This story must be considered apocryphal, given that it was during this same invasion of Egypt the Rosetta Stone was discovered. The Rosetta Stone was the artifact which enabled scholars to finally be able to translate the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs into a modern, understandable language. But it took twenty years of effort by scholars before anyone hit on the key to translating them, by which time Napoleon was out of the picture. Maybe the Coptic scholar knew ancient Egyptian, but…
Anyway, Napoleon kept his copy of this Book of Fate in what he dubbed his ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ and he never failed to consult it before making every major decision. He also kept a diary of questions he had asked of this oracle, and the answers he received. This was helpful, because when he was forced to a sudden retreat at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 C.E., leaving his personal equipage behind, the Prussian officer who found Napoleon’s Book of Fate in his cabinet of curiosities also found the diary, and was able to tell that the Book of Fate had never steered Napoleon wrong. After Napoleon’s death, the Prussian officer presented the Book of Fate to Napoleon’s widow, the Empress Marie Louise, who allowed him to publish it in 1821 under the title Napoleon’s Book of Fate. This edition can still be found in electronic format at InternetArchive.org.
SKEPTICISM SETS IN
I have Walter Brown Gibson, author of The Complete Illustrated Book of Divination and Prophecy, to thank for my awareness of the existence of the full version of Napoleon’s Book of Fate. It was Gibson who noted that, given the history of the Rosetta Stone, Napoleon couldn’t have had the ancient manuscript translated into German when he reportedly did. Gibson speculated the text actually came from further East, and probably no further back than the Middle Ages in Europe. The ancient Egyptian tomb story was probably concocted to give the Book of Fate a certain mystique or glamour, since Napoleon’s campaign into Egypt made all-things-Egyptian, all-the-rage in Europe in the very early nineteenth century. Gibson further noted the type of questions and answers in the Book of Fate are more reflective of the concerns of the Napoleonic Era than the likely concerns of the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt.