Last night, I was reading Finnegan’s Wake, and thinking about ciphers. A cipher is a sort of cryptographic coding system used to disguise information. It can be like a formula of replacement, or some kind of matrix that is applied, or all kinds of different crap.

An example of a cool theory about ciphers: one of the charges brought agains the Knights Templar was that they worshipped a demon named Baphomet. But some say that the Templars actually practiced a Gnostic variant of Christianity. A cryptographic system in use at the time, involving Hebrew letter replacements, called the Atbash Cipher, supposedly renders the word “Baphomet” as “Sophia”. Sophia, in Gnosticism, is a goddess figure who represents wisdom, and gave birth to the Demiurge, and a bunch of other crap.

Anyway, so I was thinking about this while reading last night. And I did some tricks where I would read pages backwards. Reversing the order of the words though, not the letters. And then I tried doing things where I would read columns vertically down the page, as though it were Chinese pictograms or something. Both yielded some interesting results.

I’m also reminded of a mysterious book, known as the Voynich Manuscript, which people have been puzzling over and trying various things to translate it for some time. It’s got all these drawings and symbols and scripts and all kinds of mixed up languages and stuff in it. It sounds a lot like Finnegan’s Wake, in that regard. As far as I know, various groups, from professional cryptographers to academics have worked out various systems to try and unlock the book’s meaning.

I wonder if anybody has applied similar methods to FW. I’m betting probably. Maybe setting up different kinds of filters and running different programs and calculations on it to unlock other layers of meaning. I don’t necessarily think they would find “THE” meaning of the book, but it seems like the actual act of going through it this way, trying to decode it, would lead to a lot of interesting learning and thought. Although, I’m sure it would be anything but conclusive. Fun though.

Here are two pages with different little programs you can use or download for basic cryptography.