The Book of Soyga
The Book of Soyga is a medieval or early modern magical treatise,
a copy of which is known to have been owned and (to some extent)
studied by the mathematician and magician John Dee (1527--1608).
The book itself was, to the frustration of generations of
Dee scholars, not to be found.
Quite recently, however, D. Harkness found copies in the Bodleian
Library and in the British Library, filed under its alternate
title, Aldaraia.
Contained in this book are 36 large square tables of letters,
which exhibit a complex hidden pattern that I was lucky enough
to recently figure out.
My paper appeared in the the somewhat [meiosis alert! meiosis alert!] pricey volume
John Dee: Interdisciplinary essays in English Renaissance Thought,
May 2006.
Click for
a
PDF version of the paper
(without illustrations).
(Thanks to Clay Holden for help with the PDF version.)
Last modified 11 June 2006.
Jim Reeds
reedsj@dtc.umn.edu