The Book of Soyga also known as "Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor" or "Soyga: The Book That Kills". This book was written in the 16th century, and disappeared until it was rediscovered in the British Library by Deborah Harkness in 1994.
The mysterious Book of Soyga is the work of an unknown author, and the book uses a number of typographical tricks, including writing certain words in coding text, and disguising other words in mathematical form.
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| One of the page of the Book of Soyga. Image credit: Blog of Wonders |
It consists of several books namely Liber Aldaraia, Liber Radiorum, and Liber Decimus Septimus and a number of other small books which together form a treatise on magic.
What makes this book unique is the 40,000 letters in it, which are randomly distributed, arranged in a scheme. There is a strange structure to the last 36 pages of the book, which contains 36 rows per 36 columns of Latin letters, for a total of 46,656 characters.
John Dee, the Queen Elizabeth I scholar and adviser tried to decode the book for years.
In the 1500s, Dee is said to be the owner of one of the copies of the Book of Soyga, and he is alleged to have been obsessed with unlocking the book's secrets, particularly a series of encrypted tables which John Dee believed held the key to some kind of esoteric spiritual knowledge.
On March 10, 1582 in London, Mortlake District, Edward Kelley offered Dee to consult the Archangel Uriel regarding clues to the mysterious book through Kelley's body as a medium.
According to the Blog of Wanders, Mariano Tomatis, John Dee was able to communicate with the angel Uriel who possessed Kelley's body by using a special mirror held by Kelley.
It is said that the angel spoke to Dee in Latin. The angel Uriel said that the book was very important, and was shown to Adam by an angel of God while in the garden of Eden. The secret of the book is known only to the archangel, Michael.
Dee is worried by the voices about the book, according to which its secrets would bring to death in 2 years and a half; Uriel is vague about this point, replying: “Thow shallt liue an Hundred and od yeres.”
At the end of the conversation, no information given by Uriel is of any use for Dee.
On April 24, 1583 the alchemist will take a note on his diary which will be of paramount importance in our century, the book shows the alternative title “Aldaraia”. Unfortunately, Dee was unable to complete the decoding of the mystery of the Book of Soyga before his death.
Many years later Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) confesses of having seen the book in the personal library of Lauderdale’s Duke, citing the complete title on the first page: “Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor”.
The Book of Soyga, although known to exist, was believed to have been lost until two copies were rediscovered in England, 1994.
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| Deborah Harkness. Image credit Blog of Wonders |
In 1994, Deborah Harkness was working on a dissertation about John Dee. Reading his diaries, and finding references to the dialogue with Uriel.
The conversation between Dee and Uriel took place in London, so she started her quest at the British Library. She immediately found it, catalogued under its alternative title – “Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor”; everyone, before her, coudn’t find it under the letter “S” of “Soyga”
Surprisingly, a second book was found at the Bodleian Library, Oxford under the same alternative title, “Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor”.
After Harkness rediscovered the two copies of the book, a few years later, James A. Reeds also known as Jim Reeds, a mathematician & cryptologist discovered the mathematical formulas used to construct the tables (starting with the seed word given to each table), and identified the different types of errors made by the playwright. He points out that some of the errors are common to the two copies, suggesting that they come from a common ancestor that contains a subset of errors (and thus it is possible that they are copies of other works).
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| Jim Reeds. Image credit: Blog of Wonders |
Although Reeds outlines the construction algorithms and code words used in creating the tables, the exact content and importance of the tables remains a mystery. He wrote, "The Covenant in the Book of Soyga dealing with tables, Libior Radiorum, has a series of paragraphs specifying the passwords for twenty-three tables, along with sequences of numbers unrelated to those words."
Jim Reeds, in his short work John Dee and the Table of Magic in the Book of Soyga, notes the tendency to note words backwards, for example Lapis reversed as Sipal, Bonum reversed as Munob, and Soyga, as Agyos. , literis transvectis , expresses a practice that seeks to obscure some of the works cited. 'Soyga' is 'Agios' (Greek for "Holy") spelled backwards.
Reed wrote:
The Book of Soyga's preoccupation with letters, alphabetic arithmetic, backward writing like Hebrew, etc., were certainly new features of Cabalistic magic which became popular in the sixteenth century, exemplified by the great compilation of Agrippa of Nettesheim (1486-1535), and the authority of borrowers. from the Renaissance the humanist interest in Kabbalah was expressed by figures such as Pico and Reuchlin and from ancient times Kabbalah supposedly. "
Reeds continues, "Though . . . not a hallmark of traditional Kabbalah, they were in Agrippa's time an integral part of the Kabbalah."
Allegedly, this book is most likely related to Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical sect, but overall the researchers have not been able to decipher the Book of Soyga significantly.
Despite Jim Reeds has discovered the secret of the “Book of Soyga”, after two years and a half he is still alive. Is it because he just analysed its structure, without venturing into its content or use?
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