![]() ![]() are titillating, what's likely to interest historians most is a passage discussing the rights of man. Secret societies were all the rage in Europe in the 1700s, but by their own design we have very little information about their political machinations. You know, the whole DaVinci Code drill-except for real. A black carpet inscribed with occult signs is spread on the floor during rituals. The group describes themselves as freemasons, and the rituals make use of mallets, compasses, epees, and other paraphernalia (and lots and lots of candles). Members must cover their eyes with aprons or their hands during certain ceremonies. Potential inductees must attempt to read a blank sheet of paper, and when they fail, they will have hair from their eyebrows plucked by the master of ceremonies. A German secret society of the mid-1700s with some very weird fixations. ![]() This gave them their first successes, and in short order they had most of the text deciphered, revealing it to be the rules and rituals of a German secret society of the mid-1700s. As their analysis found that German was, by a hair, the most likely of the 80 languages they'd tested-the team's primary focus, not incidentally, is automated translation-they tried to see whether the abstract symbols could be standing in for German letters. The carefully inscribed gobbledegook included Greek and Roman letters and abstract symbols, and for a long time the team worked on just the Roman letters, but that yielded nothing. The first words they deciphered? "Ceremonies of Initiation." Starting out, the team had no idea what language the enciphered text was. ![]()
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