Book of Soyga

Did You Know?

• Elias Ashmole recorded that the Duke of Lauderdale owned a manuscript titled Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor that had formerly belonged to Dee.
• The manuscript was sold at auction in 1692 and is now probably Sloane MS 8, based on Jim Reeds' identification.
• Bodley MS. 908 was donated to the Bodleian Library in 1605.

Contents

The Bodley 908 manuscript comprises 197 pages, including Liber Aldaraia (95 pages), Liber Radiorum (65 pages), and Liber decimus septimus (2 pages), plus shorter unnamed works totaling about ten pages. Its final 18 pages contain 36 tables of letters. The Sloane MS 8 version has 147 pages, mostly identical except that the tables occupy 36 pages and Liber Radiorum appears as a two-page summary. The book includes incantations, instructions on magic, astrology, demonology, lists of conjunctions, lunar mansions, and names and genealogies of angels, and cites otherwise unknown medieval magical treatises such as liber E, liber Os, liber dignus, liber Sipal, and liber Munob.

Analysis

Jim Reeds noted a tendency in the manuscript to record words backwards, as seen in Lapis reversed as Sipal, Bonum as Munob, and the title Soyga as Agyos, literis transvectis, revealing an effort to obscure some cited works. 'Soyga' is 'Agios' (Greek for 'Holy') spelled backwards. Reeds observed that the book's preoccupation with letters, alphabet arithmetic, and Hebrew-like backwards writing is characteristic of the new Cabalistic magic popular in the sixteenth century, exemplified by Agrippa of Nettesheim and borrowing authority from Renaissance humanist interest in the Kabbala. The square tables, while not a traditional Kabbalah feature, had by Agrippa's time become integral to Christian magical Cabala.

Significance

In 1556, Dee proposed founding a national English library to Queen Mary, but the plan was not implemented. He instead amassed the largest library in England at the time using personal funds, with at least 3,000 printed volumes and many manuscripts. The library was pilfered during Dee's six-year trip to continental Europe between 1583 and 1589, and upon his return he was forced to sell many volumes due to penury. After his death in 1608 or 1609, the remaining library was ransacked.

During his continental trip, Dee sought to contact angels through scryer Edward Kelley. Dee claimed to have questioned the angel Uriel about the Book of Soyga, receiving the reply that the book had been revealed to Adam in Paradise by angels and could only be interpreted by the archangel Michael. After Deborah E. Harkness rediscovered the two copies, Jim Reeds uncovered the mathematical formula used to construct the tables, starting from a seed word for each table, and identified scribal errors.

A subset of errors common to both copies suggests they derive from a common ancestor. Although Reeds deciphered the construction algorithm and code words, the actual contents and significance of the tables remain mysterious; Liber Radiorum mentions code words for twenty-three tables together with number sequences whose relation to the words is unknown.