The Western Gate

Zadkiels Dream Book
Zadkiel & Ebenezer Sibley
Troy Books

It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the content, to be cynical or sceptical. A 19th century book of fortune telling, and a dream dictionary with ‘one size fits all’ answers to all the prompts and keys revealed in your dream. Apparently. It’s not Jung, and , thankfully, not Freud. It could well sit alongside the parlour games type shelf of oddities. The original was 19th century, when table knockers were kicking tables with their shoes to imitate an answering spectre in the séance, when bits of muslin were being drawn from aghast mouths in mercury vapour photographs to depict ectoplasm.
There’s no harm in it. Is there?

I remember my dad coming back from Petticoat Lane Market once, somehow he managed to purchase and bring home 12 volumes of The Wonderland Book of Knowledge, bearing in mind, he walked and got the bus. A hefty set of encyclopaedias that I was fascinated with, the articles, the puzzles, histories and illustrations and, there was fortune telling. Yes, card reading et al. In much the same manner as Zadkiel.
If you take this seriously then perhaps it’s not for you, or is it? Imagine if the answers were in fact revealed in the naïve and stories for the gullible, that fairy stories actually held the keys, or that tea leaves showed inevitable fate. Who are we to dismiss things so arrogantly, that the world is round and revolves about the sun, that humans came from apes? what baloney eh?
Fiction is rooted in fact by manner of the observer.
Troy Books have reproduced the original Zadkiel’s Dream ‘dictionary’ as well as Ebenezer Sibley’s ‘The Popular Fortune Teller’ into this one volume, I believe these were reprinted in the mid 90’s, so I’m not sure what, which version this was taken from, I assume they’re all the same.
Therein lies perhaps a general concern, there’s no background story, who was Zadkiel, and Sibley, what was the nature and reason to publish these books, who were the clientele, how was it received etc. To be fair, Troy Just dive straight in… here’s the book, this is it.

I could say its a folly, worthless and cheap, an insult to us serious occultists who want to be taken seriously. Except I don’t care to be taken this way or that, and more’s the point the insulters do so in defence of their own inadequacies. At the end of the day, I love this book, I enjoy it as a curio and as a prompt. So, naysayers, be as the crows in Dumbo and mock me as you wish, I care not a caw.
Of course, I don’t agree with the one size fits all approach to dreams. I love spiders and serpents and bats for instance which would give, I suggest, an opposite reading to those who hate them. With regards to serpents for instance Zadkiel states, falsity, abandonment, treachery ! that’s not how I see snakes.
It can be ambiguous, one size fits all, we can manipulate and mould. But, it makes you question.

Sybly’s Fortune Teller guides us in Palmistry, body language, another selection of Dream diagnosis to compare~ though it’s pretty much a duplicate of Zadkiel, and charms. A jamboree bag, an assortment of sideshow antics from Gypsy Rosy Lee. Ah! tis innocent and enthralling. There is however much within that is testament to even modern methods, so as a quick overview its well considered. The book is a wonderful piece of ephemera, that despite its supposed short quaint appeal demands more attention than perhaps it should, but what do we care.
I really would like to know more about its history though, and the authors and the time it was first published and what the well-to-do and chattering classes were getting up to in their tea and cake soirees prior to séance.

Of Dreams.

As an example. I remember perhaps the first nightmare I ever had. I was about 5 years old perhaps, had just started school. I had a dream I was in the playground, myself and two others were drinking from cartons of orange juice observing the sky which was swirling most peculiar. At once it went dark and a woman’s face appeared in the clouds and began to suck everything upwards. I awoke, screaming of course.

I remember most, the face of the woman in the clouds, she had fiery hair and appeared as if she were in the throes of abject fear at what she were about to do. Many years later I saw her face again, in real life or at least illustrated in a Tarot Card, as the figure above the lovers in the VI.Lovers card, who ominously was also the herald of stormy weather. (See recreated picture of dream). I remember seeing the face on that Tarot card, “That’s her” I thought, and it really was, not just similar, that face was burnt into my memory, I never forgot her, it was her.

According to Zadkiel’s Dream Book, ‘Children’ gives a vague answer, in fact there are two entries for children, though one more particularly suggests childbirth. It says (of children) Success in trade? increase wealth. However to dream of Oranges, says insolvency and loss? thus each negated.
What is striking about this however is that on the Tarot Card viz.‘Lovers’ . The tree behind ‘Eve’ although descripted as the ‘Apple’ tree, they are in fact orange in colour? Spooky Scooby doo.

To analyse further the dream, Zadkiel then says, of Wind, to dream of Stormy blasts, trouble in all states, and crosses in love ? Sibley’s dream list agrees- Wind~ You will be crossed in love, by the way~ Sibley’s entry for orange, which I saw as significant, implies grief.
In general both Zadkiel and Sibley say, of Nightmares, that to have a night terror is to be ruled by a Fool?
It strikes me some 50+ years after this dream, and being as it was the first remembered dream I ever had, how archetypal it had become. I am the fool, the first passage on the progress of whatever path we choose- as it is on the first unnumbered Tarot card. However, again, am I seeing dragons in cloud formations, messages in coincidence, we could argue it’s all nonsense, so what are we saying. …No sense after all is the oblivion of being– which is the….., I’m digressing. This is what happens when you read these so-called novelty books, ‘every boys handbook’, ‘the wonderland of knowledge’, ‘The wizard of Oz’. Into the world of imagination.
I cannot live with a stated fact as my shackle, for facts change as surely as the Earth does revolve around the Sun, as surely as we evolve piecemeal to adapt to our environment. So I will enjoy the folly and the dance as the fool, and lovers cannot cross me because they are not ‘mine’.
I look at the palm of my hand, its a mesh of lines, thousands of them, all over the place, I’m not sure how Sibley will interpret this, but let’s have a look, why not, just out of curiosity, it cant do any harm….

Header Illustration- ‘Fortune Teller’- Charles D. Gibson. 1906