Napoleon's Oraculum

Napoleon's Oraculum (also most commonly Napoleon's Oracle, The Oraculum, and The Book of Fate) is a British lot book first published in London in 1822, the year after the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was extremely popular and had innumerable reprints from the year it was printed to modern times.

Authorship

According to the Preface, the original manuscript was found by Napoleon and his team during the 1798 expedition into Egypt. According to the story, it was found as a scroll of papyrus that was attached to a mummy found within a sarcophagus, which was itself found inside a royal tomb on Mount Libyeus, near Thebes. Napoleon is said to have had a Copt dictate its contents to his secretary who translated into German. These documents are then said to have been captured at the Battle of Leipsic in 1813 along with various other occult documents that were in his desk. The translation then passes through the hands of a family of patriotic Frenchmen before coming into the possession of Empress Josephine. She was never able to get it to Napoleon during his exile, and so passed it to Herman Kirchenhoffer, so he could translate it to English.

Napoleon's Book of Fate: Its Origins and Uses by Richard Deacon presents the theory that Robert Cross Smith and a Dutch man named Bakerstedht who adapted the book from a Dutch translation of the I Ching instead.

Usage

The Oraculum uses geomantic processes to produce an answer, but rather than 16 columns of four single or paired dots, the original used 32 columns of five. However, shortly after the first edition, an abridged version was published using the usual 16 figures of Geomancy. Regardless of the edition, the user must first choose a question from a numbered list. Once one is chosen, a geomantic figure is generated and a chart is consulted. After finding where the row on the chart which corresponds to the question chosen meets the column which corresponds to the figure generated. The symbol which occupies this spot indicates which page to turn to. Once there, the user once again looks for their figure, and there they will find their answer.

Legitimacy

Although there really was a 1798 expedition into Egypt held by the Napoleonic French, the likelihood of such a discovery having taken place is dubious due to numerous factors, including the nature of the answers not being appropriate for the time and place the manuscript is claimed to have come from, the fact that knowledge of the Egyptian hieroglyphs had already been lost, and the way in which the mummy was buried with the scroll, which would have been out of the ordinary.

Additional History

According to Deacon, the book was investigated in the 1830s and 1840s by various European intelligence agencies. The Austrian government is mentioned specifically, who apparently had their Military Intelligence branch check it for code. The British Naval Intelligence Division allegedly had an interest in the book as well, but instead concluded that it was something that was made with the intent of being disruptive to Napoleon's rule.