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Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

wired.com

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Re: Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

#5

Post by MatthewTavares »

atrust wrote: post #4

Here is the English version of Copiale cipher in PDF: http://stp.lingfil.uu.se/~bea/copiale/copiale-translation.pd...

I found a few phase to phrase similarities between this and what appears to be an OCR scan of a free-mason manual: "Knee to knee", "foot to foot", etc.

https://archive.org/stream/ritualillustrati00allyuoft/ritual...

Re: Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

#6

Post by ChuckMcM »

Reading this ... "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." makes me think they may come back in fashion.

Re: Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

#7

Post by Kinnard »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #6

Reading this ... "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." makes me think they may come back in fashion.

How do you know they haven't already?

Re: Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

#8

Post by ChuckMcM »

Kinnard wrote: post #7
ChuckMcM wrote: post #6

Reading this ... "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." makes me think they may come back in fashion.

How do you know they haven't already?

Very true, but one of the things that was clear in the article was that while the contents of the secret societies were secret, their existence was not.

Re: Cracking a 250-Year-Old Code to Reveal a Secret Society (2012)

#9

Post by ablation »

A good read but a terrible headline (not here on YC, I mean the Wired page itself).

This trend of using third-person pronouns in article headlines is mildly annoying and feels like its come around as a result of this style of writing being popular on Reddit, Buzzfeed, etc. It rankles my inner subeditor.

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