"The Shakespeare Forgery: Napoleon’s Book of Fate" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "The Art and Practice of Geomancy: Divination, Magic, and Earth Wisdom of the Renaissance"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 9
The Shakespeare Forgery: Napoleon’s Book of Fate
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On November
9, 1799, a thirty-year-old general fresh from the deserts of Egypt set his
conspiracy in motion, and by the following evening grenadiers with fixed
bayonets had cleared the deliberating chamber of the Council of Five Hundred at
Saint-Cloud. He was master of France. The coup of 18 Brumaire
launched the career of Napoleon Bonaparte as ruler, and soon emperor, of half
of Europe.
More than
two decades later, a London bookshop would offer readers the secret behind that
astonishing rise: an ancient Egyptian oracle, plucked from a royal tomb, that
the emperor had supposedly consulted before every great decision. It was a
sensation. It was also, from first page to last, a fabrication…
Napoleon’s
invasion of 1798 brought not only soldiers but a small army of scholars, the savants,
who measured temples, sketched tombs, and turned up the Rosetta Stone in 1799. Napoleon himself
slipped away from his stranded army that August, sailed for France, and seized
power within weeks of landing. Ever after, the general and the land of the
pharaohs were fused in the European imagination, and when Napoleon died in
exile on St. Helena in May 1821, London was gripped by a double fever of
Egyptomania and Napoleon-worship. Into that market, on July 4, 1822, came The Book of Fate, its
full title promising an ancient Egyptian manuscript, found in 1801 by M.
Sonnini in a royal tomb near Mount Libycus in Upper Egypt, translated into
German for the emperor, and now rendered into English by Herman Kirchenhoffer.
The backstory
was gloriously detailed. The papyrus had been found clutched to a mummy, the
tale ran, translated at Napoleon’s command, and so prized by him that he
consulted it before his most daring enterprises, until it was lost with his
traveling cabinet after his defeat at Leipzig in 1813 and recovered by a
Prussian officer. Kirchenhoffer was billed as a Fellow of the University of
Pavia, a Knight Grand Cross of a Sardinian order, and a Chevalier of the Legion
of Honour, and the book was dedicated to Napoleon’s widow, the Empress
Marie-Louise. Inside, readers found a fold-out table of “hieroglyphical
indications” that keyed answers to thirty-two oracular questions, most of them
charmingly domestic: will I live to old age, will my sweetheart stay true while
I’m away, will I retire from business with a fortune?
Nearly every
element collapses under scrutiny. Napoleon had left Egypt in 1799, two years
before the supposed discovery, and the French army he left behind surrendered
in 1801. More decisively, nobody alive could read hieroglyphs in 1801, or in
1813, or even on the day the book went on sale: Jean-François Champollion
announced his breakthrough in decipherment in September 1822, two months after
the Book of Fate reached London’s shops. As the Public Domain Review’s account
of the book lays out, its tomb narrative was lifted from a French scholarly
report of 1800, its learned history of oracles was plagiarized from a standard
encyclopedia, its “hieroglyphs” were crude sketches of well-known Masonic
symbols, and its questions echoed the French parlor divination games of the
previous century. The instructions even reassured readers that common ink would
serve perfectly well in place of the priestly blood the ancients supposedly
used. As early as 1823, one reviewer was already calling the whole thing an
“innocent hoax.”
So who was Herman Kirchenhoffer? According to the historian Kevin Dann, there was no such person. Dann attributes the book to William Henry Ireland, one of the most notorious literary forgers in English history. As a teenager in the 1790s, Ireland had “discovered” a trove of Shakespeare documents, culminating in a supposedly lost play, Vortigern, which was staged at Drury Lane in 1796 and laughed off the stage in a single night. Ireland confessed, spent the rest of his life as a jobbing writer under a dazzling array of pseudonyms, and produced, under his own name, a whole shelf of books celebrating his hero, Napoleon. Dann even spots what may be Ireland’s private signature among the oracle’s answers, a line telling the querent that he is cut out to be a rope-dancer, an image Ireland had used in one of his own novels.
None of this
hurt sales. The Book of Fate ran through about a dozen editions before
1840 and many more abridged versions afterward, including translations into
Spanish and Italian. Within months of its debut, the astrologer Robert Cross Smith, the original “Raphael”
of the famous ephemerides, rushed out a rival imitation claiming that its own
manuscript had been found in Napoleon’s cabinet at Leipzig. Herman Melville
gave a copy, as a sailor’s cherished “Bonaparte Dream Book,” a cameo in his
1849 novel Redburn. And
the book has never really gone out of print, reappearing in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries under titles promising “ancient Egyptian fortune-telling
for today.”
And yet here’s the twist that makes the Book of Fate genuinely interesting to an occultist. Beneath its fake Egyptian costume lies a method with a real and venerable pedigree. The querent makes several rows of marks at random, counts whether each row is odd or even, and records a single or double point for each, building a pattern that leads to the answer. That is the essential logic of geomancy, the divinatory art of figures built from odd and even counts, whose classic four-row figures yield sixteen combinations. Geomancy flourished in the medieval Islamic world as ʿilm al-raml, the “science of the sand,” entered Latin Europe through twelfth-century translations, and became a favorite of Renaissance magicians and, much later, of the Golden Dawn. Whether Ireland borrowed directly from geomantic manuals or from parlor games descended from them, the oldest thing in Napoleon’s Book of Fate isn’t pharaonic at all. It’s medieval, and it’s real.
There’s a
lesson in that for every reader of this column: a forged provenance can be
wrapped around a genuine tradition, and a genuine tradition can be smothered by
the glamour of a forged one. The Book of Fate sold because people wanted
to believe that history’s great men possessed secret books, and that those
books could be theirs for a few shillings. The real art it borrowed from,
patient, structured, and centuries older than the emperor, needed no such costume,
and it’s a subject this magazine will be exploring in depth in our Winter
Solstice issue on geomancy.
The Art and
Practice of Geomancy: Divination, Magic, and Earth Wisdom of the Renaissance
By John Michael Greer | Red
Wheel / Weiser
John Michael
Greer’s The Art and Practice of Geomancy, published by Weiser Books with
a foreword by Lon Milo DuQuette, is a thorough, traditionalist, and remarkably
clear handbook to the system of sixteen figures that Renaissance diviners
prized as one of the most practical oracles available. Greer, one of the most
prolific and respected writers on the Western esoteric traditions, organizes
the book in three parts. The first explains the history and foundations of the
art; the second teaches geomantic divination step by step, from generating the
four Mothers through the Daughters, Nieces, Witnesses, and Judge to the full
astrological house chart; and the third explores the less familiar territory of
geomantic meditation and magic, including ways of working with the figures as
tools of inner development rather than simply fortune-telling.
What makes it
the right companion for today’s post is that it shows readers exactly what the
Book of Fate was imitating. The odd-and-even marks, the single and double
points, and the patterns built line by line are all here, but with their true
lineage, their real symbolic depth, and a working method that answers serious
questions rather than parlor-game queries. Where the Book of Fate offered a
stage prop, Greer offers a complete divinatory system, along with the honest
historical context that the hoax so conspicuously lacked, rooted in the
documented history of the art as it passed from the Arabic world into medieval
and Renaissance Europe.
This is a practitioner’s manual first and foremost, and readers wanting a purely academic history of geomancy’s transmission should supplement it with specialist scholarship. Beginners should also expect to put in some practice, since mastering the full chart takes time and patience. But for readers who finished today’s post curious about the genuine art hidden inside Napoleon’s Book of Fate, Greer’s book is the ideal way to start working with it yourself, and a perfect preparation for our coming Winter Solstice issue.
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