The oculist's secret society

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The Copiale document comprises 75,000 characters written on 105 pages of high-quality double-watermarked paper which are bound in gold and green brocade paper. It was found in the archive of the East Berlin Academy, which later merged with the West Berlin Academy to become the Academy of Arts, Berlin. Analysis of the paper has dated the document to around 1760-80, although Andreas Önnerfors, an historian at Lund University, Sweden, and an expert on secret societies, proposes the 1740s, based on the handwriting style. Aside from 'Copiales 3' the only other plaintext is 'Philipp 1866' on the flyleaf; otherwise the text is a cipher created from 90 distinct symbols, a mixture of Greek and Roman letters and abstract pictograms. There is no word-spacing, and there are no chapter breaks or illustrations; but paragraphs are indented.