The Book of Soyga, also titled Aldaraia, is a 16th-century Latin treatise on magic, one copy of which is known to have been possessed by the Elizabethan scholar John Dee.

After Dee’s death, the book was thought to be lost until 1994 when two manuscripts were located in the British Library and the Bodleian Library, under the title Aldaraia sive Soyga vocor.

Amongst the 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.

It gets even better – according to the legend, revealing the secrets of the book would result in the revealer dying within two and a half years.

Modern researchers have had some better luck analyzing the over 40,000 letters over 36 tables in the book. James Reeds, a mathematician from Princeton who has also been working on the famous Voynich manuscript, thinks he’s figured it out:

Through a series of microfilm, Reeds transcribed on the computer all the 46,656 letters, with the aim of identifying the order that lies behind the apparent chaos.

After a detailed study, Reeds come across the startling answer to the puzzle: each table is based on a “magic word” of 6 letters, which constitutes the “seed”, different on each page; a simple equation allows to calculate all the letters of the square 36 × 36.

James Reeds notes, “The Book of Soyga’s preoccupation with letters, alphabet arithmetic, Hebrew-like backwards writing, and so on, is of course characteristic of the new Cabalistic magic which became popular in the sixteenth century.”

“Soyga” is “Agios” spelled backwards – the Greek word for “Holy”.

To the ancient author, it was essentially a mathematical rule to define everything that exists based on a single word. For the author, logically that word was the word for God – IEHOVA.

But the system is more powerful than that, and put in a different seed, and you get a computationally different “universe” of math as can be played with at this site.

As a postscript, it should be noted that James Reeds remains alive, defying the book’s legendary curse.

Via Wikipedia and The Book of Soyga.

Second quoted text via Blog of Wonders for some great info.