If you missed Brent Morris’ appearance at The American Lodge of Research six months ago, I suppose you could catch him in Indianapolis in October. The Grand Lodge of Indiana plans a Masonic Education Day for Saturday the third. Brent will reprise his talk on Robert Benjamin Folger and his vexing Masonic cipher of 200 years ago.
If you have read Committed to the Flames, Arturo de Hoyos’ and Brent’s book on this secret code, its author, and the rituals themselves, then you know all about it. Otherwise, you’ll be amazed by this story.
Honestly, it’s a bit much for me to comprehend, but some basics were discovered: Folger’s code masked English words; it is read from left to right, top to bottom; the same encryption style is employed throughout, and twenty-six symbols stand for English characters; words are represented by clusters of symbols; and identical repeats of many words are seen. Get Committed to the Flames for the full story.
Brent’s illustrious career has encompassed teaching mathematics, statistics, computer security, and cryptology at Duke, Johns Hopkins, and George Washington universities, as well as The National Cryptologic School. This will get the conspiracy goofballs worked up, but he also was a cryptologic mathematician at the National Security Agency for a quarter-century. So you can see why he’d want to decipher an elusive code that possibly only its creator ever knew.
I’ll try to summarize the story. Circa 1826, Robert Benjamin Folger, age 23, a physician and a new Mason at Fireman’s Lodge 368 (and later in I.R.A. 2) here in New York, filled a pocket-sized commonplace book with his own cipher of the Rectified Rite’s Craft rituals. This was not like anything you’ve seen in any Masonic ritual book, nor was it the Pigpen Cipher, or any other coded alphabet that might come to mind.
The code had been cracked twice in the twentieth century, first by W. Bro. Wil Baden in the 1950s, another New York Mason; and again by Mr. Donald H. Bennett in the ’80s. Proving it’s a small world, Bennett was inspired by the article “Fraternal Cryptography” Brent recently had published on the subject. Neither man was aware of Baden’s success.
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| Brent Morris sporting his UGLE regalia at The ALR in March. |
Baden cracked the code using what they call the “matched plain and cipher” technique made possible by the inclusion of some English text in Folger’s pages, which Baden compared and contrasted with symbols in the cipher. Bennett employed the “cipher text only” method involving “classical cryptanalytic techniques.” His findings are revealed in his paper “An Unsolved Puzzle Solved” in Cryptologia magazine.
The book also contains the amazing (to me, at least) biographical details of Folger’s medical career and Masonic activities. Not your typical lodge sideliner!
Also on the program for October 3:
• Candidate Experience
• Grand Master’s Blueprint Project
• Masonic Symbolism
• MED Talks from Indiana Brothers
• Lodge Showcase
Indianapolis Freemasons Hall. 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Registration is free. Lunch costs $20/person. Register here.
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