Book of Soyga

History

The Book of Soyga, Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor, is an anonymous Latin book of magic of the sixteenth century; Deborah Harkness identified its two copies, Bodley 908 and Sloane MS 8, in 1994. John Dee owned a copy; at his first session with Edward Kelley, on 10 March 1582, the angel Uriel told him it had been revealed to Adam and only Michael could interpret it. The book ends with 36 tables of 36 × 36 letters: twelve for the signs, twelve more with their code words reversed, seven for the planets, four for the elements, and the master’s table, given for MOYSES; the book’s Liber Radiorum ends by telling whoever is anointed to make it from his own name.

How it works

Jim Reeds found how the tables were made. The alphabet has 23 letters, a = 1 to z = 23. A code word and its reverse fill the left column, six times in all. Every other letter is the letter above it moved on by a step that depends only on the letter to its left, counting round from z to a; in the top row the letter to the left stands for the one above too. A wrong letter carries into every letter to its right and below, and Reeds found 13 such slips in the original, which the tool keeps unless the rule alone is asked for.

How it was checked

The tests reproduce Reeds’s worked table for SARTON, with and without the slip he plants in it, the runs he lists in the Aries table, and the first 17 rows of the Leo table as he quotes them from a manuscript: 609 of 612 letters agree, the maker’s slip at row 15 among them; the other three are copyists’ errors that do not carry on. Six rows of Aries in Jane Kupin’s transcription of Sloane 8 agree in 206 of 215 legible letters; seven of the others are q read as g. At each transposition Reeds lists, the tool has the letters he says the original had.

Limits

Neither manuscript is online as images, so the tables have not been compared with the pages letter by letter; they are shown as the rule and Reeds’s slips make them, the copyists’ errors he lists noted beside them. The table names other than Aries are Reeds’s. Where the steps came from, and what the Liber Radiorum’s number sequences mean, is not known.