Learning another language was one way to approach an obscure manuscript. John Dee (1527–1608/9) also sought help from beings he believed had known its history from the beginning. On 10 March 1582, at his house in Mortlake, he asked the angel Uriel about a book called Soyga. The question passed through an intermediary, and Dee recorded the exchange among his accounts of angelic conversations.
The man keeping these records also advised navigators and collected books useful to scholars and travellers. His library at Mortlake brought an extensive range of learning within reach of people engaged in practical affairs. An obscure manuscript belonged to that working collection, although its difficulties had led its owner to seek an interpreter beyond the human scholars he knew.
According to the answer in his diary, Soyga had been revealed to Adam in Paradise. This was more than an assurance that the manuscript was worth studying. It placed the book before the divisions of language and religion that made the earliest human past so difficult to recover. Dee had in his possession, he was being told, knowledge from a world no ordinary chain of surviving documents could reach.
The reply nevertheless left his immediate problem unresolved. Only the archangel Michael could interpret the book. Confirmation of its extraordinary ancestry therefore became a reason to continue the inquiry, rather than an explanation of the pages already before him. The manuscript’s obscurity and the authority attributed to it reinforced one another.
Dee returned to the work of seeking instruction, preserving questions and answers in his records. The assurance of the book’s importance had not made its pages readable. His diary left later readers both the claim of a revelation given in Paradise and the unresolved difficulties of the man who believed he possessed it.