The origin of the auxiliary function f in the Book of Soyga's 36 letter-tables — open since Jim Reeds's analysis of their construction (in Clucas, ed. , John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought, Springer 2006, doi: 10. 1007/1-4020-4246-9₁0) — is identified as the book's own letter-value system, stated in verse in Section 18 of the text: f (W) = V (W) − 1 (mod 23), exact for all 23 letters of the book's 23-letter alphabet, with one uniform constant and zero free parameters. The identity regenerates all 36 tables (46, 656 cells). Corroboration: the same values are load-bearing in the book's prose arithmetic (PATER CREATOR = 140; porta paradis = 132, independently forcing d = 29), and a blinded replication — a reviewer given only Reeds's empirical f and the raw text of Kupin's 2014 edition — rediscovered the verse and the identity unaided. The book's own prose further specifies the tables' use (a scrying mirror, §26. 1; a spirit-binding grid, §27), answering in the operative register the question John Dee put to the angel Uriel on 10 March 1581/2. Includes the full findings dossier, verification code with test suite, and the adversarial review record including five published self-corrections.
Jason Louv (Mon,) studied this question.