US and Swedish researchers have cracked the code of the 300-year-old Copiale Cipher with the help of a new computer program that may help to decipher other legendary secretive manuscripts.
"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret
societies," computer scientist Kevin Knight said in a statement on Wednesday.
The 75,000-character Copiale Cipher describes the rituals and political leanings of an 18th-century German secret society, which bound the manuscript in gold and green brocade paper, the USC statement said.
The rituals, encoded in a series of abstract symbols interspersed with Greek and Roman characters, indicate that the secretive group had a fascination with eye surgery but that members were not actually eye doctors.
Knight, along with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden, used a computer program designed to help quantify the recurrence of certain symbols and identify other patterns.
Knight plans to target other famous coded messages, including the ciphers sent by the Zodiac Killer, an American serial murderer in the 1960s -1970s who was never been caught.