Use
As you will see from the PDF file attached below, this Book of Fate consists of seventeen pages of charts. The first page contains sixteen possible questions to pose to the oracle, and the answer-table (called the ‘oraculum’) to the right of those questions. The following sixteen pages of charts, lettered A through Q, contain the answer tables. This is the half-sized version of the full-length Napoleon’s Book of Fate. I will cover the full-length Napoleon’s Book of Fate at some point, in a future lesson. For now, this one may be used with some degree of effectiveness.
The list of questions is rather limited, not to mention antiquated, so you may have to interpret some of them rather liberally. For instance, question 14, “will the prisoner be released?” can be a question asked about someone with an addiction, since addiction is it’s own sort of prison. The list of answers is also rather limited, since each question has only sixteen answers. That having been said, this ‘Book of Fate’ is not completely useless. Some of these questions you can ask frequently. A few of them, you may only ask once or twice in a lifetime. In my version which I’ve attached below, I’ve tried to modernize some of the language, because it’s written in early nineteenth-century-speak and comes from an early nineteenth-century perspective. But I’ve also tried to respect the original phrasing, where possible.
One more thing about Napoleon’s Book of Fate: according to the lore which accompanies this oracle, there are certain days of the year when this divination tool should not be consulted at all, and I am attaching here a chart with the days in question:
NapoleonsBookofFateDoNotConsultChart
Why the Book of Fate cannot be consulted on these dates has never been made clear; its just one of those rules which was attached to this oracle, possibly as the result of someone’s trial-and-error. So enjoy this divination tool, in spite of its limitations, and may it bring you the similar good fortune it brought Napoleon–before he lost it when he was suddenly forced into a retreat, that is.