The Book of Soyga, also called Aldaraia, is a Latin magical treatise known to John Dee. It survives in two identified manuscripts and is famous for thirty-six dense letter tables. This reading room starts with the books and dated records, then asks what modern analysis has actually established.
Read the guides
Why a separate reading room?
Search results often describe Soyga as a solved angelic code or as another name for Enochian magic. Neither shortcut respects the surviving sources. Dee’s diaries show him asking about a book that already existed. The book’s thirty-six tables have their own manuscript transmission. Eight of those tables were copied into Dee’s Book of Enoch, now Sloane MS 3189. The copying establishes contact between works; it does not turn the whole of one manuscript into the other.
Jim Reeds reconstructed a systematic method for generating the letter arrays. That achievement lets scholars compare copies and identify likely transcription errors. It does not reveal a hidden message or settle how an early reader was meant to use the grids. The guides distinguish the reproducible pattern from unresolved questions about meaning, provenance, and practice.
| Witness | What it contributes | Limit |
|---|---|---|
| Sloane MS 8 | Latin Soyga text and thirty-six tables; close title match to Dee’s known book | No direct ownership mark establishes Dee’s hand |
| Bodley 908 | Second surviving Latin copy for variant comparison | A related witness, not Dee’s diary |
| Sloane MS 3189 | Dee’s Book of Enoch includes eight copied Soyga tables | It is a distinct manuscript work |
Begin with the records
Roberts and Watson’s Dee library catalogue addendum identifies Sloane MS 8 as Dee’s book or a close copy, while expressly noting the absence of direct ownership evidence in either known Soyga manuscript. Deborah Harkness’s first-person account describes recognizing the work in 1994. Reeds’s chapter documents the table comparison. These three kinds of source; a catalogue, an eyewitness research account, and an analytical study; answer different questions.
- Roberts and Watson, John Dee’s Library Catalogue addendum, entry DM166 (Bibliographical Society) ↗
- Deborah Harkness describes her 1994 discovery in a Folger Shakespeare Library interview ↗
- Jim Reeds, “John Dee and the Magic Tables in the Book of Soyga,” publisher chapter record ↗
- British Library catalogue, Sloane MS 3189, Dee’s Book of Enoch / Liber Loagaeth ↗
This is historical and bibliographic commentary. No modern translation or institutional manuscript image is reproduced here.