In 1892, George Waters — a British surgeon and president of the Bombay Anthropological Society — delivered a lecture on an esoteric Persian manuscript: the Marnameh, or “Book for Taking Omens from Snakes.” Written in the late 15th century, it belongs to the Zoroastrian revayat tradition: opinionated narrations on religious and practical matters, not scripture but authoritative enough to consult for divination.
The text lists the thirty days of the Zoroastrian calendar and what the sighting of a snake portends on each.
- Some omens are dark: snakes as creatures of Ahriman (the evil principle), to be killed on sight with a dedicated “snake-killer” stick
- Many are surprisingly positive: seeing a snake on Sheherivar’s day means you will “find an absent friend in your arms”; on Zamyad’s day, you obtain “justice from the Creator”
- The Shahnameh epic features Zahhak, a demon-king with snakes growing from his shoulders who terrorizes Iran
- Plutarch and Agathias both noted the Zoroastrian classification of creatures into gospand (good) and khrafstar (evil)
The contradiction is the whole point. Zoroastrians loathed snakes, yet the Marnameh offers good omens. Waters speculated Egyptian influence; philologist Martina Palladino suggests the positive associations may be echoes of pre-Zoroastrian Iranian beliefs, before snakes were demonized. Either way, the text preserves a folk practice that existed alongside — and partly at odds with — established doctrine.
Like Hafez divination or Turkish coffee readings, the Marnameh offered ordinary people a way to find meaning in random encounters. “After all,” as Joobin Bekhrad notes in the PDR essay, “who would not want the ‘revolving heavens’ to fulfill their wishes — especially after stumbling upon some fork-tongued fiend?”