[NetBehaviour] They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside
marc
marc.garrett at furtherfield.org
Fri Nov 30 13:01:08 CET 2012
They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside
By Noah Shachtman
The master wears an amulet with a blue eye in the center. Before him, a
candidate kneels in the candlelit room, surrounded by microscopes and
surgical implements. The year is roughly 1746. The initiation has begun.
The master places a piece of paper in front of the candidate and orders
him to put on a pair of eyeglasses. “Read,” the master commands. The
candidate squints, but it’s an impossible task. The page is blank.
For more than 260 years, the contents of that page—and the details of
this ritual—remained 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.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/ff-the-manuscript/all/
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