I realise this may sound very conspiracy theorist-y so please forgive that but does anyone else see a very strong relation to the Cicada 3301 organisation? The last two paragraphs especially made me think of the 3301 challenges released in the past few years.

"the mystical system in which meaning is derived from the numerical value of letters"...."symbols don’t represent just words and letters, they stand for numbers too"

I had a play about with the challenges when they were released and throughtout them were strange runes/ciphertext which could be both used as letters and numbers. I have done a fair few CTFs before but I have never seen anything like the Cicada challenges in terms of combining maths and language in such a way - how prominetly primes featured or how insanely well words and there numeric meaning seemed to align. The reason I immediately thought of them after reading the article is because I remember thinking while looking at the challenges that no one could come up with such an intricate and interconnected mathematical ciphertext system without some special (and as yet unknown/unpublished) "new way of calculating".

Not to mention all the secrecy around Cicada and the only rumors or supposed leaks from them suggest a secret organisation with a similar philosophy to the Oculists.