The Naibbe cipher was amazing, and it made me think of a late night party I went to
addekallstrom > 28-09-2025, 09:22 AM
I watched the Voynich Day on youtube and the Naibbe cipher presentation was amazing. And it reminded me of a small party I went to with my best friends some years ago.
As the party was winding down towards the wee hours, I turned and suddenly saw friend 1 sitting at a table with a normal deck of 52 cards, and friend 2 sitting opposite, with X friends around them.
Friend 1 was asking questions like: "How many sibilings do you have?" Friend 2 would say: "3" and then Friend 1 would count 3 cards and put the 4th down face up. Then he would ask: "How many boyfriends have you had?" And Friend 2 would say: "2" and friend 1 would count 2 cards and put the 3rd face up. You get the picture: random questions to force out random numbers which held some significance to friend 2.
When Friend 1 had amassed ca 8-10 cards, he then grouped them together and started to interpret them. "The Ace of clubs mean that you will have a big house"; "the 4 of clubs means that you will have a hard time finding your first job but that your 3rd job will be amazing."
All of this was, of course, in good spirits and between friends and it was a grand old time.
Anyways, it was the only time I ever really saw someone interpret cards and the future etc., and I sort of stored it away as a cute memory with my friends.
Until the Naibbe cipher brought it all back!
It looked exactly the same! It literally looked exactly the same to me. As if someone had a text, presumably of arcane nature, and then had some sort of esoteric way of picking cards at random to inscribe the text.
I'm sure others have noticed it to, but it really, really made me feel like this could be an extremely good explanation to the why question: it was a way to read tea-leaves, so to speak. It was a divine way to write a book; you take your text, whether that is the Bible or medicine or local folk myth or whatever you have, you create ~15 characters only you can read, and then you let random chance, i.e. God, encode the text for you.