Throughout history, cryptic books have fascinated curious minds, with some surviving to intrigue modern historians, cryptologists, and occult enthusiasts. While the undecipherable Voynich Manuscript, and the Codex Gigas are among the most famous, lesser-known works are equally intriguing. The Book of Soyga is one of them.
This seemingly supernatural Soyga magic book is an emblem of esoteric knowledge – a tantalising artefact that bridges history, mysticism, and cryptography. Here’s the story of the Book of Soyga, one of the world’s strangest manuscripts.
The Soyga Manuscript
The Book of Soyga contained astrological calculations and lunar observations (Credit: Tetra Images via Getty Images)
Who wrote the Book of Soyga? Well, despite many attempts to answer that question, the author remains unknown. The date of its creation can be narrowed down broadly to the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and even the meaning of the word ‘Soyga’ is uncertain. There really is very little known with any certainty about this mysterious manuscript.
Some have suggested that Soyga comes from a Persian word meaning ‘horoscope’ or ‘astronomical’. Others have speculated that it’s a backwards version of the Greek word agyos which means ‘holy.’ Indeed, the book’s full title, Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor, translates to ‘Aldaraia or I am called Soyga,’ indicating that Soyga might be a mystical name or identifier tied to its esoteric content.
What we do know is that the Book of Soyga was written in Latin, and is a dense compilation of magical rituals and incantations, astrological calculations, demonology, and angelic hierarchies. It also includes lists of planetary conjunctions (when two or more line up), and lunar mansions (the position of the moon).
The enduring mystery of the Book of Soyga lies not only in its indecipherable sections but also in its broader implications for Renaissance magic and alchemy. The text references angelic communication, astrological phenomena, and medieval humours, offering insights into the intellectual and spiritual pursuits of its era.
But perhaps the most enigmatic feature of the Soyga magic book lies in its final thirty-six pages.
The Last Thirty-Six
The last 36 pages have baffled mathematicians and cryptologists for years (Credit: burcu demir via Getty Images)
The last thirty-six pages of the Book of Soyga are perhaps the most baffling and talked-about aspect of this enigmatic manuscript. These pages contain thirty-six tables, each with thirty-six rows and thirty-six columns of seemingly random letters – a configuration that adds up to a total of 46,656 individual characters. This section of the book has been a focal point for those intrigued by historical ciphers and codes.
Each table is titled with a different angelic name, which might suggest a celestial or spiritual significance to their contents. The arrangement and the specific letters used don’t correspond to any obvious logical or linguistic pattern, and both traditional and modern cryptographic analysis has – so far – proved elusive.
In the early twenty-first century, mathematician and cryptologist James Reeds (who had tried to decipher the Voynich Manuscript) proposed that the tables follow a set of definable rules and might be generated by a complex algorithm involving alphabetic sequences and permutations connected to ‘magic words’ or ‘seeds’. However, even with this insight, the exact method of construction and the intended purpose of the tables remain unclear.
John Dee & The Two Versions
A statue of the Archangel Uriel (Credit: Karen Richards via Getty Images)
The Book of Soyga was owned by John Dee, an eminent Elizabethan scholar, mathematician, and occultist who served as an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I. Dee’s extensive diaries reveal his profound interest in the supernatural, and documented his discovery of the Soyga manuscript. He was deeply fascinated by the book’s contents and spent years attempting to decode its secrets, particularly the mysterious tables.
He even sought divine guidance through séances (known in the sixteenth century as ‘actions’) with the Archangel Uriel, mediated by his associate, a scryer, what we might call a fortune-teller or medium today, named Edward Kelley. Uriel is said to have told Dee and Kelley that the Soyga magic was revealed to Adam, the first human, in Paradise, and could only be understood or interpreted by the archangel Michael. In some versions of the story, Uriel said that the book was cursed, and anyone who did decipher the coded tables would die two-and-a-half years later.
Try as he might, Dee couldn’t unlock the mysteries of the tables in the Aldaraia. After his death around 1608 or 1609, the book disappeared, thought lost forever, until it was rediscovered in 1994 by American scholar, historian and novelist Deborah Harkness – who wrote a doctoral thesis on John Dee – in two locations. The first was in the British Library in London (the version named Sloane MS 8) and the second was in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (the version known as Bodley MS 908). These two surviving copies differ slightly in their structure and presentation but researchers believe they are most likely derived from an earlier lost version.
The rarity of these copies – multiple versions may have once existed – and the differences between them add another layer of mystery to the already enigmatic nature of the book.
The Last Word
The Book of Soyga remains an enigma, tantalisingly out of reach... (Credit: Tetra Images via Getty Images)
Was the Book of Soyga decoded? In part, yes – in that the construction method of the tables was likely deciphered, but their meaning is still very much a mystery, along with who wrote this strange medieval manuscript.
Thus, this enigmatic quality continues to fuel interest in the Book of Soyga among historians, esoteric enthusiasts, and cryptographers alike, many of whom believe that the book’s powerful mysteries are simply waiting to be discovered…
