Strange Texts · Manuscripts & Books

The Book of Soyga

A cryptic work of magic and astrology associated with John Dee, containing elaborate tables of letters.

Portrait of John Dee, who studied the Book of Soyga
Portrait of John Dee (not an image of the Book of Soyga); Wikimedia Commons

Renaissance · Esoteric writing

Also known as Aldaraia, the Book of Soyga attracted the attention of the Elizabethan scholar John Dee. Manuscript copies were identified in twentieth-century collections, and later scholarship recovered a procedure for constructing its letter tables. Reconstructing a system, however, is not the same thing as recovering its intended significance.

A point of interest

The distinction between solving a pattern and understanding why someone devised it.

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