the queen. Just like the Kryptos Sculpture is known by the U.S., Voynich should be no secret to England.
I've used several sources to come to some conclusions about cryptography. Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies, The Friar and the Cipher, A Curious History of Mathematics by Joel Levy and Hidden Codes & Grand Designs are just come of my references. French Masonic ciphers of 31st degree of the Scottish Rite and those Rose Croix to Old Arabic numerals seem to also make up the Voynich Manuscript. I've researched quite a bit on the subject.
While some may argue that codes are either just substitutions or realigning the order of the characters it is really summed up in the book The Friar and the Cipher. I like to summarize, what I feel to be the ideas of hiding a message - I've gone beyond what Roger Bacon has stated:
1. Use other character or symbols
2, Riddles
3. Incorporate inside a mass symbol or artwork (like talismans)
4. Reduction (like removing the vowels, for example)
5. Gain characters (by adding nulls that don't relate to the message)
6. Contraction (using a mathematical process to reduce the message much like computers use compression to save memory today)
7. Expansion (mathematical process to increase the characters of the message)
8. Like John Dee's 'Holy Table' containing special characters with examples of the same characters written slightly different. (Many of the same characters may represent multiple letters)
9. New special letters with special qualities that may represent a complete different language
10. Codes where the characters or symbols have no meaning but mean something with respect to the position they are in relation to a specific point on the paper
11. Codes that resist frequency analysis (such as Russian one time pads)
12. Codes where the message might not be complete (like a 1/100 code with multiple splices)
13. Steganographia by Johannes Trithemius also covers the rest of steganography or hiding messages in plain sight.
There may be more and this is my own category list.
In the
Dummies book, Masonic ciphers are listed as well as ideas about how to solve them. Some may be based on other languages. If the message is written in old English, middle English, or English written with Hebrew letters adds to the complexity of breaking the code. Do some reading on the web and you will find the Russian one-time pad as perfectly unbreakable if you follow the rules. If you use a computer to generate random numbers it may be breakable by the top code breakers of the country. They probably are aware of random number generators of most computers. If you are generating your own one-time code numbers you can mix a few of your own favorite numbers in with a set of computer generated and this will keep the top code breakers stumped. I'd never use PGE by some software companies to hide a message; most software companies probably give the government a back door to their software. There really is no privacy unless you take privacy into your own hands. Snowden's disclosure has made a lot of people on edge about the U.S. government's secret spying on its citizens. Most recently, I came to the conclusion that it could be a cipher from a high ranking Mason, it is related to the Mary Queen of Scotts or it is related to the language of the Kaballah.
On a more recent note, I had been reading something in one of the library books on remote viewing. I wasn't aware that British intelligence had been infiltrated by the Soviets during the cold-war era. Just after I had become aware of that fact I had found something interesting at the Michigan Library and Historical Center located in Lansing, MI in the U.S. On the fourth floor of the library, the periodical and U.S. documents are found. A variety of old periodicals are located there. Some of these old periodicals now have their bindings breaking down and falling apart. I don't know a lot about the book binding process, but I noticed from the shelves that the 1800's book cases that held magazines and journals had spines that were made using old newspaper. What caught my eye was volume #33 and #34 of Northern British Review. The broken spines of these indexes reveal a Russian newspaper! (
See my photo above.) It makes me wonder if the Soviet double agent, during the cold-war, had been involved with the publishing of volumes of this journal which could have gotten back to Moscow without detection!
My method of the 1/100 code seems to show that the Russians could have had the newspaper print as some kind of key and they may have sent their other codes through radio transmission or mail systems. It could have been a 1/3 code. You could then add letters up to make up your intended message. It's all speculation, but it makes a great story to think about. Research the web to find ASCII equivalent of the Russian 'A' is 192. Think about it. Makes the spy history books a little more exciting to read...better than a James Bond movie.
Codes are essentially a disappointment. They may mean that talismans are real if they really contain just a hidden message. Maybe, the Voynich Manuscript is a phony of random codes. Our true job, as occultists, is to find the true meaning and workings of occult science. We have to separate the myth from reality. By testing and experimenting, we can come to some conclusions how things really work. By testing and experimenting...isn't that how your grandmother figured out how to make the best scalloped potatoes?