Can you decode/decipher this weird book? Antichthon Universalis by Ángel Ortega

I came across this coded book today and was hoping some of the "boffins" here on ATS can perhaps help shed some light or give insights into this very crazy and weird book.

Antichthon Universalis

Ángel Ortega's web site dedicated to this book

Foreword to Antichthon Universalis

(Note: this is the prologue included in the printed book)

First time I heard about Antichthon Universalis was in the summer of 2010, in an email from my friend Pavel Kolsinski. On it he told me about a newly discovered document, seemingly received from an anonymous source by a semiotic professor at the University of Salamanca which also prefers to remain anonymous. All the secrecy involved, though certainly suspicious of forgery, called for my immediate attention.

Before having the document in my hands, my friend Pavel described it very well: it’s a rather short text, initially thought to be handwritten (but almost immediately after demonstrated to be an electronically-generated document) written in an unknown script and illustrated with bizarrely looking pictures. The text is some kind of encyclopedia for a strange world. This conclusion has been inferred from the very structure of the book, as no word of it has been translated yet.

When the document arrived to me, I fully agreed with my friend’s description. It surely lacks interest for those initiated in famous cryptograms, but it’s something curious to look at. After being asked what could be done with it, Pavel told me that the source had given to him full rights on the publication of the document; he immediately bounced these rights to me, and that’s why I’m the editor.

The name of the book, given by Pavel himself, comes from one of the illustrations found in the first pages, showing a rather symbolic diagram of what seems to be a central solar system with two planets orbiting in completely opposite positions, not unlike some ancient representations of what the philosopher Philolaus thought to be the Counter-Earth (or, in greek, Antichthon), a twin planet for our Earth that was always behind the Sun (so, obviously, invisible to us). In the illustration, the planet with the small crescent Moon is assumed to be Earth, and the other, more remarked, the object of the text. I wasn’t sure if the Universalis part in the title is grammatically correct and suggested Encyclopedia or Tractatus, but Pavel preferred the original name and I kept it.

As said above, the book seems to be structured (based in the nature of the illustrations) in a very similar way to other universal treatises with common sections about cosmogony, fauna, flora and geography. It contains no recognizable page numbers, titles, headings nor punctuation. The text is structured in paragraphs and seems to flow from left to right and from top to bottom.

The script resembles the characters used in the Rohonc Codex and the glyphs are separated from each other, with no visible ligatures between them nor joined characters, as in oriental scripting systems like Chinese or Hangul (Pavel has seen similarities to these Korean symbols in some of the glyphs). There are a total of 34 different characters (not counting the blanks between them), all uniformly spared and with a similar statistic ratio, giving the hint that it’s more like an encoding than an alphabet or syllabary. Anyway, I’m no language expert and cannot give a definitive answer to this.

The book has been edited in an almost facsimile way to help experiencing it as I did on first arrive. I added page numbers to easily annotate or reference it. Apart from this, no additional modification was done to the original.

It has been said that this text is a joke or game (like the Codex Seraphinianus) or a perverse mischief (like the Oera Linda) forged by somebody with too much time. My opinion is that the script itself is not intrinsically artistic in any way, so it should contain a hidden message using some kind of coding system. Given that the illustrations are rather simple and crudely drawn, and expecting that the writer and the illustrator are the same individual, I guess the algorithm to decrypt the text won’t be too difficult to crack by an average amateur (I’m also no cryptology specialist in any way, so maybe I’m mistaken). There is nothing more to be said about this document. Just in case someone finds a way to decode it or wants to add any light to this little mystery, please email Pavel Kolsinski ([email protected]) or me ([email protected]).

Ángel Ortega, summer of 2010

reply to post by Falcifer


Interesting.....quite different to the voynich manuscript but will have a look during the day at the website

reply to post by Falcifer


From page 55 of the pdf file that you provided a link to

Everything shown or told in this book,
including this paragraph, can be considered
from pure invention to patent lie. Pavel
Kolsinski and Ángel Ortega are fictional
characters as well.
Composed during the summer of 2010.

reply to post by Falcifer

Everything shown or told in this book,
including this paragraph, can be considered
from pure invention to patent lie. Pavel
Kolsinski and Ángel Ortega are fictional
characters as well.
Composed during the summer of 2010.

The final page.

Thank you for sharing. It is a truly brilliant parody of the Voynich Manuscript. I loved the Lovecraftian allusions as well. I literally laughed out loud at some of them.

It looks like a relic book you would get in World of Warcraft.

I gotta call fun-fake on this one.

Wow cool book even if it doesn't say anything. anyone have any ideas on what the purpose of this book is?

It's clearly an attempt at a humorous pardy of the Voynich Manuscript.

There is nothing "occult" about this whatsoever, sorry.

reply to post by brizellious


Exactly this is what is so strange to me. Why would somebody go to all the bother to do something like this?

But still, I suppose it could be fun to figure out what they tried to convey no?

The remarks so far is really good and I am impressed at the ability of the ATS people so see a hoax a mile away! Very well done! I certainly have much to learn...

Yea i don't believe anyone would dedicate this much of there time to write a book full of symbols that relate to nothing. If anything it would be special to you and you would write something even if its meaningless it would still mean something to you. The writer is obviously a fan of cyphers and therefore there must be something hidden in the text. If you look through the pages you can see symbols appear in doubles or in an arrangement like 'ere' common occurrences in the English language. But who knows i could be clutching at straws.

reply to post by brizellious


If you wish to dedicate your time to looking into it further then perhaps this site will assist you in finding out which of the sigils are real and which have been created by the author.
I can tell you there are real occult symbols, plus the odd Greek letter used (in their incorrect context), along with ones seemingly originally created by the artist.

In my opinion the sigils/writings are random and mean nothing. There is the possibility that they mean something specific to the person who drew them, but this is very much a modern work and as such, doesn not hold up very well to scrutiny I'm afraid.

As an artist myself amongst other things, I have to say that I too have drawn similar in my time, merely to sate boredom, so there does not always have to be a clear purpose for such things.

reply to post by OptimisticPessimist

If you wish to dedicate your time to looking into it further then perhaps this site will assist you in finding out which of the sigils are real and which have been created by the author.
I can tell you there are real occult symbols, plus the odd Greek letter used (in their incorrect context), along with ones seemingly originally created by the artist.

The font was probably downloaded from this site. The text might simply have been generated by running fingers up and down the keyboard at random. The cartoons are the point of the thing, and they're very well done.

Everything shown or told in this book,
including this paragraph, can be considered
from pure invention to patent lie. Pavel
Kolsinski and Ángel Ortega are fictional
characters as well.
Composed during the summer of 2010.

triptico.com...


You made me read it, please proof it atleast

first paragraph

V W H R V H J W I Q K 3 E T K 6 I N 5 R
R 7 7 Q I E 5 T L 4 A K I : U 7 R V 7 A I
I : N H T S C A H : Q 4 O K L 4 A C I : U O
T ; L O J N G Q O T ; L H J : Z Q H E 6 R O
A U I 3 3 D K 7 7 N G C 3 R S 7 7 G I 2
3 R E 7 7 N G Z 6 R V P ; Z L G Y 6 K L
N A Z I N H D X S Z ; G

2nd

C O K N C 2 X F I B : M D F 2 V 4 I V F
N E E W A L V F S 4 P W G Y M M D B 6
G 4 C L H : N Q J A 4 Y O K D C : E W X Y
; O M H B E : W K L A : M H E E : W F I 3
V H E 2
V 4 L R
H S 4 T
W E I K
: M D D
V J Y Y
O ; F H
B : E W Z
I Q M 5
E U W R
; A G C :
N 2 U J N I 3 V 5 D V G Y B A W D 6 2
X K Y 3 H D S T W ; R L O 2 F 4 T W E I
K : M D 6 T W E I 3 V S 4 T W H L R H S
4 T P Z ; Y G N D E E : W K L A : M H E E :
W X L A H : H C P W B B A : H D 6 T A 4 I
G F : M K P X A L 3 F N E E W G Y I M D

It is either an elaborate code or a bunch of gibberish meant to look like it has structure.

I guess what we can "take home" with this is the fact that even though something is written and well thought out does not mean there is any meaning or truth behind it.

I certainly have learned this lesson and will continue to have an open mind but will be much more critical in future of "truths".

Many thanks to all who have given their feedback, you are all great!

I will give it more time latter but now it is looking like it might be a simple code like every "T"=A. Im just going to assume it is in english. E is the most common letter so find all of those then T then A then O.After a while it will just start to make sense. At the end it tells you how many times any symbol was used so it makes it a lot easier.

Its a cryptogram almost there first paragraph

MBYE MY JBTXS3CKS6 TH5E E77XTC5K W4AS T:R7EM7ATT:HYKPVAY:X4FS W4AVT:RFK;WFJHIXFK;WYJ:LXYC6E FAR T33O S77HIV3E P77IT23E C77HIL6EMN;LWIG6S WHALTH YOU PL;I

reply to post by Darkk


You are as tenacious as my bull terrier!

My hat off to you.

Im leaning towards hoax im still going to work on this but it is just a variation of a wingding font. Sometimes those fonts can say some pretty funny things
NYC in wingding



But it may be a possibility that the author was using leet speak for some parts in an effore to throw people off
1337 ||00|3

editby]edit on 31-3-2011 by Darkk because: (no reason given)