I am trying very hard to find an original version of this cipher with no luck. It almost sounds like this whole thing is a hallucination...? Can anyone point me to a PDF of the original Cyphral Distich as printed?
> Die Lösung müsste eigentlich mit Hilfe des Buches zu finden sein (..who worthily will hear or read this book..)
And there’s another one that says:
> jeweils 32 zahlen pro reihe.
erste zeile seitenzahl
zweite zeile wort?
oder umgekehrt?
wär mir als erstes in den sinn gekommen.
leider gerade keine zeit das nachzuschauen.
So people have seen and proposed the method already in 2014 that it’s keyed to the book but had not had time to pursue a solution.
its not quite the correct method though, the commenter suggests using the first row as a page index, and the second row as the word index, but the actual solution was using both rows as word indices within the 32 paragraphs ("Proquiritations") paired to the 32 numbers in each row
It is actually the correct method but not the correct solution. Nevertheless, the claim is not that this is the correct solution, nor that matters for the point being made.
Thank you, and SahAssar for doing the due diligence here. Like many others, I have at least a passing interest in cryptography, and I'm confident I'd never even heard of this before.
Is it wrong to presume they tried to run a similar prompt on all ciphers that come before this one in search results, and this was the only one that worked?
I also don't find it on the site of "Klaus Schmeh" that it claims to be on a list of "Top 50 unsolved encrypted messages": https://klausschmeh.net/?s=Cyphral
I googled for "cyphral distich" before:2026-08-30, and found barely anything that was relevant. Mostly incorrectly dated pages about this exact thing. In fact, the only instance I can really find is this website, which seems to be an archive of a magazine issue from 1927 https://toebes.com/Flynns/Flynns-19270813.htm (it also has a scan of the original text of the magazine in the top right). This facebook post https://www.facebook.com/groups/2600net/posts/46775529324677... seems to indicate it is found in at least one edition of the book
