Reading Room · Fortune-Telling Methods · Method
What was a Falnama, the Persian book of omens?
A Falnama is an illustrated book of omens, a Persian and Ottoman bibliomancy tool. A seeker prays, asks a question, and opens the book to a random page, where an image and a facing text form the omen to be read.
Facts checked on against 16 sources, 12 of them museum, university, archive, library, government or primary texts.
Key facts
Every line comes from a source listed at the bottom of the page. The small numbers point to it.
| Mid-14th to 15th century | Koranic prognostication was codified as tables placed at the end of Korans, and the earliest Falnama-i Jafar appears in Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi's Kitab al-bulhan, illustrated between 1334 and 1435.1 |
|---|---|
| 1480 | The British Library manuscript of Żamīr-e ḵosrowānī, written in 884/1480, is probably the oldest extant manuscript of a fāl-nāma.2 |
| Mid-1550s to early 1560s | The most widely published copy of the Falnama was made at the court of Shah Tahmasb, reigning 1524 to 1576, in Tabriz and Qazvin in the late 1550s and early 1560s.34 |
| 1614–1616 | The Ahmed I Falnama was assembled by the Ottoman vizier Kalender Pasha for Sultan Ahmed I.15 |
| 1660s–1670s | Jean Chardin observed diviners in Isfahan using large books of about fifty old illustrations.1 |
| 2009–2010 | The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery presented Falnama: The Book of Omens, the first exhibition devoted to these manuscripts.5 |
What the book was
A Falnama is a Persian book of omens, the name given to illustrated manuscripts that sultans, shahs and commoners used to explore the unknown. Falnamas were consulted in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey.635
Scholars describe the genre as a kind of bibliomancy. The Iranica entry defines a fāl-nāma in its narrower sense as a text used for divination by the reader directly or through a fortune-teller.27
How a consultation worked
The seeker performed ritual ablutions and recited certain prayers, then opened the oversized manuscript to a random page. The facing pages held an image and a text, and the image was regarded as the key to the omen's meaning.38
Each page paired an image, a joyful sun or an ominous villain, that served as a good or bad augury with a text giving a prognostication in list form. Interpreting the image meant linking it to the story it came from and to that story's place in the literary and religious canon.89
Falnama pages were often around a foot and a half tall, large enough for a small group to view together.9
Images and sources
Falnama images combined episodes from the Quran with scenes from the lives of Plato and Alexander the Great, along with stories from history and folklore. A recurring theme in the texts is the apocalypse, with signs of doomsday listed in order of expected arrival.9
The Koran served as the most important divinatory text in much of the Islamic world, and practitioners developed licit methods of consulting it that were later adapted for other texts, including illustrated Falnamas. Seeking guidance from God on specific issues was usually regarded as licit, while using the Qurʾān as a device for augury was disapproved of.12
Šams-al-Dīn Jovaynī, the Il-khanid minister, performed a tafaʾʾol on the Qurʾān shortly before his execution in 683/1284, as recorded by Maḥmūd b. Moḥammad Āqsarāʾī.2
Surviving copies
Only four monumental copies of the illustrated Falnama are known to survive, and the monumental volumes were made for affluent and courtly circles. Kalender Pasha's compilation differed from earlier image-based divination because its textual interpretations fixed the meaning of each image, so the seeker needed no intermediary.132
The Harvard folio 1999.302 belongs to a now-dispersed pictorial falnama probably created for Shah Tahmasp. It is dated to about 1555 and was made in Tabriz as an opaque watercolor and gold painting on paper. Its text side cites the Garden of Eden and announces that the rose of the seeker's desires has bloomed.1011
What the tradition holds
How practitioners describe it, in their terms. Described, not endorsed.
Massumeh Farhad, chief curator at the Freer and Sackler galleries, said Falnama texts were not religious manuscripts but expressed ideals such as prayerfulness and kindness to neighbors that the reader was meant to aspire to.8
Among the Ottoman court's bibliomancy, Hafez's Divan was consulted as an oracle, and Gertrude Bell wrote that his mental eye penetrated into provinces of thought that later ages were destined to inhabit.1213
Anatolian mystical thought held that Imam 'Ali predicted his own death and told his two sons that a veiled man would carry his coffin away on a camel for burial, a scene that appears in a Falnama of Ja'far al-Sadiq.14
What the evidence shows
What historians, scientists and controlled tests have found.
Massumeh Farhad and Serpil Bagci's exhibition catalogue and Cornell Fleischer's chapter on prophecies at the Ottoman court place the Falnama within a longer tradition of Islamic divinatory books and talismanic texts.1115
The Met's catalogue identifies the crowned rider in the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus folio as most likely the Roman emperor Decius, and says the folio would have faced a text page containing a positive augury.16
Fallen angels Harut and Marut appear in an Ottoman Falnama from Ahmed I's reign as a bad omen, and a Shah Tahmasb-era dispersed Falnama includes Satan among fallen angels.15
Worked out from the evidence
Not stated outright by any one source. It is worked out from the sources cited.
- The Falnama was a method of interactive bibliomancy in which the image and facing text were read together, so the book's authority lay in the reader's interpretation of a chosen page rather than in a fixed forecast.910
- Accounts of who first commissioned the Falnama differ. Some writers link the dispersed Shah Tahmasb copy to Malik al-Daylami as calligrapher, while others treat that attribution as tentative and point to Tahmasb's known interest in prognostication.11011
Not yet confirmed
- Which Falnama copies were made for Safavid patrons and which were made later in India or the Ottoman lands?
- How did the image-and-text pairing change when the texts were fixed in the Ottoman Falnama of Kalender Pasha?
Sources
Museums, universities, archives and primary texts first. Every fact is paraphrased and nothing is copied; Wikipedia is never cited.
- Internet Archive: The Book of Omens. Read on · Primary text
- iranicaonline.org: FĀL-NĀMA - Encyclopaedia Iranica. Read on · Reference
- si.edu: “Falnama: The Book of Omens” at the Sackler Gallery Offers First Exhibition of Rare Manuscripts | Smithsonian Institution. Read on · Museum
- metmuseum.org: "Muhammad Revives the Sick Boy", Folio from a Falnama (Book of Omens) of Ja'far al-Sadiq - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read on · Museum
- asia.si.edu: Falnama: The Book of Omens - National Museum of Asian Art. Read on · Museum
- asia.si.edu: Folio from a Falnama (Book of omens); recto: blank; verso: Angels bow before Adam and Eve in Paradise - National Museum of Asian Art. Read on · Museum
- thebooksinmylife.com: The Books In My Life : Falnama and Bibliomancy Cultural Traditions. Read on · Reference
- smithsonianmag.com: Falnama's Book of Omens: The Future Will Be Bright and Sunny. Read on · Museum
- daily.jstor.org: A Book of Divination for the End of the World - JSTOR Daily. Read on · University
- harvardartmuseums.org: From the Harvard Art Museums’ collections Day of Judgment, folio from a manuscript of the Falnama (Book of Omens).. Read on · Museum
- harvardartmuseums.org: Day of Judgment, folio from a manuscript of the Falnama (Book of Omens) | Harvard Art Museums. Read on · Museum
- thriftbooks.com: Fal Nama: Divination Book of Hafez of Shiraz.... Read on · Reference
- books.google.com: Fal Nama: Divination Book of Hafez of Shiraz - Hâfez - Google Books. Read on · Reference
- metmuseum.org: "Coffin of Imam 'Ali", Folio from a Falnama (The Book of Omens) of Ja'far al-Sadiq - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read on · Museum
- archive.org: Full text of "[Licit Magic - Touch and Sight of Islamic Talismanic Scrolls](https://archive.org/details/LicitMagicTheTouchAndSightOfIslamicTalismanicScrolls)". Read on · Primary text
- metmuseum.org: "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus", Folio from a Falnama (Book of Omens) - The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Read on · Museum