January 22 is the birthday of Sir Francis Bacon.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was one of the most remarkable men ever to walk the earth. He laid philosophical foundations for the scientific revolution. He was a visionary and a poet. Yet he walked the corridors of power and held the highest offices in the land. All this is known.

October 1623: Francis Bacon describes a new and ingenious method for writing in code. A month later the Shakespeare First Folio is published with what may be a code embedded in the typesetting.

Coincidence? Perhaps not.

If Queen Elizabeth I did indeed deny her sons (Bacon and Lord Essex), then they couldn't reveal personal information without fearing for their life. How could Bacon make sure that future generations knew the real story? By his own cipher?

 

Virginia Fellows, author of The Shakespeare Code, describes her journey of uncovering another story.

The first step of my research was a visit to the Francis Bacon Library in Claremont, California, where a fine collection of Bacon-related books endowed by philanthropist Walter Arensberg had been preserved. Arensberg, staunch and enthusiastic, was a great Bacon admirer during the early twentieth century. (The library has now been taken over by the Huntington Library in San Marino.)

I asked the then director, Elizabeth Wrigley, to recommend one single book that would give the true history of Francis Bacon. “There is no such thing,” she answered, “you will have to be the one to write it.”

Since that time I have visited dozens of fine university and public libraries; I have prowled through new and used bookstores and interviewed many people through letters and personal contacts. I have acquired a collection of Baconian books and have kept in close touch with the Francis Bacon Society in London.

This scholarly group was formed in the nineteenth century to explore the real facts of the Bacon-Shakespeare story. They are devoted seekers after the truth and have revealed many fascinating facts about the Elizabethan aristocrat, but even they have not reached a final conclusion about him. The one fact they do agree on is that Bacon was the true author of the works of Shakespeare.

Early in my research, that strange phenomenon which Carl Jung called synchronicity brought me in touch with the single most amazing Baconian artifact I could have imagined. Most readers are familiar with such surprising events. Suddenly out of nowhere, just at the right time and the right place, some essential object or information will appear, as though a genie had been at work behind the scenes.

For me this surprise came in the shape of a strange wooden contraption known as a cipher wheel. On the printed pages affixed to it, in a most ingenious code is recorded the true story of Francis Bacon-an account actually and incredibly written by him in his own words.

It is a story that changes the current concept of English history. No longer was guesswork necessary. Now the task was to fit the details of Bacon's life, as the cipher gives it, into accepted records of history.

The Shakespeare Code is my attempt to do just that and to explain what the cipher wheel is and why Bacon felt the need to create the ciphers. It is a poignant and tragic tale-but one that ends on an unexpected note of triumph.

Virginia Fellows spent many years tracking down the mysteries of Shakespeare and the authorship of the Plays. Her book is an amazing compendium of ciphers and methodologies applied to
Fellows reconstructs the decoded information to tell us about life in the court of the Queen Elizabeth I, combining the secrets contained in the works of Shakespeare with contemporary accounts from the era. The codes reveal an explosive story: the hidden marriage of Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen,” murder and scandal, corruption and lies at the highest levels. And they tell the true life-story of Francis Bacon, the one who devised the codes themselves.classic literature, from bi-formed alphabets to Dr. Orville Owen's cipher to Ignatius Donnelly's cipher and more.

Francis Bacon – The Shakespeare Author

The cipher story reveals still more—that Francis Bacon was the true author of the works of Shakespeare. Bacon wrote of his vision of a coming golden age—a New Atlantis—in the new land of the West. He foresaw an age when science and technology would lift the curse of Eden and man would be free.

The secret history could not be told in Bacon's own time, so he concealed it in code, hoping for a future when it would be discovered, when men could be free to speak and know the truth. Author and ascended master student Virginia Fellows shows us, in a way never told before, the truth, honor and faithfulness of Saint Germain's victorious soul embodied as Francis Bacon.

Fellows found the 100-year-old cipher wheel in an old warehouse in Detroit, Michigan and bequeathed it to Summit University before she passed on in 2006.

Photographs of the Cipher Wheel