I am trying very hard to find an original version of this cipher with no luck. It almost sounds like this whole thing is a hallucination...? Can anyone point me to a PDF of the original Cyphral Distich as printed?
I am trying very hard to find an original version of this cipher with no luck. It almost sounds like this whole thing is a hallucination...? Can anyone point me to a PDF of the original Cyphral Distich as printed?
I found this german blog: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we...
which links to: https://archive.org/details/s9notesqueries03londuoft/page/12...
which is in reference to the original proquiritations here: https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas00mait/page/416/...
i had also never heard of this before today and wonder if people had even seriously tried to decipher this at all?
In your first link one of the comments says:
> Die Lösung müsste eigentlich mit Hilfe des Buches zu finden sein (..who worthily will hear or read this book..)
And there’s another one that says:
> jeweils 32 zahlen pro reihe. erste zeile seitenzahl zweite zeile wort? oder umgekehrt? wär mir als erstes in den sinn gekommen. leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.
So people have seen and proposed the method already in 2014 that it’s keyed to the book but had not had time to pursue a solution.
* Edit: Typo
its not quite the correct method though, the commenter suggests using the first row as a page index, and the second row as the word index, but the actual solution was using both rows as word indices within the 32 paragraphs ("Proquiritations") paired to the 32 numbers in each row
It is actually the correct method but not the correct solution. Nevertheless, the claim is not that this is the correct solution, nor that matters for the point being made.
Thank you, and SahAssar for doing the due diligence here. Like many others, I have at least a passing interest in cryptography, and I'm confident I'd never even heard of this before.
Is it wrong to presume they tried to run a similar prompt on all ciphers that come before this one in search results, and this was the only one that worked?
Which makes me wonder, other than the author and maybe two other humans on the earth, does anyone care about the cipher or the success?
I don't see it in https://archive.org/details/worksofsirthomas0000urqu or https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170...
I also don't find it on the site of "Klaus Schmeh" that it claims to be on a list of "Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages": https://klausschmeh.net/?s=Cyphral
Looks like the best source I can find is this: https://scienceblogs.de/klausis-krypto-kolumne/2014/11/17/we... which seems real-ish?
It is there in that first link (search for "The Cyphral Distich"). It's missing, however, from this 1653 print: https://archive.org/details/bim_early-english-books-1641-170... (It should appear on that page above the Latin motto.)
I googled for "cyphral distich" before:2026-08-30, and found barely anything that was relevant. Mostly incorrectly dated pages about this exact thing. In fact, the only instance I can really find is this website, which seems to be an archive of a magazine issue from 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm (it also has a scan of the original text of the magazine in the top right). This facebook post https://www.facebook.com/groups/2600net/posts/46775529324677... seems to indicate it is found in at least one edition of the book