Given that his skill as a bard is already well-known, is
William Shakespeare also a skilled cryptographer?
By: Ringo Bones
This so-called “new way” of looking at Shakespeare’s Folio
and Sonnets as a cryptographic device was absolutely newfangled to me after it
was mentioned in an episode of the History Channel’s The Curse of Oak Island
and thus familiarizing the rest of the world with Petter Amundsen’s new way of
looking at Shakespeare’s works as a secret treasure map. To most grade-school
pupils in the early 1980s – Shakespeare was usually synonymous with one of the “most
boring” aspects of the English language ever taught in school. It was just too
bad that a swashbuckling and Knights Templar treasure related aspect of
Shakespeare was relatively unknown to grade-school kids at the time.
Petter Amundsen’s day-job is a church pipe organist and
while he admits that his maybe a strange profession for someone writing a book
about hidden treasure. Amundsen remarks that his training as an organist is
similar to that of a symbologist – as it includes learning about languages and
symbols.
Amundsen’s initial experience with Shakespeare during his
formative years didn’t impress him, as with most boys elsewhere in the world
with “swashbuckling daydreams” during their mundane seventh-grade Shakespeare
class. Later in life, Amundsen came across a story about a cipher on William
Shakespeare’s gravestone while investigating stocks and future’s markets
online. Amundsen became so fascinated with the subject of cryptographic aspects
of Shakespeare’s literary works that he dropped his pursuit of stocks and
futures investing to pursue the Shakespeare cipher angle. Amundsen bought a
facsimile of Shakespeare’s original Folio of thirty-six plays and when he began
looking for cryptic patterns, he found several, not only in the original folio
of thirty-six plays but also in the original collection of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
which translated to a celestial map that could correlate with locations on the
ground.
The pattern Amundsen found is a square and compass celestial
pattern that mimics some aspects of some secret societies – such as those of
the Freemasons – and he then mentioned features that locked in a source point on
the map, such as the star Deneb. Amundsen then went on to say that if the
original zero meridian of Shakespeare’s day – i.e. around the reign of Queen
Elizabeth I – one which ran through west of the Canary Islands – rather than
the modern-day meridian located on Greenwich, that celestial point corresponds
to the coast of modern day Nova Scotia on Oak Island itself.
Amundsen noted that the Rosicrucians probably had a hand in the
publication of Shakespeare’s portfolio and notes that the Rosicrucians created
patterns in their own publications of the day and invited people to search for
these. So for Rosicrucians to place patterns in Shakespeare’s work wouldn’t be
far-fetched. Amundsen also theorizes that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of all
of his plays, acting more like a “front-man” for the speculated actual three
authors of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, pointing out that the children
of the man called William Shakespeare were illiterate – something that would be
highly unusual for someone who virtually was credited for codifying the modern
English language.
