original version appeared in: sirbacon.org
(please also see the companion page, Shakespeare Nightmare Words)
Optimally Concise Summary of the Word Cipher
The Word Cipher is unusual in that there is no letter, word, or word sequence transformation necessary to lead from the original source text to the final, deciphered Secret Message. Instead, concealment (and therefore Security) comes from the secret message text having been divided, from the start, into very numerous fragments of text, with filler-material spliced in between the fragments, so that it deceptively reads like somewhat-plausible prose.
The scheme may remind American males of my generation of the folding-in back cover of the satire periodical, Mad Magazine, which ran as a monthly feature for more than half a century:
But the slice-and-dice preprocessing is damaging to the readability of the final prose, and the finished decoded (public) outer text is certain to have a strained, artificial sense to it. The counterparts can be seen in the Al Jaffee artwork above, both in the text and the graphics. But if you were a reader of Mad, you knew what to expect, and you never questioned it. For certain reasons, then, there was a reader-specific Suspension of Disbelief.
It will be useful to develop an intuitive sense for this, to identify additional historical documents which also have had the Word Cipher secretly embedded within them (all along).
Of primary importance is being able to locate where the fragments of un-decoded secret message are located within the public body of text.
A thorough literature search shows that there is very little published information about How the Word Cipher Works. Currently the multi-step decoding process is only partially understood. But the following is known with certainty:
There are four global Guide Words: Fortune, Nature, Honour and Reputation. They are global in that:
1. They appear across many pages of multiple documents (such as multiple hardcopy Bookes)
2. They appear across the two great Baconian Cipher Methods, the Biliteral Cipher (known today as the Binary Code) and also the Word Cipher (being described publicly here, in non-cryptic form, for the first time in 400 years).
The instructions on how to decode the Word Cipher are chiefly encoded using the Biliteral Cipher; so it is a multi-tier encryption method, with a multi-step decryption process: the instruction manual for the Word Cipher is guarded by being encoded in the Biliteral Cipher.
And it is Initiatory, in that to access the upper levels of elite knowledge, you have to first prove yourself Worthy (by decoding the Biliteral portion).
The Guide Words indicate the fragment locations indirectly through a significantly larger set of Key Words. Apparently, the sentence surrounding an instance of a Guide Word is the container within which reside a number of Key Words. There are hundreds or perhaps thousands of Key Words.
Key Words are chosen, and are used in such a way, as to draw attention to themselves in a way which is obvious, if not ‘vivid’. The meaning of vividness here is that there will be an anomalous, and perhaps bizarre, cluster of word repetitions. In addition, the meaning of the word itself forms a hint when extracted from the text of a sentence. So the same word could have very different nuances, comparing the two states, Encoded and Decoded. This would correspond to the ‘Charade’ meaning, vs. the real (though covert) ‘Actually-Intended meaning’.
The Key Word instances are not a part of the final text of the secret message, instead they only act as delimiters for the message text fragments. While they do not appear in the final decoded message, they serve an additional purpose: they act as organizational category names. Clarification is needed on the process by which the text fragments are sorted within a Category after they are gathered together. Helpful is an understanding of the basics of Prince Tudor Theory. For example, an especially important Key Word is ‘Virginity’. The word ‘Drown’ is special, also, for those in-the-know.
Below is color-coded text of a selection from All’s Well that Ends Well, which illustrates a cluster of Guide Words. The prose style can fairly be called “Tormented”. Yet the existence of the Word Cipher embedded within it has passed by nearly unnoticed for centuries, despite the intentionally obvious indicators. The World has been hypnotized into believing that this is all ultra-classic English literature text, when really a passage like the following is just elegant Elizabethan gibberish, a vehicle for broadcasting messages into the Future, using the Word Cipher.
All’s Well That Ends Well
The Guide Words are not distributed uniformly within of the content of a written Work hosting them. Since frequency of word occurrences is fundamental to this project, color coding of words is extensively used here.
A Word Cloud can be a useful visualization of patterns in word repetitions. Results may vary on your choice of Web Browser, but the following provides active links to the Ultimate Website for Baconian word reference, shakespearewords.com.
Everywhere on this site it is preferred to remain in line with the color coding above for Guide Words.
| Guide Word | Frequency |
|---|---|
| Fortune | 515 |
| Nature | 532 |
| Honour | 1056 |
| Reputation | 73 |
Repeatedly, Fra Bacon tells us in his Biliteral Code instructions that Fortune is in some way first or foremost among the four Guide Words. There is no reference in publication which explains how that is so.
Until now, the Word Clouds presented have been hand-crafted from wordcloudart.com.
As in line with the fundamental goals of this Project, computer-aided methods will be used to provide Visualizations.
Below, our custom software creates a word cloud for each of the plays (“Works”) of the 1632 First Folio of Mr. William Shakespeare. Unlike before, we now have dictatorial control of the filtering of words from the text: we maintain lists of “stop words” in common spreadsheet files (such as .csv) for global Stop Words (trivial words such as a/the/this and so on) and also lists of stop words for Characters in the Works.
Storing Stop Words, and output data files, in .csv supports enabling independent research by others, in that they are commonly in use by many different software systems, supporting a very wide range of technical adeptness. Current AI/Data Science apps depend on .csv, and so does Microsoft Excel (and all other spreadsheet apps). This project depends on the Google Colab platform for AI development, but once the question of How the Word Cipher Works is resolved, it may be possible to re-use all of the Colab .csv files produced here using some spreadsheet program, with a dramatic slashing-away at Complexity.
Below is Colab-generated word clouds using all system defaults, and with the names of all characters not filtered.
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