Tantrik Coding & Decoding (Sandha-bhasa 'Intentional Language')

In order to discourage hostile outsiders from investigating a potentially subversive occult organization and its activities, it is frequently adopted as a tactic to put into a distasteful variety of code the terminology used by the organization. Thus, the Sandha-bhasa method is to use terms considered filthy (such as “faeces” and “urine”) to the actually delectable methods (involving spices and perfumes) for establishing communications with divine worlds. It may fairly be assumed that governmental spies (who tend to be extremely suspicious of anyone establishing communications with divine worlds, which divine worlds are easily capable of overthrowing superfluously oppressive and inhumanely malevolent earthly governments) would cease from investigating any further as soon as words like “faeces” and “urine” would arise in descriptions of the methods of communication with the divine worlds.

A possible instance of this method in the comparative history of religions may be thus :-

What is believed to be faeces is being praesented (in Codex Borgianus Mexicanus, p. 64, upper registre) to a turkey-deity, with fumes indicated as emerging thence. This is likely a case of Sandha-bhasa. In the same scene, flowered tubes containing fluid (probably floral perfume) appear, perhaps to indicate the applying of drops of perfume from tubes (eyedroppers, or simply open-ended tubes inserted into the perfume-bottle and one's finger put on the upper open end to hinder by vacuum the perfume from falling out until being applied to its object).

The comparative aspect is thus :- In the turkey-deity scene of Codex Borgianus Mexicanus, p. 10, upper right, a man within a rope encirclement is prying at his own eye with an awl : this may be aequivalent to Polu-phemos with his eye being prodded at the instigation by Odusseus, who afterwards tied by ropes the bodies of his fellow-mariners onto the undersides of sheep. The position of Odusseus clinging to the wool on the underside of his sheep is aequivalent to the position of the tuft on the front of a turkey (which tuft is repraesented by a rod-within-pendant on the turkey-deity). The indication of evasive coding is to be found in Odusseus's substituting (for his own name) “Ou-dei-” ('No-one' – the mention of this sort of word is as sure to cause governmental investigators to desist as is mention of “faeces” and “urine”).

To “talk turkey” [after “cold turkey” treatment] is an obverse of “gabble/gobble”, a term used in cryptographers' cant for 'coding'.

[written Jan 4^th Fri 2013]