Sunday, July 10, 2016

The Universal Fortune Teller: Now Available!




The Universal Fortune Teller of Fortey's fame is a work vaguely similar to Napoleon's Oraculum- containing some of the same material (in not quite the same form) a full 24 years before the Oraculum was crafted, adding several new elements to the work and removing several others.

This specific work revolves mainly around the reading of tea leaves, palmistry, and a section on charms and simplistic rituals mostly involved with love and marriage.

Indeed, the Fortune Teller is itself based upon a similar work from 1790 by some anonymous author called "Universal Fortune Teller: Mrs. Bridgets Golden Treasury." This latter text is attributed to the "Norwood Gypsy" and contains the same prognostication for children born on each day of the week (omitted from the Oraculum; but I added it back for continuity's sake) and a lengthy astrological exposition included in the Oraculum in modified form and absent from the 1860 Fortune Teller.

The convoluted and interconnected content of these three works, as well as the second version of the Oraculum is interesting enough to warrant a future post specifically delineating the content.

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