Mormons, Masons, and Mario…?
Ex-Mormon Mike Reed became interested in a lightly-enciphered entry in Mormon founder Brigham Young’s diary (dated 6th January 1842)… and wondered to himself whether Young was actually using a Masonic “Royal Arch cipher” (basically, a kind of pigpen cipher).
Well… after a bit of online bantering with an LDS (“Latter Day Saints”) apologist, the answer turned out to be: basically yes, Young was. Amusingly, the apologist also cited a Royal Arch cipher as per p.42 of “A Big Color Activity Book: Nintendo Super Mario Bros.” (1989), as used by his 9-year-old son – and I couldn’t miss the once-in-a-lifetime chance to segue from Mormons to Masons to Mario. 
Apart from the large number of pictures, what I liked most about Mike’s post (and which I’m sure Tony Gaffney would appreciate too) was keeping track of the proportion of errors made while enciphering – adding or dropping dots, reversing shapes, etc. Enjoy!
December 9th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
Having sharpened my crayons I was very disappointed not to find the ‘Big Colour Activity Book’ –
boo hoo
December 10th, 2009 at 3:32 am
Hi Nick! I like the tablet comparing the Masonic cipher characters to Hebrew letters. I think it’s kinda cool! I may post this to a Jewish ng I occasionally post to.
You know what would really be interesting? If a cipher entry from Young’s diary revealed that Smith and Young had taken a page from what Dee and Kelly did with their spouses. And Smith and Dee had so many more possible variations!
Me and my filthy mind…
Dennis