secret language codes tricks spies thieves and symbols apr 2010

The most common case is the acrostic poem,where the initial letters of the lines form a word or phrase, butthere are authors who cunningly bury all sorts of secret messages in... Suchpai

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SECRET LANGUAGE

BARRY J BLAKE

1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

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12 Della Porta’s cipher and steganography 93

20 An Enigma machine (schematic diagram over leaf ) 104

25 The Greek alphabet with numerical values 123

I would like to thank the following for helping me write this book

by supplying references, examples, suggestions, and translations:Alexandra Aikhenvald, Delia Bentley, Robert Crotty, MichaelFrazer, John Hajek, Andy Pawley, Randy La Polla, Jarinya Thammachoto, Erma Vassiliou, the publisher’s referees, and the everhelpful John Davey

Quotations from the Bible are from the Authorized Versionunless otherwise noted

Translations are my own unless otherwise acknowledged

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Language is a means of communication, but a good deal of

language use is deliberately obscure if not actually encrypted

in some form of cipher or code This book explores thereasons for obscurity and secrecy, and touches on some of thefascinating beliefs that underlie the constraints on using languagefreely

We begin our exploration in Chapter 2 with word games.Nowadays anagrams, palindromes, and word squares are generallysources of entertainment, but in the past they were often ascribedserious significance as elements of sorcery Word games sometimesfeature acrostics texts in which a sequence of initials spells out aword or phrase The most common case is the acrostic poem,where the initial letters of the lines form a word or phrase, butthere are authors who cunningly bury all sorts of secret messages in

passages of prose, as the alert reader may discover in the presenttext All these features of language and others are exploited in themost popular word game of all, the cryptic crossword.

In all languages some words have more than one meaning,different words sometimes sound alike, and often a phrase orsentence can be construed in more than one way These sources

of ambiguity give scope for making puns and concocting riddles Chapter 3 reveals that while, for us, riddles may be achildish novelty, once upon a time heroes were required tosolve riddles as well as performing physical feats, and prophetsfound it useful to phrase their predictions in the ambiguouslanguage of riddles

There are times when communicating in secret is crucial Intime of war, for instance, information needs to be passed secretlybetween governments and military authorities Acrostics can serve

an important purpose in relation to secrecy, as we see in Chapter4

We also consider how letters can be shuffled or replaced by otherletters to form a cipher and how words can be replaced by otherwords in a code

The ciphers and codes used by governments and the military arerecognized as such, but some scholars claim there are anagrams,ciphers, and acrostics hidden in the Bible They also perceive ahidden significance in the numerical properties of biblical diction

In a number of ancient languages, including Hebrew, the letters ofthe alphabet served as numbers, just as our Roman numerals do(clix can be159 or a brand name for dry biscuits or crackers) Thismeans one can add up the numerical values of the letters in words,which in turn creates scope for comparing totals and findingsignificance in the fact that certain words produce the same total

The Bible is an example of literature dealing with belief in thesupernatural a belief which links mainstream religion with what

is classified as superstition.1All societies believe in the supernatural, although of course not all individuals do Large scale societiesinclude sceptics, agnostics, and atheists, and nowhere is this truerthan in present day western society But we are exceptional Wemay become the norm in the future, but we are anomalous bycomparison with the small scale societies that existed in the past.Scepticism is a product of civilization, which encourages recognition of more than one system of belief Long term observation andexperiment take some of the mystery out of awe inspiring eventssuch as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tidal waves, and eclipses ofthe sun and moon occurrences which past societies often attributed to supernatural powers Belief in the supernatural accountsfor some of the strongest constraints on straightforward communication, and chapters6 and 7 are largely concerned with this Inmany cultures certain words and phrases cannot be used for fear ofoffending a god or spirit and inviting retribution, while converselysome words and phrases are thought to have the power to enlistsupernatural intervention in the physical world Knowledge ofthese efficacious words and phrases or magic words is oftenrestricted to initiates Although few people in contemporary western society believe in magic, the notion of the magic word plays animportant part in our culture The spell word abracadabra is wellknown, as is the charm phrase Open sesame, which reflects the

1 The Christians’ miracle is the pagans’ magic Even within Christendom we find orthodox Christians describing as magic what hereticsclaimed as miracles, while Lollards and later Reformers referred to sometraditional Catholic practices as magical (Kieckhefer1994: 815)

Arabian strand in our literary heritage Popular literature, particularly works aimed at the young, are full of magic and magic words.Think of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and morerecently the Harry Potter novels, where the magic words aremostly modelled on Latin They include incendio (producesfire), serpentortia (conjures up a serpent), and silencio (silencessomeone).

In many cultures certain texts are considered sacred and arebelieved to contain records of divine revelation The best knownexamples are the Bible and the Qur’an, but there are numerousothers, including some that are orally transmitted from generation

to generation Sacred texts have often been invested with thepower of healing and by this I mean not just their contents butthe physical texts themselves We read of cases where, in the hope

of effecting a cure, the Bible has been placed against stricken parts

of a patient’s body, or where verses from the Bible have been given

to a patient to eat More often such verses have been worn inamulets or charms to avert misfortune.2In the early centuries of

2 There is another term that vies with amulet, namely talisman I willtreat amulet and talisman as synonymous Some writers distinguish them,but different writers use different criteria Some take a talisman to be anamulet that attracts good fortune as opposed to warding off bad fortune,some take a talisman to contain text, while others consider a talisman tocontain astrological images such as the signs of the zodiac or images ofplanets, and others again take a talisman to be an amulet that is used for aspecific task such as guarding buried treasure (Budge 1978: 13 14; Skemer2006: 6 9) The term charm overlaps with amulet and talisman Originally

it referred to an incantation, then it covered a text used in an amulet, andfinally it came to denote the amulet itself, as in the modern charmbracelet

Christianity the Bible was also thought to be a source of divinationand prophecy and a guide to appropriate courses of action:devotees had only to open the Bible at random and take heed ofthe first verse that came to eye St Augustine attributes his conversion to committed Christianity to this simple method.People who work together, live in the same area, or congregatethrough common interests are likely to develop distinctive forms

of language that are a barrier to communication with the widerlanguage community This differentiation is dealt with in Chapter8.Sometimes it arises from the specialized terminology or jargon of

an occupation or leisure pursuit, but often it comes from aconscious desire for demarcation from the larger community.Language is an important marker of identity and people oftenfoster a distinctive vocabulary, particularly of a colloquial variety.Among criminals and others who tend to attract the attention ofthe authorities, an elaborate argot often develops, a mixture ofslang and jargon Such in group languages serve both to bond theirusers and to create codes which are opaque to the authorities Theyemploy two means of disguise One is a type of code in whichmainstream words are replaced with substitutes: stir for‘jail’ andscrew for‘jailer’, in two well known examples The other is closer

to cipher, for instance, back slang, where words are pronouncedbackwards (so that fish comes out as shif ), or Pig Latin, whereinitial consonants become the initial of a final syllable with therhyme ay so that‘Pig Latin’, for instance, becomes Igpay Atinlay.Obscurities of various kinds are common in everyday life Manypeople go out of their way to be ironical or playfully abusive Someinterlard their speech with double meanings or use expressionssuch as,‘Were you born in a barn?’ rather than ‘Would you mind

shutting the door after you’ Others favour euphemisms Thesedeviations from straight talking are covered in Chapter9.When people play overt language games such as cryptic crosswords and riddles the fact that there is a hidden meaning is quiteclear Often the teasing is covert, however, as when people insertpassages from a previous text into their speech or writing, or choose

an allusive name Such allusions are the subject of Chapter 10

A good example of a literary allusion is the novel White Mischief

by James Fox, better known from the 1987 film It presents ascathing portrait of decadence among the British elite in Kenyaduring World War II The title plays on Black Mischief, a comicnovel by Evelyn Waugh published in 1932, which tends to seeblack Africans as a source of humour in a way that would beconsidered politically incorrect or somewhat racist nowadays Ifone accepts this interpretation of Black Mischief, it gives an edge tothe view of the British elite presented in White Mischief

Allusions are also cleverly embedded within some fictionalnames Have you ever wondered why the computer controllingthe space mission in2001: A Space Odyssey is called HAL? Why doyou think the bad guy in The Da Vinci Code is called Sir LeighTeabing? These names are not arbitrary They are encipheredallusions Read on and all will be revealed

This chapter deals with the written form of language It

may come as a surprise to some people that writing is acomparatively recent invention Humans have beenspeaking for well over a hundred thousand years, probably somehundreds of thousands of years They have also been using handsigns, and it may be that signing predates speech Writing wasinvented in Mesopotamia and Egypt far more recently, in thefourth millennium bc It is thought that most writing systemscan be traced back to these beginnings in the Near East, butwriting was also developed independently somewhat later inChina and Central America.1

1 For a brief illustrated account see Blake2008, ch 10

Not all humans have access to writing Even today the vastmajority of the world’s languages are not written, though this isobscured by the fact that national languages such as Chinese,English, Hindi Urdu, and Russian are written.2Writing is derivative, a way of representing speech, yet many people treat it as theprimary form of language There is also a lot that is arbitrary aboutwriting For instance, English is written in the Roman alphabet,but in theory it could be written in the Greek or Cyrillic alphabet.Spelling is also arbitrary Words like music and logic were once speltmusick and logick, and words like honour and labour have thealternative spellings honor and labor.

Although writing is essentially a means of representing speech inpermanent form and although the means of representation isarbitrary, people in literate societies become fascinated by thewritten symbols, whether these represent individual phonemes as

in Europe, syllables as in Japanese and Korean, or words as inChinese People notice that there can be systematic relationshipsbetween the written form of two or more different words andbetween parts of different words One such relationship is theanagram, where the letters of one word can be rearranged toform one or more other words The words prose, ropes, pores, andposer are anagrams of one another.3Another relationship that holdsfor some words is that they are spelt the same way backwards as

2 Hindi Urdu is essentially one language It is called Hindi in India andwritten in Devanagari script, and it is called Urdu in Pakistan and written

in a form of Persian (ultimately Arabic) script

3 Some anagrams can be found in speech as in lifer andfiler, where theanagrammatic relationship is simple, but in written language it is possibleusing pen and paper tofind more complicated anagrammatic relationships

forwards These are palindromes and examples include words such

as level, madam, minim, and tenet Note that the palindromicrelationship does not hold for the spoken form since there is anunstressed vowel in the second syllable, though spoken palindromes are possible, especially in monosyllabic words such as tat,tit, and tot In some cases spelling a word backwards produces adifferent word; for instance, star spelt backwards yields rats Suchpairs are sometimes referred to as mirror words or semordnilaps, aterm which is itself formed by reversing the word palindromes.Parts of words in a phrase, sentence, or text can spell out a word

or phrase The most common example is the acrostic poem, whereinitial letters of lines spell out a name

Written words can be arranged in patterns such as squares andthe incorporation of anagrams, palindromes, mirror words, andacrostics into such word squares has been popular for centuries.Today picking out word patterns is considered a form of lightentertainment There is a game called Anagrams, for instance, inwhich players have to compose anagrams using lettered tiles likethose in Scrabble Anagrams and palindromes are to be foundmostly in cryptic crosswords, but it is interesting to note thatpalindromes and other forms of word play have been a regularfeature of curses and charms for centuries, and in the past peoplehave often seen hidden meanings in the formal properties ofwritten words

Anagrams

As mentioned above, an anagram is a word made up of the letters

of another word, so that reside is an anagram of desire and vice

versa Other groups of words sharing an anagrammatic relationship are Alice/Celia, amend/named, artisan/tsarina, conical/laconic,prenatal/paternal/parental, rescued/reduces, and listen/silent/tinsel.There can be an anagrammatic relationship between a word and

a phrase, as with ovation/too vain and hitherto/other hit ; or betweenphrases, as with same old story, which yields phrases such as delaysmotors and dreamy stools Anagrams are not all that difficult to find,

at least in English, and nowadays anagram producing computerprograms are freely available on the Web Although the availability

of such programs threatens to take some of the fun out offindinganagrams, there is still satisfaction to be had infinding an anagramthat is related in meaning to the original word or phrase When the

US government repealed the eighteenth amendment and allowedits citizens to buy alcohol again, Wyndham Lewis wrote Tons’odrink, even ale, for all, an anagram of the name of the thenpresident, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bergerson1973: vii) Theword astronomers anagrams to moon starers and the name of theformer Conservative British prime minister Margaret Thatcherproduces Meg, the arch tartar and an ironic that great charmer.The Greek poet Lycophron of Chalcis is often credited withbeing the inventor of the anagram, but it is likely that anagramswere in use long before Lycophron since fairly obvious examplesare found in Greek, such as åº (cholos) ‘choler’ and Zåº(ochlos)‘mob’ (as in ochlocracy ‘mob rule’) Anagrams were popular in Ancient Greek culture and Lycophron, who lived during thereign of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285 247 bc), included an anagram

of the king’s name in his poem Cassandra: —ˇ¸¯`ˇ

‘Ptolemaios’ became `—ˇ ¯¸ˇ (apo melitos) ‘made ofhoney’ There is at least one example of something akin to an

anagram that purports to predate Lycophron It involves a simpleword break, but it is an illustration of how seriously patterns ofletters could be taken When Alexander the Great was besiegingTyre, he dreamt of a satyr One of his advisers interpreted this as agood omen because satyros (Æ ıæ) could be broken up into

Sa Tyros (

(Plutarch, Alexander XXIV:8 9)

In the classical world anagrams of names were consideredsignificant, a belief that continued into the Middle Ages Somepeople believed that a person’s character or fate could be discovered by anagramming the letters of his or her name, and that acurse could be lifted by rearranging the letters of the afflictedperson’s name (Augarde 1984: 71)

It has been common in Europe for centuries for authors toincorporate anagrams of their names into poems, and it waspopular to form anagrams from biblical texts The first examplebelow is much quoted It is from the Latin version of the Bible (theVulgate) It is a good anagram in that its sensefits in with the sense

of the original, but remember that with a large number of lettersthere are many possibilities and in the late seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries numerous anagrams with meanings related tothe original were made from this verse (Sarton1936)

Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum (Luke1:28)

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee

Virgo serena, pia, munda et immaculata

Virgin serene, holy, pure and immaculate

The following is another much quoted example The anagramforms a possible reply to the question posed by Pontius Pilate

Quid est veritas? (John18:38)

What is truth?

Est vir qui adest

It is the man standing before you

Scientists sometimes hid information in anagrams In the thirteenthcentury Roger Bacon found it prudent to identify one of the ingredients of gunpowder in anagram form In the seventeenth centuryscientists often protected their discoveries by recording them in anagrams For instance, Galileo wrote to Kepler haec immatura a meiam frustra leguntur o.y., which means,‘These immature thingsare now read by me in vain’ It is an anagram of Cynthiae figurasaemulatur mater amorum‘The mother of loves emulates the phases ofCynthia’, where the mother of loves is Venus and Cynthia is themoon Galileo’s anagram isn’t a very good one since it doesn’t makefull sense and there are two left over letters, but he could haveunscrambled it if anyone else had claimed to have discovered thephases of Venus before hisfindings had been published.4

4 Ferdinand de Saussure (1857 1913) is famous as one of the founders ofstructural linguistics on the basis of the posthumously published Cours delinguistique générale From other unpublished notes it appears that hespent a lot of time investigating whether the names of gods and heroes

in ancient poetry, songs, and prophecies were reflected in other words ofthe surrounding text For instance, Saussure suggests that some of thesyllables of Aphrodite are picked up in the following lines of the Aeneid(1: 403 4) where Aphrodite reveals herself to her son, Aeneas:

Ambrosiaeque comae divinum vertice odorem

Spiravere; pedes vestis defluxit ad imos

‘And [her] ambrosial tresses breathed heavenly perfume fromthe top

[of her head]; her clothingflowed down to the bottom of her feet’

Anagrams were sometimes formed on the names of prominentpersons The Protestant theologian we know as Calvin has thename calvinvs in Latin, which was anagrammed to alcvinvs (InLatin v had the value of [u] or [w] (later [v]).) Voltaire was bornFrançois Arouet It is thought that Voltaire is an anagram of ArouetL(e) J(eune)‘Arouet the Younger’ The letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ were onceinterchangeable, and also the letters ‘i’ and ‘j’ The practice offorming anagrams from people’s names was so popular at one time

in France that Louis XIII appointed Thomas Billon as courtanagrammist

Today anagrams are very common in pop music circles TheFrench singer and songwriter Pascal Obispo’s name is an anagram

of Pablo Picasso The English rock band Sad Café released analbum called Façades (1979), and American singer and songwriterMike (Michael ) Doughty released an album called HaughtyMelodic (2005)

Anagrams are used in popularfiction from time to time In DanBrown’s best selling novel The Da Vinci Code (2003, film version2006), the lines O, draconian devil and Oh, lame saint written inblood on the body of the murdered curator of the Louvre areanagrams of Leonardo da Vinci and The Mona Lisa respectively.The central ideas of The Da Vinci Code can be found in an earlierbook, The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail by Michael Baigent,Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1982) One of the characters in

The syllables that are thought to reflect syllables of Aphrodite are pickedout in capitals The procedure is so open ended as to be vacuous, butSaussure’s work has attracted a lot of attention and is often discussedunder the label‘anagram’, as in Samuel Kinser’s 1979 paper ‘Saussure’sAnagrams: Ideological Work’, from which the above example is taken

The Da Vinci Code is Sir Leigh Teabing, whose name echoes those

of two of the earlier authors (the surname being an anagram ofBaigent)

Palindromes

A palindrome (Greek palin-dromos ‘back running’) is a word,phrase, or any other sequence of symbols that reads the same ineither direction The earliest examples are from a Greek poet ofthe third century bc, Sotades, whose name is perpetuated in thealternative label for palindromes, namely‘sotadics’ Words likeeke, eve, deed, level, madam, peep, reviver, rotor, racecar, rotator,tenet, and tot are palindromes, as are the names Anna and Glenelg(Scottish and Australian place name) and the name of the popgroup ABBA, who had a palindromic hit entitled SOS Malay-alam, the name of a Dravidian language spoken in southernIndia (Kerala state), is also a palindrome.5Palindromes are notuniversal and their frequency depends on the word shapes thatare possible in a language In most Australian languages, forinstance, all words begin with a consonant and end in a vowel,

so there are no palindromes However, these languages werespoken and signed, but not written, and an interest in palindromes seems to be confined to cultures with written forms oflanguage Japanese is written with Chinese characters andsyllabic signs (which are ultimately derived from Chinesecharacters) When words are written in syllables, it is relatively

5 There are about a score of languages with short palindromic namesincluding Atta, Ewe, Idi, Obo, and Ulu

easy to find palindromes, e.g shinbunshi ‘newsprint’ does notread as a palindrome in Roman orthography, but the syllablesshi-n-bu-n-shi form a palindrome.

A phrase or a sentence can be a palindrome, as in the muchquoted examples Able was I ere I saw Elba and Madam, I’m Adam,and the more natural Was it a car or a cat I saw? If we take wholewords rather than individual letters to be the relevant units, then asentence such as Fall leaves after leaves fall is a palindrome.Some Christian churches, both Byzantine and western, containfonts for holy water, particularly baptismal fonts, bearing thefollowing Greek inscription:

˝ˇ˝`˝ˇ˙``˙ˇ˝`˝ˇ˝

which breaks up into:

˝ˇ˝ `˝ˇ˙`` ˙ ˇ˝`˝ ˇ˝

This means‘Wash the sins not only the face’ and is a palindrome

in Greek In the transliteration from the Greek alphabet it is notquite a palindrome, but note that ps () is one letter in Greek.The only other unfamiliar letter in the inscription is ˙, whichlooks like a capital‘h’, but is eta or ‘long e’

A Latin example of a palindrome is sum summus mus‘I am themightiest mouse’, where sum is ‘I am’, summus ‘highest, greatest’,and mus‘mouse’ Composing palindromes, mainly in Latin, waspopular in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.Augarde (1984: 98) quotes examples such as the lawyer’s motto

Si nummi, immunis, literally,‘If money, immune’, i.e ‘If you pay,you will be free from prosecution’, and the motto of a woman

banished from the court of Queen Elizabeth for alleged impropriety: Ablata at alba‘Banished but blameless’.

For the most part finding palindromic words or composingpalindromic phrases and sentences is a form of light entertainment Some devotees display great ingenuity in finding longpalindromes covering more than one sentence In the past, however, palindromes havefigured in the language of magic, and manyhave taken reversibility to be significant (Stewart 1979: 70) In theworld of Ancient Greece and Rome it was common to try andbring misfortune to one’s enemies by inscribing curses on leadtablets (see also Chapter6) These contain lots of mysterious wordsand phrases, mostly gibberish as far as the users were concerned,but likely to be garbled words from Hebrew and possibly otherlanguages such as Egyptian Some of these voces mysticae or vocesmagicae (‘mystic words’ or ‘magic words’) are palindromes AsOgden (1999: 49) writes:

One sort of vox magica well suited to the curse tablets was thepalindrome: such words remained magically proof against theretrograde writing common on curse tablets They appear invarious lengths, but they are often very long indeed, and are thefavourite bases for the formation of isosceles triangles, since theyretain their symmetry and palindromic nature at each stage ofreduction

One palindromic vox magica in use among the Gnostics of thethird and fourth centuries ad was the Greek palindrome

`´¸`˝`¨`˝`¸´` (in Roman alphabet ablanathanalbawith ¨ transliterated by the digraph th) This was popular inamulets It may be from Hebrew ab lanath‘Thou art our father’,but this is not certain (Budge1978: 207) The example in Figure 1

is one of the long ones that Ogden alludes to, which was used asthe basis of an isosceles triangle or shrinking word It is written outand then repeated below with the edge letters missing Theserepetitions and reductions of the edges continue until only themiddle letter is left In the Roman alphabet version given here¸ is

IAE BAPHRENEMOUNOTHILARIKRIPHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENERPHAB EAI

AE BAPHRENEMOUNOTHILARIKRIPHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENERPHAB EA

E BAPHRENEMOUNOTHILARIKRIPHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENERPHAB E BAPHRENEMOUNOTHILARIKRIPHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENERPHAB BAPHRENEMOUNOTHILARIKRPIHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENERPHAB APHRENEMOUNOTHILARIKRIPHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENERPHA PHRENEMOUNOTHILARIKRIPHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENERPH RENEMOUNOTHILARIKRIPHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENER ENEMOUNOTHILARIKRIPHIAEUEAIPHIRKIRALITHONUOMENE

1 Shrinking word.

transliterated L, ¨ is transliterated with the digraph th, and with the digraph ph (Gager1992: 95).6

As Gager notes, a palindrome produces the same word whenreversed, so if you discovered that someone had cursed you with apalindrome, you could not simply counter the curse by reversing it.The notion of the palindrome, especially palindromic poetry,has become popular in eastern Europe over the last few decades,and an iconic relationship between reversibility of form and reversibility of meaning has been explored (Greber n.d.) Palindromicpoems consist of palindromic lines, but the term ‘palindromicpoetry’ is also applied to poems in which the whole poem is onelong palindrome (first word equals the last, second word equals thesecond last, etc) The thirteenth century poet Baudin de Condéwrote poems of this type.7The term is also applied to poems wherethe sequence of lines is palindromic (first line equals last line,second line equals second last line, etc.)

SemordnilapsClosely related to the palindrome is a word that yields anotherword when spelt backwards Examples include paws/swap, star/rats,diaper/repaid, reward/drawer, and tiler/relit The term given to such

‘mirror words’ is semordnilap that is, palindromes in reverse.Word play enthusiasts can have a lot of fun with semordnilaps

A word in one language may produce a word in another when

6 The palindrome is Greek looking, but identifying words is problematic One can perhaps see phrēnē ‘mind’, mouno ‘vulva’, thilari ‘nipple’ (cf.thēlē), kriphia ‘hidden’, and litho ‘stone’

7 For examples see Augarde1984: 104

reversed as in the case of the name of the forty fourth Americanpresident, Obama, which yields the Latin amabo‘I will love’ whenreversed In another variation, the phrase stressed desserts is apalindrome consisting of a semordnilap pair.

Although for most people these pairs of mirror words are just aminor linguistic novelty, there are people who see significance inthe fact that dog is the reverse of God, which is strange when youconsider the fact that this relationship holds only for English andonly in the modern spelling If we go back to the Middle Ages wefind that while God was spelt God, dog was spelt dogge (earlierOld English docga) In seventeenth century witch trials the claimwas often made that the devil appeared in the form of a dog, abelief that seems to have been prompted by a chance linguisticrelationship

Acronyms and AcrosticsWords and phrases can be formed from the initial letters of aphrase or longer text In such cases we refer to the new word as anacronym A well known example is scuba, which is derived from

‘self contained underwater breathing apparatus’ In the MiddleAges the acronym agla was popular as a magic word It is anacronym for the Hebrew Atah gibor leolam adonai ‘Thou, OLord, are mighty forever’ Alternatively it is interpreted as Atahgabor leolah, adonai‘Thou art powerful and eternal, Lord’.Similar to the acronym is a word, phrase, or longer text that can

be read from the initials of words in a larger text This is called anacrostic The term is derived from Greek akros‘pointed, at the tip’(as with acro-nym) and stichos‘a line or verse’ An acrostic is usually a

short verse composition in which the initial letters of lines or stanzasform a word or phrase Here is a short example from Ben Jonson(1572 1637), in which the initial letters of the lines spell wolf.

To Doctor EmpiricWhen men a dangerous disease did’scape,

Of old, they gave a cock to Aesculape

Let me give two, that doubly am got free

From my disease’s danger, and from thee

Acrostics were popular in Akkadian and other Mesopotamiancultures, and among the Greeks and Romans The prophecies ofthe Erythraean Sibyl were issued on leaves, so arranged that theinitial letters made up a word or phrase This is not entirelyunexpected given that those involved in the occult seemed regularly to favour various word patterns In the City of God (18:23)Augustine recalls being shown a Greek verse purportedly from theErythraean Sibyl, in which the initials form an acrostic spellingout

Uios Sōter) ‘Jesus Christ, son of God, saviour’ It is scarcelycredible that this verse actually came from the Erythraean Sibyl:

it is much more likely to derive from an imitator But the example

is remarkable in that the initials of these words spell ‘¨’(ICHTHUS) ‘fish’, so we have an acrostic within an acrostic.Augustine sees ‘fish’ as standing for Christ since, as he writes,Christ lived in the abyss of mortality like afish in the depths ofthe ocean He does not mention that thefish was a commonlyused symbol among the Christians of the Roman empire.Here is a Latin acrostic from the classical period It is interesting

in that it employs the first consonant and vowel of the proper

names in thefirst two lines to make up pedicare ‘to bugger’ It isnumber lxvii in a collection known as Priapea dedicated to Priapus, a God charged with guarding and increasing the fertility oflivestock and gardens The poem is of a type displayed in gardens.

It is to be read as if spoken by Priapus and it is a threat directedagainst any would be thief who should enter the garden

Penelopes primam Didonis prima sequatur

et primam Cadmi syllaba prima Remi,

quodquefit ex illis, mihi tu deprensus in horto,

fur, dabis: hac poena culpa luenda tua est

The initial syllable of Dido follows the initial syllable of Penelope,and the initial syllable of Remus follows the initial syllable of Cadmus,And that’s what will happen to you caught in the garden

That, thief, will be the penalty you’ll have to pay me

Acrostics remained popular among leading literary figuresthroughout Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance In

1599 John Davies (1569 1626) wrote Hymnes to Astraea containingtwenty six poems that all contained the acrostic Elisabeth Regina,and in1637 Mary Fage published Fames Roule, which containedover four hundred acrostic poems in honour of leadingfigures ofthe day Each poem was headed by an anagram of the subject’sname The following example is quoted in Stevenson and Davidson (2001: 262 3) It is addressed to Carolus Stuart, i.e., Charlesthe First, represented as sol, the sun, and Maria Henrietta, thequeen consort, represented by Vesta, the Roman goddess of thehearth.8

8 As noted earlier in the text letter v does double duty as [u] and [v],hence V in CAROLVS and STVARTE

to their most excellent majesty ofGreat Brittaines MonarchyCAROLUS MARIA STUARTE

anagramma

au! vesta, trac sol, marryCheerlyfirme Vesta, clad in verdant Green,

Au! is an emblem of our glorious queen;

Rendring a stable, fast, well knotted heart,

On our great sol plac’t, thence not to depart:

Likely a higher Goddesse cannot be,

Vesta like, ruling in her chastity,

Shining in virtues gracious increase

Much glory hath this Vesta, but no peace

Au! doth to her true soul remain,

Returning till she doth her sol retain;

In whom she doth delight, whom in her pace

Admiring she doth follow in true trace

So Vesta traceth sol, and did not tarry

Til their united graces they did marry,

Vertues conjoined thus, sol in his heat,

And Vesta in her chast, and plenteous great

Rare right increase, doth truly multiply,

Thrusting so forth a great posterity,

Ever to last unto eternity

Since the seventeenth century, in Britain at least, acrostics haveceased to interest serious poets, and they have come to be regarded

as a marginal curiosity which is popular only among those who likeword games

Not all acrostics are to be found in verse They also occur inprose In Hypnerotomachia Polyphili (Polyphilo’s Strife of Love in aDream), a famous example of early printing (1499), the decoratedletters at the heads of the chapters spell out poliam frater

franciscus columna peramavit ‘Brother Francesco Colonnaloves Polia’ The work is written in Italian, but the acrostic is inLatin.

The hidden word in an acrostic can be made harder tofind byputting the letters in anyfixed position other than the beginning ofeach line An acrostic in which the last letters of each line make up

a word is called a telestich If thefirst and last letters of lines formwords, then we have a double acrostic There are also tripleacrostics with a name running down the middle of the lines aswell as at the ends Varying the position of the relevant letterswithin the lines produces even more difficult acrostics For example, the letters could appear in thefirst position of the first line,the second position of the second line, the third position of thethird line, and so on In fact, Edgar Alan Poe worked the nameFrances Sargent Osgood into a poem using this method.9It is easy toimagine a more subtle pattern known only to the sender andintended recipient The typical acrostic is a literary device rather

9 The most extreme form of acrostic is the carmenfiguratum in which ahidden text forms a figure or pattern within a text The term carmenfiguratum also applies to a text, usually a poem, where the words are laidout to form a pattern In the Greek Anthology there are six poems with theline length varied so that they form a pattern representing the subject ofthe poem (e.g., wings), and a number of the curse tablets from the Romanempire contain words and letters arranged in shapes In the Middle Agespoems were sometimes written in the form of a cross More recent examples

of this kind of poem can be found in the work of the nineteenth centuryUruguayan poet Francisco Acuña de Figueroa, and in Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1918) John Cage moves thelines of some of his poems to the left or right in order to produce an acrosticrunning down the centre of the page Such verse is sometimes referred to asvisual poetry or concrete poetry

than an attempt at serious deception, but cases where the pattern iscomplicated fall under the heading of steganography, which isdiscussed in Chapter4.

Some Jewish and Christian scholars claimed to have foundwords, phrases, and sentences by examining the sequence of initialletters in the Bible They took these acrostics to have been hiddenthere deliberately rather than to be the result of chance Examplesare given in Chapter5

There are literary works known as abecedarians in which thesequence offirst letters spells out the alphabet Acrostics of thistype appear in the Hebrew Bible in the Lamentations of Jeremiahand some of the Psalms In Psalm119, for instance, the first eightverses all begin with aleph, the second eight with beth, the thirdeight with gimel, and so on through the alphabet.10

The label‘acrostic’ is also used for a type of crossword where youfill in the answers not in a sequence across or down, but in anumber of designated positions scattered over the matrix Whenthe puzzle is completed, words can be read either horizontally orvertically In the following example thefirst clue is fancy and theanswer is whim, so youfill in w in the cell numbered 27, h in thecell numbered30, i in the 32 cell, and m in the 17 cell The secondclue is chase and the answer is hunt, so you put h in the22 cell, u inthe38 cell, n in the 33 cell, and t in the 26 cell I will leave the restfor readers to complete You should employ two methods First, try

tofind the answers to the clues, and second, look at the emerging

10 Richard Coate has pointed out to me that Jim Cladpole translated allthe abecedarian psalms into the Sussex dialect, preserving the acrosticsystem The manuscript dates to1938 and it is published as De A.B.C.Psalms put into de Sussex dialect and in due A.B.C feshion by Jim Cladpole,edited by Richard Coate (Brighton: Younsmere Press,1992)

text and try to estimate which letters are likely in various unfilledpositions Your guesses can be filled in in the numbered spacesopposite each clue Some will help choosing the right answer forthe clues You shouldfinish up with a text that reads horizontallyfrom left to right.

fancy: 27 30 32 17 aromatic plant: 24 10 13 15

shown where the words star, tame, amen, and rent can be readvertically as well as horizontally.

One kind of word square found in curse tablets from theGreek and Roman worlds was a square (plinthion) formed by asmany repetitions of a word as there were letters, with eachrepetition being offset from the previous one by one position.The square in Figure4 is from a curse addressed to the spiriteulamo¯ seeking his aid in ruining the performance of rivalathletes (Gager1992: 60)

The notion of a systematically filled in rectangle must havebeen credited with some secret power, for word squares wereused in amulets as well as in curses The square shown in Figure5

is from a medieval amulet It features one of the Hebrewnames of God, namely Elohîm (zjela), which can be read by

starting in the middle with a (aleph) and proceeding to anycorner by any series of horizontal or vertical steps (Budge1978: 234).

Squares made up of the consonants of Yahweh, namely efej

yhwh, the most sacred name of God, were also used.11HeinrichCornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486 1535) in his De OccultaPhilosophia Libri Tres (Three Books on Occult Philosphy) describes amedal withefejwritten in the form of a square and surrounded by

a wish According to Agrippa, for the medal to be effective inprotecting the wearer it had to be made of pure gold or virginparchment The ink had to be made from the smoke of a consecrated candle or incense mixed with holy water by an artist purifiedfrom sin (Shumaker1972: 149)

One square that hasfigured prominently over the centuries indiscussions of word patterns is the sator square and it bringstogether the palindrome, the acrostic, and the anagram It isillustrated in Figure 6 The words are Latin and they form apalindrome: sator arepo tenet opera rotas When aligned in

a square, they form a multiple acrostic so that words can be readvertically as well as horizontally Starting in the top left hand

5 Elohîm square.

l ¼ l, e ¼ h, j ¼ î, z ¼ m For practical purposes a is a

silent consonant supporting the vowel [e], which is

not shown The vowel [o] is not shown either The

Hebrew consonantal alphabet is shown in Figure 23.

ם ם

ל ל

11 Note that Hebrew is read from right to left and in biblical Hebrewthe vowels were not represented Some further details are given inChapter5

From my disease’s danger, and from thee

Acrostics were popular in Akkadian and other Mesopotamiancultures, and among the Greeks and Romans The prophecies ofthe Erythraean... God charged with guarding and increasing the fertility oflivestock and gardens The poem is of a type displayed in gardens.

It is to be read as if spoken by Priapus and it is a threat directedagainst...

So Vesta traceth sol, and did not tarry

Til their united graces they did marry,

Vertues conjoined thus, sol in his heat,

And Vesta in her chast, and plenteous great

Rare