Some ways literate people covertly share their anti-religion/political beliefs and send each other messages with basic letter codes

The recent Paris Olympics opening ceremonies featured a tableau that mocked the "last supper" of Jesus Christ, but the choreographer claimed it was unintended. I don't think anyone who has really looked at the images believes him, and I don't think he meant people to believe his denial was honest. The performance was quite the overt mockery.

Not all mockery or self-marking of one's self as being against Christ, and by extension Christianity, is as obvious as what we just saw in Paris. People have been getting tattoos of "666" (the number of anti-Christ, per the Bible's Revelation Chapter 13) for some time. Various graphical representations of 666 (vav-vav-vav from vav, the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet) can all mean that someone is marking themselves as against Christianity: 666, 111, VVV, WWW, UUU, eee, 999, ggg, GGG, bbb, FFF (because F is the sixth letter of the English alphabet), etc. are ways to play around with the underlying vav-vav-vav pattern.

Similar Bible-based labels of rebellion against the God of the Bible include:

• 42 (the number of months a blasphemous beast exercises authority in Revelation Chapter 13)
• Cain (the first murderer)
• beast (a blasphemer, per Revelation Chapter 13) (this can also be "brute")
• den (as in a "den of thieves," per the Bible's Matthew 21:13)
• serpents (see Exodus 7:12 and Matthew 12:34)
• wolves (see Matthew 7:15)
• Ammonites (see Judges in the Old Testament)

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have some extra labels of rebellions that they can apply to themselves that they pull from the Book of Mormon:

• Amalickiah/Amalickiahites (see the book of Alma in the Book of Mormon)
• Korihor (a teacher who was anti-Christ; see Alma 30)

The Book of Mormon teaches that people who rebel against God often mark themselves with signs for each other to recognize. I grew up hearing a lot of discussions wondering how people would be forced to "take the mark of the beast" as discussed in Revelation, but as I look around me now I see that no one is having to be forced into it. They are happily volunteering because of antipathy towards chastity and a lack of understanding about how important the teachings of Christ (especially his Parable of the Good Samaritan, with its command to actively love and serve one's neighbor) are to a happy society.

As I've continued to notice people's subtle messages, I've realized that some in publishing have been sending each other covert messages for over a century. The codes are pretty basic and messages often fall out easily once one knows the steps:

• First, cancel out letters that are doubled. For instance "petticoat government" would become "picagvrme." (It has no deeper meaning; I just use it because it's in my blog's name.)
• Second, look for words. Because more vowels are often needed, V can be read as a U, W can be read as an O, and H can be treated as an A.
• Apply various ring ciphers (circle the alphabet around on itself or twist it back around halfway through).
• As far as I have seen, the most commonly used of these ring ciphers in older documents is the one that matches O and L together (the words awl, all, and ol' are often used to signify that this ring cipher should be used on a segment of the coded message):
• A B C D E F G H I J K L M
• Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N
• Doubled letters can be substituted with the letter that is 13 letters afterward:
• A B C D E F G H I J K L M
• N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
• "X" (or "KS") can be used to reverse the order of the segment either before or after it.

You know you've likely hit on a decoded message if there are two closely-related possibilities, one of which looks like a mockery of someone and the other which looks like a clue to something important. Sometimes the mockery is in Spanish. Sometimes the entire message has to be shifted 1, 2, or even 8 letters forward or backward before the other steps bear fruit. It's a fun intellectual exercise.

This approach has been fruitful in decoding messages hidden in dissertation titles, schoolbook chapter headings, article titles, and scripture chapter headings (spoiler: some of the people writing the chapter headings don't appear to hold genuine faith in the scriptures they are presuming to interpret).

You could argue that I'm just finding these messages because I'm looking for them. I would answer that you never find what you don't look for if it's hidden just out of sight. Go ahead and look. Don't take my word for it. I think you'll find a good place to start is PhD dissertations written before the internet was available to the general public (I don't think academics realized just how accessible their dissertation titles would become to everyone after the 1990s).