The Book That Won't Speak: The Mystery of Soga
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In an age when the Church cast a wary eye on secular knowledge, a strange and unsettling manuscript emerged from the shadows of the Middle Ages—the Book of Soyga.
Its pages whisper of magic, hidden forces, and things not meant to be known. Even now, parts of the text resist translation, defying scholars who have spent centuries trying to unlock its meaning. What secrets lie buried within its coded passages—and why do they refuse to be understood?
The book—also known as Aldaraia—is most closely linked to John Dee, the enigmatic thinker of the Elizabethan age who moved as easily through mathematics as he did the occult..He was an astronomer and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I since her accession to the throne in 1558. He helped her select her coronation date. Besides astrology he spent much of his time on alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophosy.
By the 1500s, Dee possessed what may have been one of the only surviving copies. He became consumed by it—drawn to a series of cryptic tables he believed concealed profound, possibly dangerous, spiritual knowledge.
Deciphering them proved nearly impossible. The unknown author had buried meaning beneath layers of distortion—words written backward, symbols disguised in mathematical forms, and patterns that seemed to shift the longer one studied them.
Dee’s obsession deepened. In 1582, he traveled across Europe to meet Edward Kelley, a controversial medium said to commune with unseen forces. Through Kelley, Dee claimed contact with the archangel Uriel. The message was as unsettling as it was extraordinary: the book, Uriel said, originated in the Garden of Eden—and its secrets were known only to the archangel Michael.
Kelley’s vision could be doubted since in 1587, at a spiritual conference in the Kingdom of Bohemia, Kelley told Dee that the angel Uriel had ordered the men to share all their possessions, including their wives.
Kelley also reveled a warning from Uriel that turned out to be inaccurate. The knowledge within the book, Dee was told, would bring death to any who fully uncovered it—within two and a half years. Due to this, the manuscript earned the moniker Soyga: The Book that Kills.
Dee never finished the task of deciphering the book. After Elizabeth’s death in 1603 and the accession of James I, Dee was largely ignored and died in poverty in Mortlake, London. The Book of Soyga slipped into obscurity after his death, its fate unknown—until 1994, when two copies resurfaced in England. Deborah Harkness, researching Dee at the British Library, uncovered the text hidden under an alternate title: Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor (translates to I am called Aldaraia, or Soyga). Another copy lay quietly in the Bodleian Library, similarly misfiled—overlooked for centuries.
Modern scholars have tried to unravel its secrets. Some progress has been made; the mysterious tables that obsessed Dee have been partially decoded. Yet beyond hints of connections to Kabbalah, the book’s true purpose remains hidden—its meaning just out of reach.
And then there is another enigma.
The Rohonc Codex—a manuscript that surfaced in Hungary in the 18th century—echoes the same unsettling silence. Written in an unknown script of over 448 pages, it resists every attempt at translation. Its symbols resemble fragments of known languages—Old Hungarian, runic forms—but align with none. Its alphabet contains more characters than almost any known language, as though it was never meant to be read by ordinary minds.
Its illustrations deepen the mystery: 87 haunting images depicting battles, landscapes, and rituals. Religious symbols from Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam appear side by side, suggesting a culture—or a vision—where belief systems collide or coexist in ways we do not understand.
It contains references to astrology, demonology, angelic hierarchies, planetary conjunctions, and lunar mansions.
Interpretations vary wildly. Some call it a sacred text. Others claim it chronicles lost civilizations. A more skeptical theory points to Samuel Literati Nemes, a known 19th-century forger—but even this explanation falls short. The text is too complex, too structured, to dismiss as meaningless fabrication.
In 2006, mathematician James A. Reeds used computational analysis to map the book’s staggering 46,656-letter structure. What emerged hinted at patterns resembling those studied in Chaos Theory—systems that appear random but conceal hidden order. Some interpretations suggest references to parallel realities, as if the text gestures toward something beyond our own world.
At its core, the Book of Soyga reads like a fusion of magic and mathematics: incantations, astrological alignments, angelic hierarchies, and cryptic instructions woven into its pages. At its center lie 36 great lettered squares—structures Dee himself could never unlock.
Reeds lived well beyond the fateful two-and-a-half-year warning.
But perhaps he only traced the surface—mapping the structure without ever stepping into whatever lies beneath.
You can download and read the manuscript for free. Book of Soyga (Download the free pdf book).
