Masonic ciphers - Maranatha-puzzle forum

JosephofArimathea · Member

Masonic ciphers

richmcd · Newbie

Well I finished the decoding and tried to put some punctuation etc. in to make sense of the text but there seem to be some problems.

1. There's an 'O' in the middle of the word 'GIVE' at the top of page 5. "....EARTH CAN GI(O)VE OF BETTER..." It seems a bit odd and there's a clue on the website about 'mistakes'. There don't seem to be enough of these for it to be part of the puzzle, though.

2. The 'verse' part doesn't seem to make much sense in the way that it's split into lines. Particularly the second and third sections which seem to be all one sentence. It seems that this ought to be important as it's the only place in the text that isn't just a big block of letters.

3. The sentence near the end which ends "...WILL BE LIKE THE GREAT SERPENT STAFF AND CONSUME THEM ALL TO ONE. SO SEAT THE ROBE..." Doesn't make much sense unless you break it like that but no other positioning of full stops/spaces seems to make much more sense. From the clue that all the sentences in the book are there for a reason it seems like the text ought to make some sense.

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Having trawled through the translation I'm keen not to stop now.

-- Edited by richmcd at 13:44, 2006-03-05

-- Edited by JosephofArimathea at 01:20, 2006-03-06

JosephofArimathea · Member

HI Rich

Firstly sorry for taking so long to come back to you. weekends are always busy for me. however. I'm pleased you are heavily involved and have done the slog of getting through the cipher.

I must confess at this stage I am keeping an open mind as to any irregularities I find , I have been involved in book treasure hunts ever siince Kit william's Masquerade ,so for over 20 years. so don't get too concerned about the initial stages of finding clues that come to a dead end.so I tend to place them onto the back burner until something else comes up that may link them.

I find the difficulty with any treasure hunt is to keep an open mind, as so often it's easy to fall into the trap of latching onto to one small aspect and going off onto a tangent, it is what we call in the treasure hunt world the inverted pyramid theories, you start off thinking of one small clue and then expand it beyond its significance, so beware..

I wouldn't get too concerned over punctuation, remember this is done in the manor of the middle ages when secrecy was all important, so being as concise and cryptic as possible was the done thing.

You mention the inclusion of the letter " O " in give , well my first thoughts that O has several meanings as a symbol and as a letter ,one possibility is that he has placed this letter in the word GIVE..... give is to receive ! another possiblity, is there any significance between the letters I and V ! or maybe the position of this letter on the page as a datum of some sort. ! I find this letter an interesting one, O= nothing , O= North as in zero degrees ie all directions are based on magnetic north ie. zero degrees, after all you can't navigate without knowing where north is, also O = Oxygen as the symbol on the periodic table, Oxygen the giver of life !so there are many ideas to play with.

Anyhow it is late now so need to go, but will happily continue the dialogue another time.

Good hunting .

-- Edited by JosephofArimathea at 01:21, 2006-03-06

richmcd · Newbie

Thanks for getting back to me; it seems as though no-one on the internet is discussing this puzzle which seems pretty odd since they generated the prize fund through pre-orders, meaning there's at least 130,000 people with this book, probably a lot more.

I agree that it's important not to focus too heavily on one aspect but this doesn't seem to be the same as other puzzle books. I'm too young to remember masquerade but I do own a copy and am familiar with the solution. I also tried the Merlin Mystery and A Treasure's Trove. All three of these hunts had a large number of clues and pieces of information to work on at once. Maranatha, once you've translated the text, has hardly any. Whereas the other hunts had too much information which made the puzzle difficult through complication, this has hardly anything to go on.

The text takes a long time to say not very much and yet every sentence is supposedly in place for a purpose. The pictures are clearly referenced by the text yet we aren't supposed to use any outside knowledge despite the references being in the forms of Sarmoung/Sarman, Nehushtan, Tobit and the legend of Alpheus and Arethusa so these inferences don't seem justified under the rules of the puzzle. (But then, frankly, the PigPen cipher seems like outside knowledge. Although you could work it out through letter frequency and the 'R' on the title page this seems a bit extreme. I guess I maybe shouldn't take the 'no knowledge' restriction too seriously.)

I'm just not sure what I should be doing. I can't see any way of interpreting the clues on the webpage without using knowledge external to the puzzle and that doesn't sit well with the suggestion that the puzzle can be solved anywhere in the world from one's armchair.

Rebel · Newbie

Richmcd, perhaps this is a bit late, but the decoded text is "earth can prove" not "earth can giove".

rugas · Member

I will confirm that it is "Earth can prove..."