The Book of Soyga: John Dee's Unreadable Tables

In 1583, at his house in Mortlake by the Thames, the Elizabethan mathematician and astrologer John Dee sat with his scryer Edward Kelley before a crystal stone. Dee, who spent much of his life trying to converse with angels, asked a question that had troubled him for years. What did his Book of Soyga mean? According to the diary in which Dee recorded these sessions, the angel Uriel answered that the book had been revealed to Adam in Paradise, and that only the archangel Michael could interpret it. Dee never found out what it meant. After his death the book dropped out of sight. For four centuries it was thought lost.

The object

• In 1994 the historian Deborah Harkness identified two copies under the title Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor ("Aldaraia, or I am called Soyga"): MS Bodley 908 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and Sloane MS 8 in the British Library.
• Both are sixteenth-century Latin manuscripts of magic: lists of angelic and demonic names, astrological material and spells.
• Each ends with 36 tables of letters, each a grid of 36 × 36 capitals (the Bodley copy crams them onto its last pages). They look like random noise. The tables were what defeated Dee.
• The book likes reversals. Soyga is Agyos backwards, the Greek hagios, "holy". Lapis (stone) appears as Sipal, and Bonum (good) as Munob.

The tables decoded

In 2006 the mathematician and cryptographer Jim Reeds published a study showing that the tables are not random. Each is generated by a rule from a short seed word: a Latin name or word, laid down letter by letter and then expanded across the grid by a fixed arithmetic procedure applied to the letters. Given the seed and the rule, the whole table can be reproduced. Reeds reconstructed the method and recovered the seed words.

That is a genuine decipherment of the tables' structure. It explains how they were made. It does not reveal any hidden message, because the tables were never a coded sentence. They are mechanically generated magical grids, a way of turning a holy word into a field of letters, in the tradition of letter squares such as the SATOR square and of Kabbalistic letter combinations.

Symbology

Letters as power. Soyga belongs to the Renaissance magia tradition that treated letters and names as channels of cosmic force. It draws on Kabbalah (ch26), including its Christian adaptations, and on the angel-names of the Liber Juratus and similar works. A grid generated from a holy word embodies the word across a surface. It is closer to a talisman than to a text meant for reading.

Reversal as veiling. Writing words backwards is a real, documented habit of this manuscript. It is a simple concealment, a way of marking words as secret or sacred, and not a cipher.

Connections

Kabbalah and its Christian adaptations (ch26), the Theosophical and occult revival (ch37, for Dee's later influence on the Golden Dawn), the Voynich Manuscript (V01, also once linked to Dee) and the Rohonc Codex (V11).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/book-of-soyga.html