Possession or patent?
Lots of buzz in religious and ciphery circles about a deciphered letter written by an Italian nun in 1676. The religious articles start from an assumption that she was possessed. The secular articles call her various Freudian labels for crazy, which is just the secular way of saying possessed.

Neither assumption is necessary or justifiable.

Better and simpler: She was developing** a coherent but heretical philosophy, and used her language skills to record her thoughts privately. This was a common trick at the time. Inventors used it to register priority for ideas. Write it down in coded Latin, store the document with a friend or lawyer, pull it out and decode it when needed.

She had studied languages and the cipher shows it. Most of the characters are actual Cyrillic. Her invented symbols have a Cyrillic flavor.

Most interesting to my eyes: A few of the symbols were later used for REAL Cyrillic variants, such as Serbian, developed in 1818. Were these symbols inherent in the mental template of Cyrillic? Or was she writing to other language students, leaving deposits of inventiveness in those circles as well?

None of the articles mention details of the encryption. Was it just a symbol-substitution from Italian? There are a couple words of plain Italian in the small segment pictured with the articles. Or was it a proper cipher with transpositions and Vigenere stuff? Inventors and philosophers tended to use transposition in their provenance provers.

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** Footnote on developing a philosophy: We should remember that the late 1600s were a terrible time for Europe. Bad weather, massive plagues, Muslim invasion from the south, idiot princelings fighting each other over sour romances or improperly shaped beards instead of helping their people. Sounds familiar. The unfamiliar part is that Rome was trying to maintain an island of knowledge. Some convents and monasteries were 'think tanks'. Just like the modern version, creativity was encouraged but outright heresy was not.

Labels: Asked and badly answered, skill-estate

  ¶ 2:24 AM