Johann Bessler’s (Orffyreus) School of Wisdom.

There is much discussion on the BWF, about the Rosicrucian codes which Øystein and others have found embedded within many of the drawings in Maschinen Tractate.  There has also been some revelations about Euclid’s geometry.  I’m no expert in these matters and certainly the evidence of their presence is persuasive, but I do not see how they will assist us to reach the solution that Bessler found and which might reveal the design inside his wheel.

Bearing in mind the fact that it was Bessler’s intention, should he acquire the money he sought from the sale his Perpetual Motion machine, to establish a School of Wisdom, supported by non-denominational Christian teaching, such arcane clues seem irrelevant.  He aspired to train apprentices in many of the crafts skills he had acquired during his wandering years.

The term, School of Wisdom, always seemed to me to be a misnomer as it was in reality a school designed to teach a trade to aid young men to provide for themselves and their families.  However for the first time I googled the words School of Wisdom, and was surprised to find a number of references linking modern spiritual, intellectual and also historical association including the Illuminati, the Masons, the Royal Society, Euclidean geometry and of course the Rosicrucians. Prague and Bohemia are mentioned several times. This seems to link with Bessler’s home town which was within the borders of Bohemia and of course he did spend some time in Prague studying with both a Jesuit priest as well as a Rabbi. 

So what ever meaning we can attribute to  Bessler’s School of Wisdom, it seems possible that there were two activities being considered; firstly the education of the apprentices in their trades, and secondly perhaps the sharing of knowledge through the use of the Maschinen Tractate about the existence of an older knowledge combining Masonic and Rosicrucian thought with those Bessler believed might benefit.

Bessler also mentioned that the rabbi taught him Hebrew and there are some handwritten examples present in his papers, but also he claimed knowledge of “the language of Angels”, a subject that has a more controversial history.  It was known as “Enochian” and was apparently first recorded by Dr John Dee, in collaboration with Edward Kelley, a spirit medium.  Years of respearch and many attempts to prove the language was invented by either Dee or Kelley, have not proved entirely conclusive, although the suspicion remains that one or both did create it.  They both visited  Prague and endeavoured to obtain the benefits of the friendship of the emperor Rudolph of Prague.

These visitors left a lasting impression on the city of Prague and it may be that Bessler’s reference to language of angels is linked to John Dee’s “Enochian” texts.

Finally I should point out that Dee was lecturing on  the geometry of Euclid at the University of Paris while still in his twenties.  He was an ardent promoter of mathematics and a respected astronomer, as well as a leading expert on navigation, having trained many of those who would conduct England's voyages of discovery.  He seems to have been a genuine polymath but they can still be fooled by a convincing hustler?

So perhaps Bessler left behind him two skeins of thought; firstly the secret of his perpetual motion machine’s construction, and secondly a number of clues relating to these secret societies.  But for the latter, to what end?  Was it just to declare his knowledge of these esoteric matters or did he invite attention from others who might have progressed further along the path of “wisdom”?

JC

Code Embedded in Chapter 55 of Bessler's Apologia Poetica

I note the current interest in the Mascinen Tractate codes and I am interested in the discussion as but also slightly puzzled as the they were bnever published. I published my own thoughts on the code in Chapter 55 of Apologia Poetica on my web site at www.orffyreus.net, but my explanation was very long and detailed and it had a few transcription errors which appeared after publication, so here is a much abbreviated explanation.

Chapter 55 was designed to be the last chapter in Apologia Poetica originally, but Bessler added part two to provide space to argue against the accusations of his enemies.  Every one must be familiar with the ubiquity of the number 55 in Bessler's works so we can assume it was important in Bessler's eyes, so chapter 55 had a purpose beyond its declaration of faith.

The whole book is written according to the AABB rhyming scheme, the first line rhyming with the second line - rhyming couplets. However part of the way into chapter 55, the rhyming changes to ABAB, the first and third lines rhyming, and the second and fourth, producing a four line stanza instead of the two line ones. The text reverts to rhyming couplets before the end of chapter 55, so this implies that the text within the four-line stanzas section is of significance and because it is the only part with this rhyming scheme it I suggest that this section which is encoded.

There are actually only 54 four line stanzas, but Bessler tricks the unwary decoder by inserting four blank lines which when included, total the 55 we've come to expect.  I numbered each of the 220 lines..  

The Bible references don’t relate to Bessler’s adjacent comments. There are many different versions of the bible and the text and verse-numbers vary from one to another which make it impossible to make sense of the references.  In my opinion the Bible used is not important, therefore the text indicated by the references is also to be ignored.

Therefore the Bible references themselves point to letters and spaces, which are more likely than words because the appearance of a whole word in the comments, such as ‘weight', would be too obvious.

Using the numbered lines I found the first and only quote on the first page appeared on line 19, along with the Judae 19 Bible reference, but no verse number.  But there were spaces in the adjacent comment, which suggested that this clue included blank lines and spaces. And the actual quote used did in this case seem highly relevant saying “These are they who separate themselves, sensual men, having not the Spirit.” I think the important point here is that these refers to the spaces and blank lines which are they who separate themselves. No verse number here meant that the quoted text here mattered.

I believe the name of the book chosen indicated by the alphanumeric position of the initial letter, the position along the lines  for the desired letter.  I discovered that counting backwards from the end of the comment, I arrived at a space, 9 from the end, J is the 9th letter of the 24 letter alphabet. This supports the conclusion that spaces were to be included.

But there about 30 places for letters, spaces and brackets in each line so a 24 letter alphabet was not sufficient and Bessler was not able to use every letter of the alphabet because he had only the first letter of each book from the Bible to choose from.  He uses just 13 letters which are all he had available. In order to provide himself with more options he chose to alter the spelling of some books.

The very next two Bible references demonstrate this. Math short for Matthew in the first example; Matth in the next one.  So in this case M is the 12th letter of the alphabet, add 3 for the first example and 4 for the second one.  One addition for each letter.

So we have a section of clearly defined text; a means of selecting specific line; a way to indicate a letter, bracket or space and possibly a punctuation mark.  So why haven't I deciphered the whole text?

There is another Bessler fail-safe, just in case it all seemed too simple.  The text for decoding is shown in fraktur font, a kind of Gothic font; the bible references themselves are in Latin font, not unlike font you see today, but there are a few places where the Bible fonts are in fraktur font, and the first one is not even a Bible reference but the one immediately below appears to be a Bible reference.  One might dismiss these aberrations as typos except that Bessler did not make mistakes.

If there is interest in this subject I'll add some more on a future blog post.

JC

Johann Bessler’s Wheel and the Orffyreus Code

On 6th June, 1712, in Germany, Johann Bessler (also known by his pseudonym, Orffyreus) announced that after many years of failure, he had succeeded in designing and building a perpetual motion machine.  For more than fourteen years he exhibited his machine and allowed people to thoroughly examine it.  Following advice from the famous scientist, Gottfried Leibniz, he devised a number of demonstrations and tests designed to prove the validity of his machine without giving away the secret of its design.

After more than thirty years he died in poverty.  He had asked for a huge sum of money for the secret, £20,000 which was an amount only affordable by kings and princes, and although many were interested, none were prepared to agree to the terms of the deal. Bessler required that he be given the money and the buyer take the machine without verifying that it worked.  Those who sought to purchase the wheel, for that was the form the machine took, insisted that they see the secret mechanism before they parted with the money. Bessler feared that once the design was known the buyers could simply walk away knowing how to build his machine and he would get nothing for his trouble.

This problem was anticipated by Bessler and he took extraordinary measures to ensure that his secret was safe, but he encoded all the information needed to reconstruct the machine in a small number of books that he published. It is well-known that he was prepared to die without selling the secret and that he believed that post humus acknowledgement was preferable to being robbed of his secret while he yet lived.

I became curious about the legend of Bessler’s Wheel, while still in my teens, and have spent most of my life researching the life of Johann Bessler (I’m now 73).  I obtained copies of all his books and had them translated into English and self-published them, in the hope that either myself or someone else might solve the secret and present it to the world in this time of pollution, global warming and increasingly limited energy resources.

In addition there is a wealth of letters to and from Bessler or about him which I have included in my book about the life of Johann Bessler, see below how to obtain a copy of my book.

It has recently become clear that Bessler had a huge knowledge of the history of codes and adopted several completely different ones to disguise information within his publications.  I have made considerable advances in deciphering one of his codes; the simplest one, and I am confident that I have the complete design. I hope to complete the wheel sometime during the summer and publish details of the design.

Johann Bessler published three books, and digital copies of these with English translations may be obtained from the links to the right of this blog or from this link,  www.free-energy.co.uk

In addition there is a copy of his unpublished document containing some 141 drawings, entitled Maschinen Tractate.  This document was intended to form a teaching aid to be used by Bessler in a school for apprentices which he wished to found with the money he hoped to obtain for his invention.

My own account of Bessler’s life is also available from the links.  It is called "Perpetual Motion; An Ancient Mystery Solved?"

Johann Bessler three published books are entitled; "Grundlicher Bericht", "Apologia Poetica" and "Das Triumphirende..."

I have also published Bessler's collection of 141 drawings and I have called it Maschinen Tractate, but it was originally found in the form of a number of drawings of perpetual motion designs. Many of these have handwritten notes attached and I have published the best English translation of them that I was able to get. Bessler never published these drawings but clearly intended to do so at some point.

For some ideas about Bessler’s code why not visit one of my web sites at www.theorffyreuscode.com

A separate web site deals with another piece of code found in his book Apologia Poetica, at www.orffyreus.net

One last thing.  Perpetual Motion machines have been utterly proscribed and Johann Bessler’s claims ridiculed - however, it seems that more than a handful of scientists have now come to the conclusion that it might theoretically be possible to design a mechanical system which is continuously out-of-balance and therefore will turn continuously using the repeated fall of weights for energy.  Gravity but not directly.  These open-minded people remain tight lipped for now, awaiting proof of their hypothesis.

JC