A closer look

Aldaraia, also known as the Book of Soyga, was a sixteenth-century magical grimoire filled with massive grids of random letters that obsessed the Elizabethan occultist John Dee, who believed it contained the ultimate secrets of the universe; he actually summoned the archangel Uriel just to ask how to decode the tables, only to be told that only the archangel Michael knew the cipher, completely ignoring the fact that modern computer analysis eventually proved the grids were just generated by a simple mathematical algorithm, making Dee the victim of a Renaissance-era cryptographic puzzle book