![]() ![]() ![]() Nowadays, though, you can even go to a webpage that will happily generate a Soyga-style table from your own keyword, with the algorithm worked out by Reeds implemented by a tiny bit of nondescript-looking JavaScript magic. Reeds’ paper John Dee and the Magic Tables in the Book of Soyga revealed the (actually quite straightforward) secrets of these tables, and tried to put them into context of the Christian Cabalistic tradition that was evolving around that time, as evidenced by the broadly similar tables in the books by Trithemius and Agrippa (and later by Thomas Harriot, though to a much lesser degree). Here’s a nice recent picture of him from Klaus Schmeh and : ![]() Yet it was historical cryptologer Jim Reeds who finally intuited the formulae and algorithm by which the tables were numerically generated from a keyword. ![]() Dee had pondered greatly over the book’s mysterious tables ( though apparently without success, if we take his diaries at face value), and had even copied eight of them into his own books. The story of how two remaining copies of the Book of Soyga (one owned by John Dee) were uncovered in 1994 by Deborah Harkness has become fairly well known – I covered it here back in 2008. ![]()
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