Annoyed at having been mistaken about the earlier, abbreviated version of Napoleon’s Book of Fate being the real thing, and having unquestioningly related the story of how Napoleon came across it in my earlier entry on the subject, I decided to do both a Yes-&-No Stones investigation and a Casting Lots investigation into the origins of ‘Napoleons’ Book of Fate. For those interested in seeing the results of my whole question and answer session, the PDF appears below:
For those not interested in reading the notes from my investigation, I’ll sum it up here: ‘Napoleons’ Book of Fate was devised in the seventeenth century, possibly sometime in the 1620s or around the year 1662 C.E., by an Egyptian occultist who was familiar with both the Chinese I Ching and the Sub-Saharan practice of Ifa. If not in any of those years, the author may have been 62 years old when he devised it and committed it to print. According to the Lots, the anonymous Egyptian occultist’s name incorporated the letters c, o, z, h, r, n, m, and o. After playing around a little with the letters, I arrived at the speculative name of M. N. Cozhor.
So really, we ought to be calling it ‘Cozhor’s Book of Fate’, and it was only around 137 years old by the time it came into Napoleon’s hands. Or so I think. Again, this is all just speculation on my part, based on what other divination tools I have on hand told me. But it’s a damn-sight more likely than the ancient Egyptian tomb story. Nevertheless, I think we are stuck with calling it Napoleon’s Book of Fate, as that is the name by which it became most well-known.