Tuesday, February 5, 2019

What if the Rohonc Codex describes a cycle of religious plays?

Here is a theory I am currently entertaining: That the Rohonc Codex describes a cycle of religious plays enacting events in the life of Christ, with each episode describing an act to be performed on a particular day. The text served as a guideline to how the scenes should be set and acted out, with a rough skeleton of the dialog to be embellished by the actors. It is written in code in order to protect the trade secrets of a particular company of players from their competitors.

This could explain, for example, why the names of saints and other figures occur so much more frequently in the text than they do in the scriptures on which the text is apparently based. If you are going to entertain your audience with the encounter between Pilate and Christ for the duration of a scene, the two of them will need to say somewhat more to each other than they do in the scriptures.

Here is how I arrived at that theory:

When I am looking at a problem with many unknown factors, I build a probability tree populated with my estimates of the likelihood of different elements. Here is what my probability tree for the Rohonc Codex looks like:

1. The RC text is intentionally secret (85%)
    1.1 The secrecy of the text protects the reader from persecution (20%, since most heretical texts are not written in code, and a text in a secret script would be immediately suspicious anyway)
    1.2 The secrecy of the text simply protects the content from becoming publicly known (80%)
        1.2.1 The images in the text faithfully represent the content (90%)
        1.2.2 The images in the text are intended to mislead the uninitiated (10%)
2. The RC text is accidentally secret (10%)
    2.1 The script was invented by an otherwise illiterate person (60%)
    2.2 The script was invented to write a language that didn't have a script (40%)
3. The RC text is meaningless (5%)
    3.1 The text is the output of some kind of religious or spiritual process (30%)
    3.2 The text is a hoax intended to fool someone (70%)

The odds that I assign here are based on my impressions of the nature of existing encoded documents, but could certainly be improved by a thorough survey of texts. When the odds are multiplied out, the most likely case in my estimation is 1.2.1, where 85% x 80% x 90% = 61.2%. That is, I think it is most likely that this text contains something religious that is intended to be kept secret, but not kept secret to protect the reader from persecution.

I have not been able to come up with a genre of texts that cleanly fits into 1.2.1, since the images do not suggest anything especially secret in the content. As a result, I have been looking for genres where the secret to be kept might lie in the way that the publicly known information is conveyed.

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