Dar and the Enigma code: A Syzygy

Good afternoon on a beautiful Friday from sunny central Florida!

In preparation for Dar, I've been doing some mental calisthenics, and I thought I'd pass along a few preliminary ideas.

We've introduced to the concept of a 'syzygy' in the prologue as well as the spell book itself. A syzygy occurs when the sun, moon, and earth are in alignment. On the cover of the spell book, we read the ambigram one way, and we get LIGHT with the sun on top. Reading the ambigram the other way, we get DARK with the moon on top. The other word on the cover, SPELLS, reads the same both left and right and makes me wonder if it doesn't represent the 'earth' in some way.

In other words, Sun might be equivalent to left-to-right, moon might be right-to-left, and earth might be both ways.

From a puzzling standpoint, the syzygy occurs when the moon, sun, and earth 'align', and here are few ideas that came to mind:

1. Three different alphabet sequences, one for the earth, moon, and sun. These three sequences would be constant over all the puzzle--analagous to the 5 x 5 grid from ATT. They would be three circles--possibly wheels.

2. A syzygy only occurs during a full or new moon, so the sequence would have to be sun-moon-earth or sun-earth-moon.

3. We would have to be in possession of three letters to create the 'alignment', maybe RED, DAR, etc. This would give us the starting positions of the three letter wheels.

4. We would have to derive a ciphertext.

All of this puts me in mind of an enigma machine.

He could give us clues like 'full moon, RED, XXJKEES' and you would know to set your cylinders in sequence from the full moon clue as 'sun - earth - moon' and then you would set the starting positions as Sun = R, Earth = E, Moon = D, then you could input your ciphertext XXJKEES into this to get whatever solution we're supposed to derive.

Just some brain stretching exercises at this point...

Doc

Keep stretching that brain of yours Doc. Your idea here is fantastic.

If it does not come to fruition and if {dont see how} you come up empty handed with DAR.....you need to publish a treasure hunt of your own. Your mind amazes me...

8)

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.........time to add a DAR ring to my collection.........


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Nice ideas, as always, Doc. The cover reminded me of the Illuminati brands for earth, wind, fire, and water in Angels and Demons . Maybe analogous for fairies and Darklings??
Chris

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Startin' to have a love/hate relationship with ATT

There has been mention of the puzzle companion book discussing Enigma machines...

Might not be a bad track your musings have led you down, Doc!

Good hunting,

Fopner

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ATT is eating my brain!

Yeah, the puzzle book does indeed have a blurb on the enigma machine, including some of the basics on how it worked.

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4 + 8 + 15 + 16 + 23 + 42 = 108