The Weavers, a Gnostic Christian sect wiped out by a Vatican Inquisition in the 12th century, used a technique known as code-drafting to secretly embed messages in their ritual cloths.

The Weavers used a variety of techniques to encode their messages. The main one is called “overshot”. Used traditionally for name or phrase coding for hundreds of years. The origins are unclear but it is thought to have begun in Persia and moved west in the early Middle Ages finally being carried to America where it developed and flourished among the first settlers.

This is how it works:

An ideal fabric, perfectly woven, can be represented by a matrix of 0s and 1’s. 0s and 1s are alternated, like the squares on a chess board, as the thread goes over and then under the fabric.

0 represents under. 1 over. It’s like computer code at its most basic level and indeed the deep forces of nature, attraction and repulsion, masculine and feminine, positive or negative charge.

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If the loom skips and makes a defect, the fabric turns out imperfectly. Color blotches. Missed weaves are created as well as knots, missteps, and jagged lines. In that way the woven Matrix turns out subtly different to the correct one. If the correct regions are thrown away, (exclusively masked), then only the defects remain:

If the empty spaces are compressed, but noted, and all the defect 0s and 1 are written out in a line, a code is created which can be represented thus:

This resulting line of code refers to letters of a secret alphabet (similar to Latin) was used by The Weavers. I cannot reveal. It took some significant decoding just to unveil the secret alphabet and reverse engineer. I can reveal, however, that it contains 32 letter symbols (2 raised to the 5th degree, 2 to the power of 5 2-4-8-16-32). And that it’s 5 bit binary encoded.

For instance if it was our alphabet

00001 - A
00010 - B
00011 - C

and so on

This way, by careful examination of ancient cloths and reverse engineering, an ancient code is revealed. It looks like this:

This is a gross simplification of the process, of course, for purposes of conveying the idea to you. There are actually significant complexities with this approach.

If you want to produce a totally readable code, for example, you must assign a unique sequence to each letter. This can indeed be done but it results in an incredibly long threading sequences because each letter must have 5 shaft numbers in its sequence. This makes the pattern unit enormous. It would take a very long time to weave. The decoder then needs a good deal of extra information including the treadling sequence (the order in which the shafts are raised which affects the pattern), the code table, and the details of whether the patterns was a straight repeat or was mirrored at any point.

You can see the problems that faced me when trying to crack The Weaver Code.

Read on about how I finally cracked The Weaver Code

Or email me to find out more about The Weaver Code

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