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Journalism of Courage
In J K Rowling’s latest novel, The Hallmarked Man, the eighth in her popular detective series written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, the sleuth, Cormoran Strike, is confronted with an ancient puzzle disguised as a modern mystery. “There is a cipher in the book that Strike needs to decrypt,” Rowling said in a teaser. “Pigpen cipher is pretty easy to break if you know the trick of it, because it is a simple substitution cipher. You’ve got one symbol per letter. It’s also known as the Freemason’s cipher, and I can’t say much more than that, at the moment.”
That cipher, the Pigpen, is one of history’s most visually distinctive codes. Instead of rearranging letters, it disguises them in grids and X-shaped patterns, sometimes dotted, producing symbols that look like a secret language.
The origins of Pigpen are difficult to pin down. Some accounts suggest early use by rabbis encoding Hebrew texts. By 1531, it appeared in print in Three Books Concerning Occult Philosophy by the German polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa. The cipher endured across Europe, surfacing in political revolutions and eventually in the 18th century, where it was embraced by Freemasons – members of one of the oldest secular fraternal organisations originating from medieval stonemasons’ guilds around the 14th and 15th centuries – that it is still most commonly known as the Freemason’s Cipher.
Across the Atlantic, British forces used versions of Pigpen during the American Revolution, proof of its enduring appeal as a practical, though not unbreakable, method of disguise.
The Caesar cipher named after Julius Caesar employs a straightforward alphabet shift. Suetonius, his biographer, describes how Caesar habitually advanced each letter by four spaces, making “D” stand for “A.” Caesar even dispatched one letter to Cicero in Greek rather than Latin, in case it was intercepted. The message was tied to a spear and hurled into Cicero’s besieged camp, where it remained stuck in a tower wall for two days before discovery.
Like Caesar’s code, Pigpen is simple once understood. Its power lies less in its mathematical security than the thrill of seeing words transformed into symbols and knowing there is a key only the initiated can unlock.
For Cormoran Strike, the Pigpen Cipher is just another problem to solve. For readers, it is an invitation to join a much older game, one in which secrecy is as much about drama and symbolism as it is about security.
