MYSTERY OF THE MIDDLE AGES: THE BOOK OF SOYGA
During a time when secular texts were frowned upon by the Church, the mysterious Book of Soyga produced during the Middle Ages has yet to be fully understood.
It contains passages on magic and the paranormal that scholars until this day have been unable to translate.
The book, also titled Aldaraia, is most famously associated with John Dee (1527-1608), a noted thinker of the Elizabethan era who was known to dabble in the occult. In the 1500s, Dee was said to be in possession of one of the only copies of the book, and he supposedly became obsessed with unlocking its secrets, particularly a series of encrypted tables that Dee believed held the key to some kind of esoteric spiritual knowledge. This was no easy task, as the book’s unknown author had utilized a number of typographical tricks, including writing certain words backwards, and encoding others in mathematical script.
Dee became so fixated on cracking the codes that in 1582, he traveled to continental Europe in order to meet with a famous spiritual medium called Edward Kelley (1555-1597). Through Kelley, Dee claimed to have contacted the archangel Uriel, who told him that the book’s origins dated back to the Garden of Eden, and Uriel explained that only the Archangel Michael knew its secrets. Dee was given information he didn't anticipate, which was the book's secrets would bring death in two and half years to anyone who read it.
Unfortunately, Dee was unable to finish decoding the mysteries of the Book of Soyga before his death. The book itself, though known to have existed, was believed lost until 1994, when two copies of it were rediscovered in England. Deborah Harkness who was working on a dissertation about John Dee, traveled to the British Library, and found the books cataloged under the title of Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor. Until then everyone would look under "S" for Soyga. A second book was found in Oxford at the Bodleian Library under the same, alternative title.
​Scholars have since studied the book, and one of them was able to partially translate the tables that had so fascinated Dee. Beyond finding that the book is most likely related to Kabbalah, a mystical sect of Judaism, these researchers have not been able to decipher the book’s real significance.
One of the most baffling of the hidden texts is without doubt the Rohonc Codex. It is a centuries-old book that is said to have surfaced in Hungary sometime in the 1700s. This most peculiar script is written from right to left, and seems to mix up runes, straight and rounded characters in the style of Old Hungarian – but it defies all attempts at translation.
The document  has proven resistant to any kind of consistent translation or explanation. The Codex consists of 448 pages of text, all of it written in a still-unknown language.
​Scholars have argued that it could be anything from early Hungarian to Hindi, but it lacks many of the prominent features of any of these languages. Moreover, the alphabet features many more characters than any major language outside of Chinese.
Perhaps even more fascinating than the text of the Rohonc Codex are the 87 illustrations that accompany it. These depict everything from landscapes to military battles, but they also employ religious iconography that is unique to a number of different religions including Christianity, Hindu, and Islam. This would suggest that whatever culture the document depicts had many different faiths in existence simultaneously.
There have been several partial translations of the Rohonc Codex, each with its own unique results. One scholar proclaimed the document to be a religious text, while another said it was a history of the Vlachs, a Latin culture that once thrived in modern-day Romania. But perhaps the most popular take on the document’s origin is that it was a hoax perpetrated by Samuel Literati Nemes, a notorious forger from the mid-1800s. This idea has often been disputed, but though they have managed to prove that the text of the Codex is not just gibberish, modern scholars have been unable to prove the forgery theory wrong.
In 2006, a a mathematician, James A. Reeds used a computer to transcribe all the 46,656 letters. In it, he found an equation similar to those studied today in Chaos Theory. Once deciphered it speaks of a parallel universe.​ In essence it is a treatise on magic and mathematics. It includes incantations and instructions on magic, astrology, demonology, lists of conjunctions, lunar mansions, and names and genealogies of angels. The book contains 36 large squares of letters which Dee was unable to decipher.Â
James Reed, has lived beyond the allotted two and a half years. But is it because he just analyzed its structure, without venturing into its content or use?
You can download and read the manuscript for free. Book of Soyga (Download the free pdf book)