Manu wants his La Buse theory disproved…

Emmanuel Mezino, having misinterpreted my critique (of his book) as in some way overcritical, has left some comments on Cipher Mysteries challenging me to disprove his La Buse theory. Constructing a disproof is often quite hard, but I think that in this case it’s possible if I focus solely on his speculative cryptology (rather than his speculative history, speculative cartography, speculative numerology, etc).

First, I’ll need to summarize Manu’s complicated-sounding reasoning. He argues…
* …that the 17-line copy of the cryptogram (as decrypted by Charles de la Roncière and popularized by Robert Charroux) is a fake, while the 22-line copy of the cryptogram (as revealed for the first time in Manu’s book) is real;
* …that the pigpen cipher key inferred by de la Roncière is only the basis of the cryptogram’s cipher system;
* …that there is an extra first level that involves swapping between dotted and undotted pigpen shapes;
* …that there is an extra second level that involves a Caesar-like +4 substitution shift (i.e. replacing a letter with a letter four steps on within the alphabet) for certain characters;
* …that there is an extra third level that involves treating the two halves of the pigpen alphabet key as if it is some kind of virtual chess board, and then using knight’s moves to make letter substitutions within the alphabet (but again, only for certain letters);
* …that even with this pigpen cipher basis plus these three additional confounding steps, he still can’t make sense of the first 17 lines of the ciphertext, but that the final five lines (of the recently revealed 22-line copy) can be read very clearly;
* …and hence that the only things he draws from the cryptogram are (a) the number 22 (which is important to him, because it is the same number as the number of mysterious stone markings he claims to have found scattered around the North-East part of Réunion, (b) the word “ECU” (which he claims links with the constellation known as the Ecu of Sobieski), and (c) a steganographic star map of the same constellation hidden in plain sight within the cryptogram, formed by linking up all the letter “A”s (in their pigpen form).

Additionally: whereas the original 17-line cryptogram has no connection to La Buse at all beyond mere hearsay, the new 22-line cryptogram has “LA BUSE” clearly added to it (written in the same pigpen cipher), along with a picture of a ship marked “La Vierge du Cap”, a picture of a man being hanged (presumably Olivier Levasseur himself), five additional lines of cipher including the date 1730 (i.e. the year of La Buse’s execution) written in words, and lots of other wonderfully detailed historical pirate-looking stuff all around it.

What is wrong with this reasoning?

For me, there’s a difficult paradox that underlies all of the above: that even though Manu concludes that the original 17-line cipher is uncrackable and unknowable (even with his claimed three stage extra confoundment of a pigpen cipher, he only claims to decrypt a single word “DIFFUS” from the whole of line 17), he simultaneously is content to accept that the new lines 18 to 22 are perfectly readable and reliable.

17: UUNDIFFURQECIEEFURTETLESL
= …DIFFUS…………….
18: UNBONVERREDANSLHOSTELDELEVEQUEDANT
= UN BON VERRE DANS L’HOSTEL DE L’EVEQUE DAN[S]

Were these two lines really made in the same way and at the same time?

For me, the answer is a flat no. If line 18 to 22 were written at the same time as lines 1 to 17, then the same subsequent process – whether of conscious confoundment (as Manu thinks) or of accumulated historical accident (as I suspect) – would have happened to both blocks of text. As such, we would not be in a situation where we can read line 18 but have not the faintest clue about its neighbouring line 17.

Really, from what I can currently see of these two ciphertexts (Manu’s book only includes his transcription of lines 18-22, but not a clear image of these new lines in the ciphertext), I cannot honestly accept that lines 17 and 18 were originally written down at the same time. That is, the final 5-line block looks to my eyes like it was added as an entirely separate (and possibly much later) constructional layer.

It’s therefore an open (and extremely interesting) question whether this second cryptogram is a genuinely old artefact (i.e. a copy of an earlier document that has been extended, though not with sufficient art to make that extension appear seamless) or a modern fake. From my perspective, I don’t think there’s yet quite enough information to make that call: but I hope someone takes it on as a challenge in the future. That, for me, is the central core of the book that I’d have written (but which Manu plainly didn’t, apparently for reasons of “respect”).

All in all, then, Manu’s notion that 22 (the number of lines of the second cryptogram) is somehow important now seems impossible to justify, whether or not you place any trust in numerological arguments (and I personally have never seen one that turned out to be true or useful). And so his subsequent claim that this necessarily links with the 22 stone incisions he found now seems almost certainly wrong.

Given the uncertainty in the confoundment of lines 1 to 17, I also have no confidence at all that all the instances of the letter “A” were letters “A” in the original ciphertext: I also have no confidence that the cryptogram as it has come to us (in either variant) has precisely the same layout as the one that was originally enciphered. As a result, I have no real confidence that Manu’s suggested A-based star map is a reliable guide to anything.

Finally, I also have no confidence that the word “ECU” apparently in the ciphertext was in the original. Manu’s claimed explanation of the 17-line ciphertext as some kind of triply-confounded pigpen (based on what? Has anyone ever made one even remotely like this? I don’t think so) is completely speculative and unhelpful, in that it doesn’t seem to explain a single word. I cannot see that the presence of “ECU” in a string of unreadable French can be a reliable starting point to build an argument about steganographic star maps.