Rosicrucian

This is pigpen. The same grids, the same dots, the same symbols - only the name changes with whoever is telling the story.

It gets called the Rosicrucian cipher, the Freemason’s cipher, the Napoleon cipher and the tic-tac-toe cipher. The Rosicrucian name comes from the eighteenth-century societies that used it for their own records; Freemasons used it for the same purpose, and enough Masonic gravestones carry it that reading one is a small rite of passage. A Union prisoner of war is recorded sending it home in a letter during the American Civil War.

The method could hardly be simpler. Draw two grids and two Xs, write the alphabet into the twenty-six compartments, and each letter becomes the shape of the compartment it sits in - dots distinguishing the second grid from the first. There is no key, so anyone with the diagram reads it as fast as they read English. That is the point: it was made to look secret rather than to be secret.

The pigpen page draws both arrangements out, so you can see which compartment each letter falls in.

The Knights Templar are often named as well, and that one is a different cipher - see the note at the bottom of the pigpen page.