At the turn of February I was reading Focault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Something in the way they were building a puzzle of sorts reminded me of the Cicada 3301 puzzles my friends had shown me last fall on YouTube. I decided to see if there was any news of a new puzzle, and found a link to this image: http://popfilesxuru7lsr.onion/~truth7/7111317192329.png You'll need to use the Tor Browser to access it. I used to play cryptograph puzzles as a teenager and had some fun pulling a phrase out of the Morse Code:
A New species is emerging. Evolution is no longer guided by survival.
The Future is ours to choose and the singularity approaching.
Myriad Choices will me made, and utopia will usurp the world,
as neurons designed into something new.
Then I came across a forum, where I found a link to the starting image for the puzzle which had this clue:
A Fludd approaches.
Chart the stars.A Chord of would WARMS My I
Opening the file in a word program provided a geographical coordinate and a link to the image I had came upon first.
The coordinate according to the forum goers was a payphone that had been removed from the Mojave Desert. (I couldn't help but think of the Mojave Wasteland of Fallout). The wikipedia for it listed an old phone number that allows for group chats, I hate being on the phone, so I decided to allow myself the ease of catching up with their help. There were tones and a list of numbers, which someone else decoded as:
FLUDD KILLS ALL BUT ROOTS
WOLVES ARE FOXES FOXES ARE RAVENS THE HUNT DRAWS NEAR THOSE WHO CLAEM GOD HOOD SHOULD BE STRUCK DOWN BY
THOSE DEEMED ORC WHEN KINGS RISE TRUMPETS WILL PLAY THE WORLD IS NOT YET FLOODED KEEP HUNTING 3301
I have a feeling there are a couple errors here, but I have yet to go back and decode the numbers myself. Another person suggested the tones meant something, and until I came across a youtube video that may or may not have been relevent and recent it showed a tonal code that through music software came out as: THE TRUTH IS LOST. FIND IT.
I don't remember how I landed on the countdown page, it was the title of the png dot come. That title was 7 prime numbers in a row starting at 7: 7111317192329. Being fond prime numbers this enthralled me. The countdown page was counting backwards from January 25th when I found it, and skimming the forum I used to dig into the initial puzzle they had all started before hand and theorized a time sensitive puzzle. Though the date January 25th may be important. Another user posted size details of an image that seemed to encode March 13, 2017 and the prime series 29 19 79 89 that came from multiplying the height and width in US inches.
So from all these clues I went on an exploration. Fludd designed and created a monochord instrument that is a physical representation of the harmonics of number, and the numbers of harmonics. Myriad is a company that creates programs which create and read music. I'm guessing this is how the YouTube person decoded the tones. Chart the stars at this point didn't correlate to anything I'd found yet.
I then searched for Wolf, Fox, Raven and found this folktale: http://members.home.nl/marcmarti/yugur/folktale/tale12a.htm
In it the Wolf is said to be the first brother, the Fox the second and the Raven the third. If we assign each of these numbers to the clue it then states: one is two, two is three.
Searching for this phrase I found the Axiom of Maria: is a precept in alchemy: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth."
I also love alchemy, so I read up on this axiom, which got me reading Jung's take on it, which led me on a tangent of self guided study. I enjoy the inspiration it brings to research and to find associations even if they aren't the ones I was supposed to find, especially if they aren't the ones I was supposed to find. I was making my own "plan", exploring possibilities. When I came back to the puzzle I realized that the wheel in the eye of the skull must relate to Chart the Stars, and the key lodged in the png must unlock some encoded message somewhere.
While I love math and puzzles, I'm not very well versed in encryption or privacy, my study of computer coded went as far as early 2000's HTML and then I shifted gears to studying art. I felt that perhaps this was going to be my wall when it came to the Cicada puzzles, and perhaps part of the reason they put them out. To push us to learn about online privacy and anonymity. So I decided I'd look into some of these processes like PGP and TSSL.
Wanting to take a break from puzzle chasing I returned to my book. Two pages in the characters began discussing Robert Fludd. I laughed at the synchronicity. The macrocosm and microcosm reflect each other. Something proclaimed by gnostics everywhere; as above, so below. I finished the novel, finding multiple more references to Fludd. I wondered about his unpublished work, and about references to him made by Pierre Grassendi which was not published widely. The book often returned to the idea of the fixed point which all revolves around that the pendulum shows us. I think that fixed point is where we move both inward to, and outward toward when we meditate. It's that well from which divine inspiration comes to the artist. Everything is connected, and all is number.
