Chapter 1
Clueing You In about Codes
and Cryptograms
In This Chapter
▶ Discovering cryptography through the ages
▶ Finding out about Masonic codes and ciphers
▶ Investigating additional resources
I
n this book, we offer you the challenge of breaking several
types of real ciphers and cryptograms, all devised by noted
Australian puzzlemaster Denise Sutherland (author of Word
Searches For Dummies [Wiley]).
In this chapter, we offer a few things to orient you to the
secrets of codes and cryptograms, including the world of the
cryptogram, the history of ciphers and codes, and the ways in
which the time-honored fraternity of the Freemasons has used
codes over the centuries. We also tell you about the contem-
porary world of codes and follow up by giving you some sug-
gestions for further reading.
Introducing the Cryptographic
World
The word cryptographic comes from elements that mean
“hidden” (crypto) and “writing” (graph). The cryptographic
world encompasses codes and ciphers (which we distinguish
between in Chapter 2), which are used to create cryptograms
(secret messages).
Part I: Code and Cryptogram Strategies
10
Ciphers. Codes. Cryptograms. What do you think about when
you hear these words?
You may get an image of dark nights with fog-filled streets. In
an attic in wartime London, a nervous man, constantly check-
ing the door with anxious looks over his shoulder, is bent
over a static-filled radio, writing down strings of numbers as
they come over one particular frequency on the dial. In the
street below, people in trench coats trade identical briefcases
on street corners after an exchange of passwords. Such is the
popular image — and, to some extent, the truth — of espio-
nage, a world where ciphers, codes, and cryptograms are part
of everyday reality.
Perhaps you prefer a more ancient or historical slant. Maybe
you’re thinking of Julius Caesar sending messages to his
troops in the hostile wilds of Western Europe, in the years
before he ruled the Roman Empire. Perhaps you wonder
about the secrets encoded on parchment in the Middle Ages
and during the Renaissance by people who had quite a lot
to lose — like their lives: political plotters, alchemists, and
even — gasp! — practitioners of magic and sorcery. And then
there are the secret societies of history, some political (the
Black Hand of Serbia, the Holy Vehm, the Bavarian Illuminati),
some criminal (the Black Hand of Sicily, La Cosa Nostra), some
religious (the Rosicrucians), some fraternal (the Freemasons
and their affiliated organizations, the York and Scottish Rites).
Then again, you may prefer a more modern and military
approach. Military and diplomatic ciphers can make or
break a nation in wartime. Just in the relatively short period
of American history, ciphers and codes have played promi-
nent roles in the American Revolutionary War and the War
Between the States, and afterward. In the world at large,
codes and ciphers — which ones were broken and which
ones endured — had much to do with determining the
outcomes of World Wars I and II, thus affecting the lives of
billions of people. Your life may have been very different if
the brave geniuses of Britain’s Bletchley Park group hadn’t
broken the German Enigma ciphers.
Of course, today cryptography has gone corporate. You
probably send or receive multiple encrypted messages every
business day without even knowing it, as you transfer funds
Chapter 1: Clueing You In about Codes and Cryptograms
11
from an ATM to your pocket, as you order merchandise over
the Internet, even as you communicate through telephone
or e-mail. Keeping these communications secure is big
business — and big trouble when it fails.
Considering the History
of Codes and Ciphers
The origins of codes and ciphers — like the beginnings of lan-
guage and writing, and my entire Beatles LP collection — are
lost in the sands of time. David Kahn, the master historian of
codes and ciphers, wrote that the development of secret writ-
ing was inevitable in any literate human culture because of
“the multiple human needs and desires that demand privacy
among two or more people.”
Then again, legends tell of another source of secret writing. In
Jewish tradition, the most ancient book was written by God and
delivered to Adam in the Garden of Eden by the angel Raziel (a
name that means “secrets of God”). The first published edition
of the Book of Raziel the Angel appeared in Amsterdam in 1701.
One part of that book illustrates divine alphabets that could be
used to encode secrets — divine or otherwise.
Parts of the Jewish Talmud (second century AD) reflect the
belief that secret messages were encoded within the text of
the Bible. These messages could be decoded according to
specific rules, such as gematria (the use of the numerical
equivalents of the Hebrew letters, where the first letter has
the numerical value “1,” and so on). The use of gematria and
other methods to detect secret messages in the Bible appears
today in the study of Kabbalah, one approach to Jewish
mysticism. (If you’re interested in discovering more about
this topic, check out Kabbalah For Dummies by Arthur
Kurzweil [Wiley].)
Whether you accept a human or a divine origin of codes and
ciphers — or both! — the following sections offer you some
tantalizing references to what could be codes and ciphers in
ancient literature of a very early date.
Part I: Code and Cryptogram Strategies
12
Early ciphers
Homer’s Iliad — thought to date between the sixth and eighth
centuries BC — has exactly one reference to writing. It comes
up in the story-within-a-story of Bellerophon, who was sent
off by an angry monarch with folded and sealed “tablets on
which he [the monarch] had traced a number of devices with
a deadly meaning,” tablets that Bellerophon was to give to
another king, who was supposed to kill Bellerophon after
reading the message. To this day, a message that instructs
the recipient to kill the messenger is called a “bellerophontic”
message. Is Homer’s wording a fancy way to talk about normal
writing — or does it indicate the use of a code or cipher? We
don’t know.
The earliest use of a cipher for military purposes involved
the fifth century BC Spartans of Greece. They used the
device called the scytale, a baton. A strip of paper or leather
was wrapped around the baton, and the message was writ-
ten straight across the different “columns” of the paper or
leather. The recipient of the message would wrap the leather
or paper around a baton of the same dimensions and then
read the message off the material wound about the baton.
The second century BC Greek historian Polybius devised a
ciphering system that has been used for centuries. Polybius
put the letters of the alphabet in a 5 x 5 array like a short
checkerboard. In Polybius’s system, each letter is described
in terms of the column and row in which it appears. Thus, “A”
is ciphered as “1-1,” “B” as “1-2,” all the way to “Z” as “5-5.” (In
this scheme, “I” and “J” are given the same code.)
Julius Caesar, the first century BC Roman statesman, used at
least two ciphering systems during the years when he was a
general of the Roman armies. These systems are the Caesar
Shift and the Caesar Box Codes (we describe both in Chapter 2,
and you can try your hand at them in Chapters 7 and 11). After
the fall of the Roman Empire in the West (about 476 AD), we
know little of the making of codes and ciphers in the West for
many centuries.
However, in other parts of the world, cryptography thrived.
The rise of Islamic civilization, from the seventh century AD
onward, saw the first books written on cryptanalysis, that is,
the organized effort to break codes and ciphers.
Chapter 1: Clueing You In about Codes and Cryptograms
13
In Eastern Asia, the use of idiograms (picture writing) in such
languages as Chinese made it impractical to use ciphers (sub-
stitutes for letters). However, real codes were sometimes
used. For example, in 11th century AD China, one military
code was based on the 30 words of a particular poem. Each
word corresponded to a brief message, like “need more bows
and arrows.” A single word of the poem would be sent as the
message from one commander to his superior.
The rebirth of learning during the Renaissance, which continued
in the Enlightenment, saw a great increase in the use of codes
and ciphers in the Western world. The emergence of the central
text of Kabbalah, the Zohar, in about 1300, led many Christian
scholars to look into the use of gematria to detect secret mean-
ings in sacred writ. The publication of Agrippa’s Three Books of
Occult Philosophy in 1531 did a great deal to spread the use of
special alphabets to conceal secret religious writings because
Agrippa was the first to publish together in tabular form the
magical alphabets called “Celestial,” “Malachim” (Hebrew for
“angels”), and the enigmatically named “Passing the River.”
These magical alphabets were republished centuries later in
Francis Barrett’s popular work, The Magus (1801), through which
these alphabets became a permanent part of the landscape of
esoteric and magical studies. (You can try some of these magical
alphabets in Chapters 6 and 8.)
But it is the worlds of politics and military actions that have seen
an explosion of activity in the area of secret writing over the last
600 years. The destinies of nations have hung on the making and
breaking of codes. For example, the attempt by Mary Queen of
Scots to take the British throne from Elizabeth I of England in
1585 collapsed when the cipher used by her conspirators, led by
Anthony Babington, was broken by Elizabeth’s agents.
As cryptography made and unmade nations in Europe, it did
the same in the New World. For example, in the American
Revolutionary War, a wide variety of cryptographic techniques
(including ciphers, code books, and invisible inks) was used on
both sides. The same is true of the use of cryptography during
the American War Between the States, or Civil War.
Cryptography and the Great Wars
During the wars of the 20th century, cryptography came to
determine the destiny, not just of nations, but of the globe.
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