The Parchments Text decipherment rediscovered....the genuine content concealed in the parchments is not encrypted in the text; it is the hidden geometry.
This has been identified many times over. The trick is this - which geometry is correct? As it so happens, Miles has put a fantastic theory across.
I have been reading the excellent new book my Simon Miles, The Map and the Manuscript. It is a fascinating investigation - one of the best books I have read on the Affair. And I often find myself reading it in small bite size pieces, because there is so much to ponder such is the wealth of information within its pages.
The Appendix is a case in point. It regards Henry Lincoln's decipherment of the Parchments. I would like to discuss this further in this article.
Simon has discovered that the decipherment Lincoln spoke of and referred to in his 1974 Chronicle programme about the Affair was misleading. Simon, being the only person I know who would religiously sit down and check everything with a fine tooth comb deserves a meddle for this perseverance! He says in a nutshell that Lincoln was fed a 'fake decoding' system, and it looks like Lincoln and the BBC producers did not check!
What does this mean in the larger context, if anything?
In this instance it means the Pommes Bleues message from the Large Parchment revolves around the use of the 25 letter alphabet or the 26 letter alphabet. Simon performed the painstaking decoding for himself, then sat down to watch Lincoln in his 'Priest, the Painter and the Devil' [1974] programme. As Simon recognises, this 'fake decoding' could not have been discovered until our modern times [You Tube] and until the BBC Chronicle programme was available to the public to watch again.
The decoding first presented to the world by Lincoln used the modern 26 letter alphabet of the French language including the letter W1. This is used as a dating mechanism for the creation of the Parchments - being accepted that the letter was not officially incorporated into the French alphabet until the mid 19th century approximately 1840 to 1860. This would rule out Bigou as the composer of the parchments.
Simon refers to Lincoln suggesting that '...two versions of the decipherment based on the two different alphabets both produced the correct final result'. In other words Lincoln was saying - it didnt in fact matter which alphabet you used, because they both 'worked'. How and why could there be 2 versions of decipherment? Lincoln did not elaborate. Of course, this piqued Simon's interest. In a detective investigation of epic proportions Simon discovered;
1] the 25 letter alphabet calls for a shift of one letter
2] the 26 letter alphabet consists of a shift of 2 letters.
and that the variations had the effect of cancelling out some of the errors that had accumulated - he called these errors parchment reading errors, and parchment writing errors.
Simon found that after performing the Knights Tour transposition on the 26 letter version the intended POMMES BLEUES message became unintelligible.
The 26 letter alphabet did not work at all.
Simon was confused as Lincoln reported way back in 1974 that it DID work. What was going on?
Simon discovered a key point - that two of the parchment reading errors reverted to the correct values that they would have been if they had been read correctly from the manuscript. But how?
He said;
'.. the person who had provided the decoding instructions must have had the two correct values for these letters in their possession the whole time. This could only mean that these two apparent parchment reading errors were not really genuine errors, but ... fake errors'.
As de Sede wrote when the cryptographic experts examined the Parchments;
'Errors have been intentionally introduced so as to baffle any attempts at deciphering, the searcher being led along false trails'.
That is exactly what was happening.
How had Lincoln shown false decipherment steps in his TV programme but ended up with the correct message? Again Simon;
'The final slide [in the TV programme] ... had simply been swapped out for the correct final string'.
The correct target string, ie the Pommes Bleues message, CAN ONLY be obtained using the 25 letter alphabet. It cannot be obtained using the 26 letter alphabet [therefore as a sideline, does this have implications for the date of the parchment creation?]
Simon thinks and asserts - that the coder used a sleight of hand/magic trick, with the purpose to create the illusion that using a 26 letter alphabet to decode the Parchment works correctly, when it does no such thing. When Lincoln claimed that the 26 letter alphabet worked - he was bluffing!
The conclusion of Simon is that whoever supplied Lincoln with the 26 letter solution in 1974, which did not work, knew exactly what they were doing.
1 The letter W is the last letter conventionally entered into the French alphabet. Grand Robert recognises it as the 23rd letter of the alphabet in 1964, while Petit Larousse had integrated it since 1948, but it is well in the French alphabet according to the Larousse for all in 2 volumes published in 1907-1910. However, W has never completely come out of practice to transcribe foreign or dialectal common names, as well as proper names. In 1751, the Encyclopedia of Diderot and D'Alembert used the W but indicated in the entry "W" that "this letter is not properly from the French alphabet. It is the need to conform our writing to that of foreigners, which has given its use"; in the same way, the Dictionnaire de Trévoux in 1771 indicates "This letter is not exactly a French letter. It is a letter from the peoples of the North. However we admit it for several proper names.' Indeed, and contrary to what Diderot and D'Alembert say, the W- or -w- has always been used in the proper names of Northern France and French-speaking Belgium, that is to say in anthroponymy (especially surnames today) and in latoponymy. Thus, North Norman, Picard, Walloon (as its name suggests), Low Lorraine, Champagne and Burgundian have never abandoned the use of this letter in regional onomastics, which is why there are frequent surnames such as Watteau, Wace, Wautier, Waquet, Wartel, Warin, Willaume, etc. or toponyms such as Lawarde-Mauger, Wanchy-Capval, Wignicourt, Longwy, etc. This is not an arbitrary spelling, but a reflection of regional phonetics, namely the preservation of the [w], later passed to [v] in some cases (in the twelfth century in Norman for example), while in the other dialects of oïl ("francian", western, central, southern), the old initial w- [w] of Gallo-Romance passed early to [gw], hence the graph gu- still in the Middle Ages (hence for example the English guard), before being simplified into [g], denoted g- or gu- depending on the case. The proper names from the western, central and southern oïl dialects therefore have forms in G(u)-, often corresponding to those in W- above: Gautier, Garin, Guillaume, Lagarde, etc. However, there are some rare examples of the use of the letter W in proper names outside the area of diffusion of northern and eastern dialects, such as in Wissous (Vizoor in the 11th century, Vizeorium and Viceor in the twelfth century), but in this case it is an abusive spelling, the initial W- only appearing in the seventeenth century.