So it feels apropos to close out the Halloween season with a post about two women who actually unraveled some of the mysteries surrounding an encrypted manuscript involving witches!
This video by Kat Saturn details the fascinating journey she and Rian Hagebeuk embarked upon to unravel the secrets of a book entitled “The Subtelty of Witches,” supposedly published in 1657.
It was one of the longest encrypted works of the period, and yet, it sat in the British Library for decades without anyone digging into the cipher or the manuscript’s contents.
In 2018, Kat stumbled across “The Subtelty of Witches” in a list of encrypted manuscripts, and started investigating.
Along the way, she teamed up with Rian, whose facility with Latin helped immensely in unraveling the manuscript’s true contents. They reached out to professionals and fellow amateurs alike, delving deep down the rabbit hole of this manuscript.
Along the way, she and Rian determined:
the year was incorrect (the text is actually OLDER)
the contents of the manuscript had nothing to do with witches (it’s a list of verbs in Latin and Dutch from a Calepino dictionary)
the cipher was consistently applied throughout (meaning it’s unlikely this was a practice exercise for improving the author’s facility with the cipher)
the real mystery of this text wasn’t in the cipher…
It was in the book’s creation and reason for existing at all.
The cipher was easily cracked — a one-to-one substitution cipher wouldn’t deter even a casual puzzler — but so many questions still remain.
Who was the author? Why was the manuscript titled this? Why were a dictionary’s partial contents encoded? What is the meaning behind the cover stamp?
Like some of the more puzzly mysteries we’ve pursued in the blog over the years, there’s always more to uncover once the puzzly part is resolved.
I purposely haven’t gone into too much actual detail — hopefully I’ve included just enough to give you a sense of the story here and pique your interest — because I think you should take the time to watch Kat’s entire video. It’s always best to hear from the creators themselves!
This story is the perfect counterpoint to the Voynich discussion a few weeks ago.
I made a point in that post of highlighting that I wasn’t throwing shade at nonprofessionals in scholarly fields. I simply wanted something more reliable than “this looks like this, so they must be related” and wild conjecture.
And Kat and Rian’s work is exactly what I was talking about.
Kat and Rian aren’t professionals, they’re enthusiastic amateurs, but they are scholars nonetheless. They’ve done fantastic, reproducible work, drawing reasonable and insightful conclusions from verifiable data.
They’ve thoroughly and meticulously documented their steps, they’re continuing to pursue leads, and they have genuinely, impactfully contributed to both awareness of the manuscript and the facts surrounding it.
The Voynich Manuscript is a cryptologic curiosity unlike anything else we’ve seen before, one that has baffled linguists and puzzlers for decades. This hand-written book was discovered over a hundred years ago, but it’s believed to date back to the fifteenth century.
The writing, which reads from right to left, has yet to be identified. It’s unclear if this is some sort of sophisticated code, an unknown or lost language which was then encoded, an invented language, an example of glossolalia (a written equivalent of speaking in tongues), or simply an elaborate hoax.
The only known copy of the text resides in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Many call the fifteenth-century codex, commonly known as the “Voynich Manuscript,” the world’s most mysterious book. Written in an unknown script by an unknown author, the manuscript has no clearer purpose now than when it was rediscovered in 1912 by rare books dealer Wilfrid Voynich. The manuscript appears and disappears throughout history, from the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II to a secret sale of books in 1903 by the Society of Jesus in Rome. The book’s language has eluded decipherment, and its elaborate illustrations remain as baffling as they are beautiful.
One of several fold-out pages in the manuscript. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.org.
There have been many theories regarding what form of encryption may have been employed in the Voynich Manuscript.
Some investigators theorize that vowels have been removed from the words in the text in order to obscure their meaning further, while others suggest writing that has been mirrored or otherwise written backwards. Anagrams and other forms of word manipulation are another common theory.
Attempts at decryption are further complicated by Lisa Fagin Davis’s 2020 paper that concluded through handwriting analysis that five different scribes contributed to the Voynich Manuscript.
So, what does all this have to do with witches and TikTok?
(There’s also a bunch of stuff about magically growing plants in menstrual blood, but I’ll be ignoring that pseudoscience and focusing on the decoding/interpretation of the manuscript.)
It’s a very interesting theory — the menstrual cycle part, not the casual misandry part — but not exactly a new one.
Given the predominant plant imagery, as well as the drawings that resemble medieval calendars throughout the manuscript, there’s a prominent theory that the plants featured could be used to induce abortions, and were being catalogued as such.
That would be very valuable information to preserve and disseminate, given the power dynamics between men and women at the time and the key role that reproduction served across all levels of feudalist society.
But can I point out the obvious? They didn’t solve the manuscript. They didn’t crack or decode anything. They looked at the images and made assumptions.
The poster talks about women having limited access to written language, which is absolutely true, and claims that they mostly communicated through imagery. When you ask the obvious follow-up question — why the huge swathes of text, then? — she suggests it’s a manufactured language to hide this information from the men hunting down women with this knowledge.
But why? Why would you hunt down people with knowledge of the menstrual cycle, which would be beneficial to reproduction? That doesn’t make any sense. (It would make more sense to hunt down women spreading information about plants that could induce abortions, which is the OPPOSITE of what she’s suggesting.)
Because she admits to never actually decoding the text, she is drawing all her conclusions from the images. That reminds me of that parable about the blind men and the elephant, where each person touches a different part of the elephant (the trunk, the tail, etc.) and arrives at a different conclusion.
Without any of the text to accompany the images, crucial context is missing.
Now, I don’t mean to demean the efforts of nonprofessionals trying to solve mysteries or cold cases. I myself am an enthusiastic amateur in many respects. Research and discovery are not the sole property of universities and professionals, and some incredible, insightful leaps in many different fields have been made by those that are not part of established organizations.
Could these self-described witches have uncovered or recognized patterns that escaped 125 years of linguistic analysis? Absolutely.
BUT.
The way that they present their argument is reductive. They don’t pose it as a fascinating discovery or a triumph of long-held traditions resurfacing. They sneer at the failure of a century of men trying to solve it. Which is, frankly, stupid.
It’s stupid because it ignores the CRUCIAL role many female linguists and translators have had over the years. Just look at the amazing work Emily Wilson did with her translation of The Odyssey, offering new insight into a classic tale. (Also you need to read her review of the movie, because Nolan claimed he based the movie on her translation, and if that’s the case, boy, did he miss the mark.)
But I digress.
This TikTok post lumps “men” and “professionals” together to the detriment of all women, just to cater to a weird, desperate anti-intellectualism crowd that looks down on years (or even decades) of hard work and study by men, women, and nonbinary researchers in favor of viral shortcuts and faux grassroots equality.
Everyone has failed at cracking the Voynich Manuscript, not just men. This isn’t a gender-based thing. Lisa Fagin Davis, the medievalist and expert in manuscript study I mentioned earlier, is widely considered the foremost researcher when it comes to the Voynich Manuscript, and she spent years handling all the Voynich-related requests and materials while at Yale.
Her 2020 paper about the five scribes of the manuscript is the result of genuine research, analysis, and deduction, not the hand-wavey pseudointellectual astrological alchemical… whatever this TikTok content creator is doing.
I’ve read some of the discourse surrounding all this, trying to get a sense of people’s reactions, both within and outside the WitchTok community. Several commenters shared this Ursula K. Le Guin quote during the discussion, which feels very appropriate for the topic at hand:
But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?
In the end, despite generations of effort, we still don’t know what the Voynich Manuscript says.
And I don’t think it’s because of gatekeeping or snobbish intellectualism or misandry or misogyny or dismissal of female viewpoints.
I think it’s simply because we haven’t figured it out yet.
This kind of decryption can’t always been brute-forced through computer power. Languages are complex and nuanced, and with five different scribes, the handwriting and personal quirks of each writer could be coloring or even masking different options. What if an S in one person’s hand looks like an F in another?
And that’s not taking into account the possibility of an encryption code or an additional linguistic trick like the vowel exclusion I mentioned.
In the end, human ingenuity created it, and a lot of human ingenuity will no doubt be required to finally reveal its secrets. And everyone who contributed or attempted to contribute to the solve, gender be damned, will be a part of that legacy.
It’s Veterans Day, and on an occasion dedicated to giving thanks to all those who served the United States honorably during either war or peacetime, it seemed appropriate to turn our puzzly gaze toward at American history for today’s post.
Second president John Adams used a cipher to send letters to his wife Abigail when he was traveling. That cipher was designed by James Lovell, a member of the Continental Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs.
President #3 also relied heavily on ciphers and secret methods of communication. Thomas Jefferson created special ciphers specifically for Meriwether Lewis to use during the Lewis and Clark Expedition to protect the intrepid duo’s findings.
He even developed his own method for encryption. Some call it the wheel cypher, but it’s more commonly referred to as the Jefferson Disk.
These 36 wheels, threaded onto an iron spindle, allow the user to twist them until a message reads out. Each wheel has the letters of the alphabet in a random order.
As an example, the sender of the message shown in the picture, “COOL JEFFERSON WHEEL CIPHER,” spells the message out and then looks to any other line of text – possibly the one directly above, which on this version of the cipher begins with the letter “N.” The sender then copies the rest of the letters from that line into the correspondence to spell out “NKYG NSUS NXML CQYO TYUH HFTD.”
The man who succeeded Jefferson as president, James Madison, employed encryption for both official documents — like letters between himself and members of the Continental Congress — and communication with other key figures. For instance, he sent a partially encrypted letter to Jefferson that described his plan to introduce a Bill of Rights.
Madison’s fellow contributor to the Federalist Papers, John Jay (later the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) always employed ciphers for diplomatic correspondence when traveling outside the US.
[This wooden puzzle is known as Franklin’s Kite.]
And as you might expect, the influential inventor, statesman, and polymath Benjamin Franklin had his hands in codecracking and cryptography as well. He not only created some of the ciphers employed by the Continental Congress, but he also published a book about encryption in the 1740s: George Fisher’s The American Instructor.
The Continental Congress, for their part, passed a resolution ordering ciphers to be used for all messages that couldn’t be safely transmitted otherwise.
In the end, as in the beginning, America doesn’t just love puzzles, it’s founded on puzzly principles.
Puzzles come in many forms, all shapes and sizes, but there’s probably no puzzle genre that offers more variety and range in difficulty than mechanical brain teasers.
The physical element adds so much to the solving experience that cannot be replicated in other puzzle styles. Whether you’re assembling pieces into a given shape, manipulating two pieces to separate them (or put them together), or twisting and turning a puzzle until it becomes the desired shape, mechanical brain teasers offer a world of possibility.
And in today’s product review, we’ve got two different varieties of brain teaser to test out, all courtesy of the creative minds at Project Genius. Both are part of their True Genius line of wooden brain teasers, rated for ages 14 and up, and each has its own ranking on a scale of 1 to 5 in difficulty.
Without further ado, let’s get solving!
First up, we have this 4-out-of-5-star difficulty puzzle box.
One of the most famous encryption techniques in history is named after Julius Caesar, so it’s quite apropos for Project Genius to name a puzzle box covered in symbols after the historical icon.
Caesar’s Codex is a beautiful wooden box with detailed patterns along all four sides. On the front, the box features four slider bars that can move up and down, each bearing eight different symbols and labeled with a different shape (triangle, star, square, circle).
The box also has a grid on the back depicting a host of different letters and characters, leaning heavily on the concept of encryption.
Your goal is seemingly simple: figure out what arrangement of characters on the four slider bars is required to open the box. But you’ll definitely need to keep your eyes open and your wits about you to unravel the secret behind Caesar’s Codex.
I do feel, though, that the difficulty ranking is too high. Perhaps I’m too accustomed to the tricks of puzzle boxes, but this seems more like a 2-out-of-5 difficulty, 3-out-of-5 at the max. This is a delightful mechanical brain teaser that I would absolutely use to introduce solvers to the world of puzzle boxes.
Now, for a proper 4-out-of-5 difficulty brain teaser, look no further than Minotaur’s Labyrinth.
Inspired by the myth of Theseus, the Minotaur, and the Cretan Labyrinth, solvers must spin and maneuver the Minotaur through the maze. But this is far more than simply a matter of choosing the correct path.
Playing around with the Minotaur piece involves figuring out how to navigate both the horns on top and the irregular shape of the peg underneath that you can’t always see. It’s a devious bit of puzzling that requires you to keep respinning and maneuvering the Minotaur in order to escape. The tight angles and variously placed obstacles make the Minotaur’s horns quite a challenge.
But once you do, the challenge is only half over.
You must now flip the piece upside down, reenter the labyrinth, and navigate your way back to the center.
[Yes, I am posting this picture just to prove I did it.]
This involves learning how to navigate the piece in its new arrangement, and the horns are much harder to judge now that they’re sliding around underneath the maze walls. It really does feel like solving a whole new maze, even though you’ve JUST conquered this one.
It’s brutal, but also immensely impressive to make the same maze twice feel like two totally different challenges. The first part of the puzzle is more like a 3-out-of-5 difficulty, but the second half absolutely earns the 4-out-of-5 difficulty rating on the box.
Whether you’re looking for a deduction puzzle or a mechanical challenge, one of these impressive brain teasers from Project Genius is sure to hit the spot. And both are part of this year’s Holiday Puzzly Gift Guide, coming soon, so be sure to check it out!
[Note: I received a free copy of each brain teaser in exchange for a fair, unbiased review. Due diligence, full disclosure, and all that.]
Trick or treating is over, but there’s no trick here. Treat yourself to some delightful deals on puzzles. You can find them on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search! Check them out!
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One of my all-time favorite cryptography stories comes from the book The Spy That Couldn’t Spell, a true-life espionage story about a dyslexic man who hid, then encrypted the locations of, thousands of pages of sensitive documents he had stolen from the U.S government.
Why is it one of my favorite stories? Well, because the man in question FORGOT one of the cipher words he used to encrypt the location of his caches.
And it sort of unravels your master plan when you can’t remember a key element of it.
Amazingly enough, this isn’t the only example of a self-trained cryptographer who forgot how to solve his own creation. In fact, one example of this very dilemma remains one of the most famous unsolved codes and ciphers in the world:
The D’Agapeyeff Cipher.
This is the D’Agapeyeff Cipher. This seemingly simple list of numbers contains a secret message. The only problem is… the creator, Alexander D’Agapeyeff, can’t remember how to decrypt it.
When he published a starter book on cryptography — Codes and Ciphers, first edition — D’Agapeyeff included this chain of 5-digit number bundles as a final challenge for the readers to unravel.
One of the first steps many aspiring cryptographers take is to break the numbers down into pairs instead of groups of five:
One result of this is the pattern that every pair has 6, 7, 8, 9, or 0 in the tens column and 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 in the ones column, which doesn’t seem like a coincidence.
And see those sequences where the same number appears three times in a row? Some cryptographers believe that is also not a coincidence.
Then, they cut off the two double-zero pairings at the end — because they believe they were nulls, empty space-filling characters simply designed to fit the 5-letter groupings pattern of the original code as a way to throw off codecrackers. (And, to be fair, D’Agapeyeff himself wrote about null entries in the book Codes and Ciphers.)
If you remove those double-zero pairings, you can arrange the numbers into a 14×14 pairing grid, like so:
See those sequences where the same number appears three times in a row? More of them now.
Many cryptographers consider this to be the true starting point of cracking the D’Agapeyeff Cipher.
But then what?
Some believe that the key to solving the grid lies in the Polybius Square, another encryption device mentioned by D’Agapeyeff.
Essentially, you place the alphabet into a 5×5 grid, and use those numbers to encrypt the letters. Here’s a straightforward example:
In this case, the word PUZZLE would be 35 45 55 55 31 15.
Another way to use the cipher is to pick a keyword to start it. For instance, if you chose POLYBIUS as the key word, then you go across, then down, writing POLYBIUS and then the rest of the unused letters of the alphabet in order, like so:
Instead of 1-5 both across and down, you could do 1-5 across the top and 6-0 across the side, reflecting the pairings in the D’Agapeyeff Cipher.
Or, as someone pointed out, perhaps we’re thinking in the wrong language. Triple-letters are uncommon in English words, but more common in Russian words, and D’Agapeyeff was Russian born.
Overlooking simple things like that can make you miss crucial ways into an encrypted message.
So, do you have any thoughts on how to solve this 80-year-old encrypted challenge, fellow puzzlers? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
Saga Vanecek — which sounds like the heroine of a YA novel series begging for a Netflix adaptation — discovered the sword while playing in the lake. The Jönköpings Läns Museum estimated that the sword is at least a thousand years old, and could be as old as 5th or 6th century.
No one is sure how it got there, but everyone agrees it’s an amazing find. (And many agree that Saga should now be queen. Hey, there are worse ways to choose a ruler.)
But there’s another story about a sword found in a body of water with an even stranger mystery attached: the River Witham sword.
There are actually two River Witham swords — it’s just the right river to go sword-hunting in, I suppose — but we’re talking about what’s known as the River Witham “knightly sword.”
It was discovered in the river in 1825 and turned over to the Royal Archaeological Institute. It is now in the hands of the British Library.
And for more than two centuries, the meaning of the inscription has remained a mystery.
Inlaid along one of the sword’s edges, spelled out in gold wire, curious eyes find the following chain of letters:
+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+
Is it an abbreviation? An encryption? Or simply patterning in the shape of letters? No solid answers emerged during decades of study.
All sorts of amateurs and professionals weighed in, exploring possibilities in Latin, Welsh, German, Irish, Sicilian, and others. They compared it to the medal of St. Benedict and other medieval engravings in search of patterns.
And the British Library shared one contributor’s thoughts as an addendum to their original post about the River Witham sword.
The Alphen aan den Rijn sword-blade.
Historian Marc van Hasselt compared the sword to others from the same time period, roughly around the year 1200, and believed it was safe to assume the language was Latin.
He compared the inscription from the River Witham sword — +NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+ — with an inscription on a Dutch sword-blade found in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands. That blade was inscribed on both sides:
+BENEDOXOFTISSCSDRRISCDICECMTINIUSCSDNI+
+DIOXMTINIUSESDIOMTINIUSCSDICCCMTDICIIZISI+
He explains his thought process:
To elaborate, let’s compare the River Witham sword to the sword from Alphen: both start with some sort of invocation. On the River Witham sword, it is NDXOX, possibly standing for Nostrum Dominus (our Lord) or Nomine Domini (name of the Lord) followed by XOX.
On the sword from Alphen, the starting letters read BENEDOXO. Quite likely, this reads as Benedicat (A blessing), followed by OXO. Perhaps these letter combinations – XOX and OXO – refer to the Holy Trinity. On the sword from Alphen, one letter combination is then repeated three times: MTINIUSCS, which I interpret as Martinius Sanctus – Saint Martin. Perhaps a saint is being invoked on the River Witham sword as well?
Unfortunately, the British Library’s investigation seems to have stopped there after the intriguing contributions of van Hasselt.
But, thankfully, there is always SOMEONE on the Internet trying to solve a seemingly unsolvable mystery. I did a bit of sleuthing and found a post on medium.com, originally posted in February of 2017, with a very thorough breakdown of a potential solution to the River Witham sword!
A closer look at the River Witham sword inscription.
The author of the piece, Stieg Hedlund, started by focusing on the W in the inscription, since the classical Latin alphabet didn’t have a W. Surmising that the inscription was an initialism — which is common for Latin inscriptions — he started looking for an aristocratic name starting with W.
Why aristocratic? Well, not just anyone in the 1200s or 1300s could afford a sword with gold wire inscriptions.
He quickly settled on some variation of William for the W, and then narrowed his search to Willem II of Holland, a count, and the initialism CHW on the sword could mean Comes Hollandia Willelmus, his name and title in Latin.
Following that line of thought and digging into the history of Willem II revealed that he ruled not only Germany, but the southern Belgian region of Hainault as well.
This gives him “Comes Hollandia Willelmus Dei gratia, Rex Germania et Hainault Dei nutu” to cover CHWDRGHD in the inscription.
When he turned his attention to the first five letters, he agreed with the supposition of Marc van Hasselt and others that it referenced “in Nomine Domini” and the XOX represented the Holy Trinity.
So that covers NDXOXCHWDRGHD, approximately two-thirds of the inscription. What about XORVI?
Well, Hedlund believes the solution lies in Laudes Regiæ, a Catholic hymn most famous for its opening words: Christus vincit! Christus regnat! Christus imperat! (In English: Christ conquers, Christ reigns, Christ commands.)
Abbreviated versions of these words were often used by kings and royalty to solidify their position by tying themselves to the church. On a coin issued by Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1384, you can read one rendition of the phrase: XPiσtoC VinCIT XPiσtoC RegnAT XPiσtoC InPERAT.
He believes XORVI is an abbreviated version, reading “XpiσtOσ Regnat! (xpiσtoσ) Vincit! (xpiσtoσ) Imperat!” where the capital letters form the inscribed message.
So, the completed message would read:
(in) Nomine Domini Comes Hollandia Willelmus Dei (gratia), Rex Germania et Hainault Dei (nutu) XpiσtOσ Regnat! (xpiσtoσ) Vincit! (xpiσtoσ) Imperat!
Or, in English:
In the Name of the Lord; of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost Count of Holland Willem by the grace of God, King of Germany and Hainault by the will of God Christ reigns! Christ conquers! Christ commands!
It’s a compelling case, and certainly the most complete interpretation and explanation I’ve been able to find.
Imagine. All of that in that brief, beautiful, confusing inscription. It’s fascinating, and makes the mind positively whirl with possibilities.
Oh, and if you find any centuries-old swords while you’re perusing the nearby waterways, let me know! We might have a new mystery to solve.
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