SOME TRANSLATION WARNINGS
Like the Oracles of Astrampsychus, the questions and answers in Oracle of the Sibyls Part One appear to have been written with the assumption that men would be consulting it exclusively. But the frontispiece illustration in Pratique Curieuse depicts ladies dressed in the fashion of the day consulting a Sibyl, so there was a visual nod to the likelihood that women would be consulting the book as well. You’re going to have to play around with the pronouns a bit. A few times, they appear to be referring to a he when they seemingly mean a she, and vice versa. And if you’re a female using this source, you’ll have to change the pronouns in a few places anyway in order to make the answer accurate.
I have tried to preserve the original phrasing of the book as much as possible. But given the nature of seventeenth century French sentence structure, I’ve had to do a little revision, word-substitution, or word addition for clarity’s sake. The list of names and their number value in the original copy was a long list of seventeenth century French names, so I dropped that section from my translation of the book and encourage users to use the alpha-numeric table on Page 12 of the PDF to arrive at the number value of the names you’ll use in calculating your answer.
Speaking of which, in calculating your answer, Oracle of the Sibyls asks you to take into account the number value of the person’s mother’s first name, as well as the first name of the person being asked-about, so you’ll be doing numerological calculations for two names.
Remember: for arriving at the day of the moon’s age, you always count from the most recent new moon, calling that day-one. Or you can look it up on-line. Each day of the moon’s age is given a particular number-value in this Book of Fate, so you want to make sure you’ve got the right day.
The final page of the PDF is an answer sheet for recording the questions and the answers you receive, as well as room for follow-up notes.
CONCLUSION
No two Books of Fate will have the exact same set of questions, or the exact same answers. Each has at least a few questions you won’t find in any other Book of Fate. For that reason, having multiple Books of Fate on hand allows you to browse and determine which one comes closest to the question you want answered. Book of the Sibyls Part One has enough unique questions to make it worth having on hand. You may never need to know ‘if the besieged place will be taken’, but a ‘besieged place’ today can be a number of things.
If you’re willing to be flexible in your interpretation of the questions and answers—and many of these answers will require careful thought on your part to discern their meaning—then you may find this divination tool of use to you. If not, I hope you see it as an interesting example of how divination tools and methods have changed over time to reflect the societies from which they sprang.
But I think I’m going to tackle tea-leaf reading next.
EXERCISE
Choose 2 to 4 of the questions, either for yourself or for someone else whom you’d like to ask about, and note the answers you get for each on the sheet provided at the end of the PDF. Know that some of these questions could take years to play out. Return to your notes later; you’ll know when. How close to accurate were the answers you received?
Pages: 12