“The Book of Soyga”: John Dee.

The Book of Soyga—also known as Aldaraia—is a banned book by the 16th-century English occultist John Dee (1527-1608).

The book of Soyga, one of John Dee’s great books, gives an account of a vast corpus of incantations, in addition to long indecipherable passages in which conversations with angels and demons are recorded.

After John Dee’s death the book was lost. Only in 1994 were two manuscripts located in the British Library and the Bodleian Library; the first under the title: Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor, and the second: Tractatus Astrologico Magicus. Both versions have slight discrepancies.

The story of the Book of Soyga is full of bumps and time jumps. It is known that the original manuscript was auctioned in 1692. It appears to have been divided into three parts: Liber Aldaraia, Liber Radiorum and Liber Decimus Septimus. They all refer to incantations and instructions of a magical, astrological, demonological order, and an interesting section with the genealogy of angels and their names.

In an appendix a sheet is shared that contains several tables of 36 columns arranged randomly, and which, according to John Dee, protect a terrible secret that not even he himself was able to discover. This table (see above) has been studied without success by numerous linguists, although everything seems to indicate that there are correspondences that would indicate the presence of a cryptic language. Perhaps the name of the book offers some solution to the puzzle: the word Soyga does not belong to a rare celestial language, but is the Greek word agios [«sagrado»] the other way around.

The story of The Book of Soyga fits perfectly with the author’s personality. In 1556, John Dee proposed creating a great national library to Queen Mary, who saw no practical application in it; which is why the necromancer set out to organize it with his own funds. He collected more than 3,000 rare manuscripts, and in 1583 he set out on a long journey to the continent to obtain as many. It was there, they say, that John Dee began receiving “visits” from angelic entities. Among them, the visit of the angel Uriel stands out, who entrusted John Dee with the pages of the Book of Soyga [ver: Enoquiano: el idioma de los ángeles]

According to John Dee himself, the Book of Soyga was previously given to Adam by the angel Michael, although he did not detail the nature of this prehistoric encounter. [ver: Lengua adánica]

Specialist Jim Reeds, who studied the two surviving manuscripts, discovered that both contain apparently intentional errors, although in different passages; fact that led him to reason that both are based on a previous manuscript, that is, the original. The 23 numerical tables were subjected to an algorithm study, showing that in fact a cryptic code exists although its meaning remains a mystery.

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