Ciphered EuropeStory · Danish folk magic, 19th century
Frørup, 1858: the ciphered grimoire of Kloge Søren
In 1858 a boy of fourteen or fifteen on the island of Funen copies out a “Cyprianus”, a book of charms, conjurations and recipes. He does not write it in ordinary Danish: under headings in clear, almost the whole text is put into an alphabet of signs of his own. The boy, Søren Christensen, would become “Kloge Søren”, the healer of Frørup. We have recovered his key, put it to the test, and publish here what it lets us read.
“Gud sætter sin Stav for Flod, han stiller Vand, men jeg stiller Blod.”
“God sets his staff against the flood, he stops the water, but I stop the blood.” Charm to stop blood, page 004 L (cipher passage, our translation).
What is new, what was known
Known. The book, its writer and its secret writing are mentioned in the Danish encyclopaedia (lex.dk, article “folkemedicin” by Birgitte Rørbye, illustration caption) and in the Royal Library’s record, which says “Størstedelen i lønskrift”: the greater part in secret writing.[1][2] The book has been deciphered once before: the inventory of the collection drawn up in 1977 notes that this volume was “copied and deciphered by Ohrt”, the folklorist Ferdinand Ohrt (1873–1938).[3] We have not seen that copy and do not know whether Ohrt published the text.
What we add, to our knowledge. An independent reading, made without Ohrt’s copy: the key (a simple substitution of about 27 signs), validated by a single measurement fixed in advance on a held-out portion of the book, then confirmed by a table of the alphabet in the writer’s own hand; and the probable text of the hundred or so charms, published in full on the Documents page. The reading remains partial: 94.41% of the words of the held-out portion, 95.1% over the whole book as an indication.
The book and its writer
The volume is kept in Copenhagen at the Royal Library (Det Kgl. Bibliotek), in the Dansk Folkemindesamling, the Danish folklore archives, as DFS 1997/020. The library’s record describes it as 90 leaves in one volume, in Danish, by Søren Christensen (16 July 1843 – 21 October 1925), place of origin Krarup, date 1858. The title, copied in the record, reads “Et Ulæg af 9de, 10de og 11te Bøger i Cyprianus. Nyttige Kunststykker og Begreber skrevet af S. Christensen… 1858”: an extract from the ninth, tenth and eleventh books of a Cyprianus, “useful tricks and chapters”, written by S. Christensen. The binding is a dark blue octavo with a pocket holding six loose slips with formulas.[2]
In Scandinavia, “Cyprianus” is the name of the handwritten “black books”, collections of charms and recipes placed under the name of Saint Cyprian. This one is a teenager’s work: born in July 1843, Søren Christensen was fourteen or fifteen in 1858. The lex.dk caption says he came from Frørup and that “already as a boy, in 1858” he composed this Cyprianus, “all of it in his secret code”.[1] He later became a healer known as “Kloge Søren”, Søren the wise; his patient diaries, 1896 to 1925, are in the same collection.[3] The collection, “manuscripts and books from Petra Mosegaard”, was handed to the archivist Gustav Henningsen at Krarup on 28 May 1977 for registration; it bears the number 1997/020.[3]
We do not know whether the whole book was written in 1858 or completed later: the date appears only in the title. The cipher text runs from image 003 to image 079; then come blank pages and the binding. A loose leaf (image 098) carries a charm in the same signs, in two copies; another (104) a circular seal that we have not read.
The cipher
The system is a simple substitution: each letter of the Danish alphabet has its sign, and the spaces between words are kept. The signs are made of a few elements: a chevron, bars, strokes, hooks, a cross, an arch, and above all dots, whose number and place tell the letters apart.
- The number of dots. A bar under one dot is u, under two dots n, under three dots m; the bare chevron is a, the dotted chevron e.
- The place of the dots. A stroke with one dot to the right is b; with two dots to the right, h; with two dots above, k; a straight dotted stroke is s; a stroke between two opposite dots, c.
- Shared signs. The same cross serves for t and f; i and j, o and ø are often merged. These are not decoys: the writer follows the usage of his time or simplifies.
- Ligatures. Two linked chevrons stand for aa; other signs for tt, nn or mm.
The cipher is plain and regular. It does not hide the shape of words: lengths, spaces and repeated words stay visible. That is what allowed it to be broken.
The alphabet table, in the writer’s hand
At the end of the volume, on a page left almost empty (image 091, left page), the writer ruled lines in pencil, then wrote his alphabet in ink: one sign per letter, in Danish alphabetical order, without the letters in clear. We found it only after the key had been validated. The nineteen values already measured all fall into place, and the table specifies five more letters (q, s, z, æ, ø), among them z, until then missing from our key. A second form of g is written above the first, probably by a later user. The table below describes the signs in words; it does not reproduce the image.
| letter | sign (description) |
|---|---|
| a | chevron (∧) |
| b | stroke, one dot to the right |
| c | stroke between two opposite dots |
| d | hook shaped like ν |
| e | chevron preceded by a dot |
| f | cross (†), the same as t |
| g | long hook (ʃ); a second form added above |
| h | stroke, two dots to the right |
| i | curved dotted hook |
| k | stroke, two dots above |
| l | stroke with a foot, like L |
| m | bar under three dots |
| n | bar under two dots |
| o | large dot over small dot |
| p | stroke above a dot (!) |
| q | dotted “#” |
| r | hook shaped like “?” |
| s | straight dotted stroke |
| t | cross (†) |
| u | bar under one dot |
| v | arch (Ω) |
| x | X-shaped cross |
| y | long hook with two dots |
| z | dotted hook shaped like “7” |
| æ | “4” with two dots |
| ø | two dotted strokes over a large dot |
The third line of the table (x, y, z, æ, ø) is read from alphabetical order; the assignment of its five signs is a reasonable hypothesis, not a certainty. The collection holds other keys: the 1977 inventory mentions a “table solving the code” in another medical book and a leaf with a code and its alphabetical solution.[3] We have not seen them and do not know whether they concern this cipher.
What the charms say
The book holds about a hundred charms and recipes, arranged in “Begreb” (chapters) numbered in cipher from 1 to 23. Each has a heading in clear, a formula, often directions for use, and closes with “I Navnet Gud Fader, Gud Søn og Gud den Hellige Aand. Amen”. The formulas follow a few models: a sacred precedent (“as surely as…”), an impossible condition, a little story in which Christ, Mary, Job or Saint Peter meet the evil. These are types known from the collections of Danish charms; we have not compared them formula by formula with Ohrt’s edition.[4] The quotations below are given as read, in the writer’s spelling; brackets mark a corrected form or a restored letter; the translations are ours.
Healing
- Blood. Several charms open the book: the lance that pierced Christ’s side, the staff set against the flood (quoted at the head of this story), and the impossible condition: “Aldrig skal dette bylne eller blode mere, førend Jomfru Maria føder en Søn til Verden”, never shall this swell or bleed again, until the Virgin Mary brings a son into the world (004 R; the word “Søn” is doubtful).
- Toothache, blamed on a worm: “O du Orm som æder dette Menneskes Kjød og drikker dette Menneskes Blod”, O worm that eats this person’s flesh and drinks this person’s blood, you shall die this night (009 L); the words are written on a slip hung on the patient’s breast.
- Difficult childbirth: “O Jomfru Mar[i]a Laan mig Nøglene dine at jeg maa aabne Lenderne [Lænderne] mine”, O Virgin Mary, lend me your keys, that I may open my loins (012 R).
- Swollen glands, at the waxing moon, on a high place, turning to the four quarters: “Hvad jeg seer tag til og hvad jeg gnider tag af”, what I see, may it grow; what I rub, may it wane (013 R).
- And fever, chilblains, warts, colic, “mother sickness”, rickets, bed-wetting, consumption, gout, a horse’s spavin, with apothecary’s recipes priced in skillings (asafoetida, castoreum, musk, camomile).
Protecting the farm
- Against witchcraft on cattle, poultry, and butter that will not come: fumigations with nine kinds of wood, slips placed under the bottom of the vats, paper cones driven into the stable threshold.
- Pests summoned to court: “Gudag [Goddag] I skadelige Kreaturer jeg skal helse [hilse] derfra Landstinget at I vige bort herfra”, good day, you harmful creatures, I greet you from the Landsting: leave this place; otherwise “I møder førstkommende Tirsdag paa Tinget”, you shall appear next Tuesday at the Thing (025 R, against cabbage caterpillars). The directions ask one to be properly dressed, hat and staff, and to take off one’s hat before the cabbage. Rats and mice are likewise sent away to the Jordan, “where Saint John baptised Christ” (026 R – 027 L).
- Fire: “Jeg saae Ild optændes og i Luften høit at brænde. Jomfru Maria slog sin Kabbe [Kappe] paa Verden”, I saw a fire kindled and burning high in the air; the Virgin Mary cast her cloak over the world (031 L); elsewhere, the SATOR square written on a plate thrown into the fire (058 R).
Weapons, thieves, luck
- The gun bound or loosed: “Bøsse, hold dit Skud lige, saa reent som Jomfru Maria holdt sin Jomfrudom i sig”, gun, hold your shot, as pure as Mary kept her virginity (030); slips to be worn “on the breast in time of war” to be proof against shot and blades.
- A long series against thieves (images 031 to 048): to hold one on the spot, force him to bring back what he took, punish him. We summarise it without copying the formulas: rituals on Thursday evening or Sunday morning, Lord’s Prayers said towards the four quarters, coffin nails, long adjurations.
- Winning at cards with a bat’s heart tied to the finger (058 L); an amulet “from the Jewish Talmud” against evil people, telling the legend of Lilith pursued by three angels (072 L – 073 L).
A hypothesis: what the cipher protected was less the formulas, often well known, than the directions for use: on Thursday evening after sunset, “stiltiende”, in silence, three times, walking backwards, with water drawn against the stream or earth from a churchyard. The numbering betrays a compiled collection: the 23rd Begreb appears twice (031 R and 036 L), the 24th never, and no number is written after page 036.
How we read it
- Probable words. The instruction “3 gange” (three times), which recurs in the margin of many charms; the trinitarian closing formula, repeated after every charm; the cipher headings with ordinals (“Andet Begreb”, “Tredie Begreb”). These gave the first values.
- A blind check. On the training pages (003 R – 007 L, 1,591 signs), a simulated annealing with no other information than the spaces and Danish statistics found the text “saa sandt … dette blod ei mere flyde i navnet gud fader … amen” by itself.
- A single measurement, fixed in advance. The key and the scoring rule were frozen and hashed on 11 November 2026 at 15:01. Images 030 and 031, never looked at until then, were transcribed and hashed before any decoding (790 signs). Measured once, the key gives a lexical cover of 0.4025 against a threshold of 0.40, met narrowly, against at best 0.1089 for 200 permuted keys and 0.1038 for 200 shuffles of the signs: key validated. Declared bias: these two images were transcribed by an agent who already knew the key.
- Reading the rest. The other 136 cipher pages were read at full resolution by sixteen AI agents, one sheet per page, with the class of every word (certain, probable, restored, unresolved) and the list of doubtful shapes.
- Brice Dudout’s blind re-reading. Sheets of thumbnails, with no reading shown, ask which shape is seen; two control questions with known answers validate each sheet. Sheet K1 (28 questions, on the held-out portion) took that portion from 96.1% down to 94.41%; a randomly drawn sheet (K2) was abandoned before it was shown; the targeted sheet K3 (9 signs and 2 controls) took the whole book from 95.2% to 95.1%. The integration rules were hashed before each sheet.
What remains uncertain
- A partial reading. Under Daniel Bourdeau’s rule (95% of words read for sense, restored words not counted), the held-out portion reads at 94.41% (133 certain, 36 probable, 1 restored, 9 unresolved out of 179 words): under the threshold. Over the 148 pages, 6,866 certain, 797 probable, 77 restored and 315 unresolved words out of 8,055, i.e. 95.1%: an indicative figure only, since the second session was checked blind on nine signs only.
- Gaps, flagged. Nine pages at the beginning (003 R – 008 L) were read at low resolution only (90.6%); page 064 L, a stained list of conjuration names, reads at only 61.4%, page 010 R at 77.2%. The circular seals (018 R, 019 R, leaf 104) are not read. A few rare signs (a chevron with a foot, a loop on a bar) remain to be settled.
- Prior work incomplete. The copy deciphered by Ohrt, recorded in the 1977 inventory, has not been consulted; we do not know whether its text was published, nor whether it agrees with ours. Birgitte Rørbye’s Kloge folk og skidtfolk (1976), which deals with healers and Cypriani, has not been consulted either.[5]
- The readers. Transcription and reading are by AI agents; Brice Dudout re-read the selected doubtful shapes blind, but no second human reader has gone over the text. The English translations and summaries are ours. No image of the manuscript is reproduced here: it can be seen on the Royal Library’s site.
References
Birgitte Rørbye, “folkemedicin”, Den Store Danske, lex.dk, illustration caption on Kloge Søren (Gyldendal). lex.dk ↗
Copenhagen, Det Kgl. Bibliotek, Dansk Folkemindesamling, DFS 1997/020, “‘Kloge Sørens’ Cyprianus”, 1858, 90 leaves; record and images on Digitale samlinger. Digitale samlinger ↗
Inventory of “Kloge Sørens samling. Manuskripter og bøger fra Petra Mosegaard”, by G. Henningsen (1977), quoted by Hans Nørgaard, comment of 6 November 2008 on “‘Slæbækdoktoren’ og andre fynske benbrudslæger”, fynhistorie.dk; no. 4: “Afskrevet og tydet af Ohrt. = kop 79.4”. fynhistorie.dk ↗
F. Ohrt, Danmarks Trylleformler, I–II, Copenhagen, 1917–1921 (not compared formula by formula).
Birgitte Rørbye, Kloge folk og skidtfolk. Kvaksalveriets epoke i Danmark, 1976.
Daniel Bourdeau, catalogue of unread ciphers (cyphersolver repository), no. 2525; our contribution: PR #419 ↗.
Record “The ciphered Cyprianus of Kloge Søren” on the Documents page, with the probable text, the counts and the credits.