The Public Domain Review’s collection on the Mâr-Nâmeh — a late-15th-century Zoroastrian Persian text that lists the thirty days of the Zoroastrian calendar and what seeing a snake on each day portends. The contradiction at its heart is what makes it fascinating: Zoroastrians held snakes in absolute contempt. Snakes are khrafstar — the baneful spawn of Ahriman, the sole origin of evil — and killing one was meritorious; the “snake-killer” stick even doubled as the instrument for punishing criminals. Yet the book is full of auspicious snake omens: “If you see a snake on the day of Sheherivar, you will soon find an absent friend in your arms.” Scholars suspect echoes of pre-Zoroastrian snake veneration (Martina Palladino: “in pre-Zoroastrian Iran, these animals were not perceived negatively”) or Egyptian influence on the text. The source is a 1911 Bombay anthropological lecture by British surgeon George Waters, who translated the text with footnotes; the original scan lives on the Internet Archive, public domain. Like the poems of Hafez and Turkish coffee grounds, the book’s favorable omens were a source of solace in divination — even if you’d just stumbled on some fork-tongued fiend.
The Persian Mâr-Nâmeh, or The Book for Taking Omens from Snakes — Public Domain Review
A 15th-century Zoroastrian divination manual that reads snake sightings as good omens — from a religion that taught its followers to kill snakes on sight.