John Dee and the Book of Soyga: What the Diary Actually Shows

John Dee did not leave a deciphered explanation of Soyga. What survives is more revealing as a record of inquiry: he valued the book, asked about it in his conferences, temporarily lost it, and later recovered it.

First recorded question: 10 March 1582
Mislaid: 18 April 1583
Recovered: 19 November 1595

The question to Uriel

During the first recorded conference mediated by Edward Kelley in March 1582, Dee asked whether his book of Soyga was of any excellence. The exchange is part of Dee’s angelic diary tradition, whose surviving early books are catalogued as British Library Sloane MS 3188. It shows an existing book entering a conversation: it does not make the Latin treatise itself a product of those conversations. This distinction matters because popular summaries often fold every text near Dee into a single object called Enochian magic.

Dee’s interest was especially directed toward the letter tables. Reeds begins his study with Dee’s frustrated desire to read them, then asks how their patterns were made. Dee’s historical question and the modern researcher’s question differ. A reproducible way to generate a table tells us how the letters are arranged; it does not supply the meaning Dee hoped to extract from them. The diaries preserve a reader confronting a difficult text, rather than a transcript of its solved message.

A missing book, a remembered clue

Reeds summarizes dated diary entries: on 18 April 1583 Dee could not find his book; on 29 April he recalled that “Zadzaczadlin” corresponded to Adam by its alphabet. The remembered equivalence helped later researchers recognize manuscripts filed under Aldaraia. This is a good example of why a diary note can carry bibliographic value even when it does not explain the whole work. A single unusual word connects a description of a missing volume with words visible in surviving copies.

The record then notes that Dee recovered the book in November 1595. The interval should not be retold as a disappearance of the work from all collections. It was Dee’s own copy that he could not locate. Subsequent references, including Elias Ashmole’s account of a volume associated with the Duke of Lauderdale, trace the later reputation of a manuscript called Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor. Each item in that chain is a different kind of evidence: a diary recollection, a later antiquarian report, and surviving library books.

What “Dee’s copy” can mean

Roberts and Watson’s library catalogue addendum identifies British Library Sloane MS 8 as Dee’s book or a close copy on the basis of its title and contents. They also state that neither Sloane MS 8 nor Bodleian MS Bodley 908 carries direct evidence of Dee’s ownership. The qualified wording is important. Reeds argues that Sloane 8 is probably the volume Dee handled; the catalogue leaves room for a close copy. A pictured folio from either manuscript is therefore not automatically “Dee’s own handwriting.”

The known manuscripts are Latin copies of late sixteenth-century date and probable English origin, according to the catalogue addendum. Dee at one point called his book Arabic, a mismatch the authors explicitly discuss without resolving. The description might have been shorthand or might refer to a stage of transmission no longer represented by the extant copies. The evidence permits a connection between Dee and the Soyga text; it does not prove an Arabic original, an angelic author, or a fixed practical use for its tables.

Worked reading: reversal is a method, not a decoration

Reeds notes that reversal runs through the treatise before the large grids appear. The name Sipal becomes the ordinary Latin word lapis when read backward, and Munob becomes bonum. The same habit governs a table’s left margin, where a six-letter code word alternates with its reversal. For the first Aries table, NISRAM is followed by MARSIN until the thirty-six-cell edge is filled. A feature that first looks like playful spelling therefore joins titles, vocabulary, and table construction into one repeated textual technique.

Dee’s memory that Zadzaczadlin corresponded to Adam helped connect a diary note with the surviving books, but it does not unlock every reversed form. Short reversals can produce recognizable Latin; the thirty-six tables instead use reversed seeds inside a larger rule. Dee was responding to an entire book organized around letters.

Source distinction

Soyga is a Latin treatise; Dee’s angelic diary books and Liber Loagaeth are separate manuscripts. A copied table is evidence of contact, not identity.

Sources and records

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