« 101: Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor | Main | 103: What Lies Beyond the Gateway » September 20, 2004

102: The Invention of Manuscripts

I'm still ruminating on the Book of Soyga (and actually managed to scare up a link to the actual tables from the book [well, corrected versions anyway]). The initial value of each table is a single six-letter word which runs down the left-hand edge (forward and then backward and forward and so on). The remaining letters of the table are generated using the formula elucidated by Jim Reed (with the first line utilizing a more rudimentary version of the formula). The first twelve six-letter words are reversed for the second twelve and the final batch of twelve are, well, something else.

It's this question of where things come from which has sent me scurrying across the Internet tonight. And, since I don't find much on the Book of Soyga's structure, I get distracted by discussion on the Liber Logaeth, one of Dee's other books; in this case, one that was dictated to him by the angels. The Liber Logaeth is nothing more than a series of tables and it is from these tables, it is said, that the Necronomicon was formed. Since the calls only utilizes somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 characters from the Liber Logaeth, the remaining 239,000 or so letters may have had other permutations and combinations. Some argue that the Necronomicon was one of these other permutations.

Some. Others argue that the Necronomicon was written much earlier and came into Dee's hands around 1586 while he was in Prague. Upon translating the book, Dee's scrying took a interesting turn and became more focused on the transmission of information between the angels and the good Doctor. If we subscribe to this route, was the information in the Necronomicon of the sort which allowed Dee to finally convince the angels that he could be trusted with their knowledge? Or, as is argued elsewhere, was it Kelly who had access to the Necronomicon and he used it to fool Dee into thinking that Dee was receiving information from the angels when actually it was just memorized passages from the book of the Mad Arab.

Of course, the Necronomicon is fake, right? It was an invention of Howard Philips Lovecraft and it was his "fiction" of connecting Dee with it that was an attempt to provide his mystery text some legitimacy. It's all a myth, really. Everything you know is untrue. It's all just a big lie, a story told to keep you wondering and to keep you scared.

Posted by Teppo at September 20, 2004 10:52 PM

Comments