Hemerology

In the Vizargird dēnīg, there is a hemerology in which each of the thirty days of the month (and each of the five days of the epact) is given a number of activities to be undertaken or avoided: mādayān ī sīh rōzag (MSR). The Pārsīg text is clear, although a few words are difficult to be correctly read.  Dārāb Pāhlan (≈ 1668 – 1735 AD) translated and put it into Persian verse in the end of his Book of Duties, فرضيات نامه, and gave the title of rōznāma to this treatise; his translation is approximate. 

Dārāb preferred this treatise to another hemerology in Persian prose in which the days are characterised as being good/ fortunate or bad/ inauspicious: “This detailed account of all (thirty) days is in Pahlavi (/ Pārsīg) and I turn it into (Persian) verse. There is in prose another commentary, but there are doubts about it. It is not approved by wise men (to say) that this day is bad or unprofitable and that day is good or profitable.”

According to a Christian missionary John Wilson the “another” type of elections, in Persian (صفت ِ سيروزه) or in Gujarati version,  was known to most of Pārsīs (of India): “There is, another Sīrōza [of a very different kind], however, possessed by the Parsis … It treats of the qualities of the thirty days of the month, as auspicious or inauspicious. Though its intimations are absurd in the highest degree, it exercises great influences over the whole body of Zoroastrians. It is so much regarded by them, that there is scarcely a family without a copy, and there are few individuals who have not the precepts written on the tablet of their hearts. On this account, as well as because of the brief information which it gives respecting the Amšāspands and Īzads, to whom the days of the month are sacred, it is not unworthy of the attention of the Europeans. It exists in the Persian language; but there are several Gujarāti versions, which are generally used.” 

However, the copies of this Persian (/ Gujarati) version are rare, and the learned Parsis, like Dārāb, disliked it; and even the first treatise was only known to a few learned Pārsīs. Dosabhai Karaka who has given an English translation of the first hemerology, made by Dārāshā Peshtanji Sanjana (and attributed it to Ādurbād), says that: “It is scarcely necessary to say that these precepts so laboriously framed by Ādurbād no longer form a guide to the actions in the daily life of the present Parsis. They are even not known to most, and this ignorance may rather be looked upon as a matter of congratulation than otherwise, for indeed, in these times of keen contest and feverish activity, there would be more disappointments than fulfilment of wishes in store for a faithful follower of Ādurbād.”

This short hemerology is found in the Admonitions of Ādurbād to his son.  It is not found in the Arabic translation of the HAM in the Jāvēδān Xrad nor in the Persian rendering of Dārāb Pāhlan, which leads one to support that it may be a separate text.

Tables of Choices

Bērōnī says, in his Chronology, that: “The Persians divide all the days of the year into elected  and fortunate  days and into unfortunate  and abominable  ones. Besides they have other days, bearing names which are common to them in every month, which are festival days for one class of the people to the exclusion of the other.”  And then he gives the table of elections. 

اختيار ِ روزها

The “Choice of Days” is a Persian hemerology that determines the propitiousness or lack of it for each day of the month with regard to a specific activity.

From
The Book of Choices

The first part of the Book of Choices of Majlisī is about “the choices of the days of a month”; in this chapter he gives among others the hemerology of the Pārsīs.
باب اول در بيان اختيارات ايام ماه است 

Hemerologies

Notes on some hemerologies ascribed to Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq

Bērōnī, in his Vestiges of the Past, said thus: « The Persians … have certain judgements regarding the appearance of snakes on the different days of the month. » And he gave an Arabic translation of a Pārsīg snake-calendar. In the Persian Rivāyats is found a similar text of snake-omens called Mārnāma, ‘The Book of Snakes’. Two other texts of snake-omens are contained in a Pārsī manuscript: One, according to the seven days of the week (corresponding to the seven planets); and the other, according to the twelve signs of the zodiac.

As J.J. Modi has said “the idea of taking omens from the sight of snakes on (the thirty days of the Pārsi month) is foreign to the view of the ancient Persians about snakes.” However, the “knowledge” of the third member of the Perso-Aryan society does not coincide with the knowledge of the religion. The scribes who came from this third class absorbed folk-beliefs and or gave freedom to their own imagination, and tried to compose a “Mazdean” ophiomancy. 

The xvarrah ī rozān ‘the Fortune of the days’ is the title of a Pārsīg book, now lost.

The Burjnāma, ‘Zodiacal Sign Books’ (Pers. axtar-nāmag*), is a small metrical composition in Persian. It describes what the first appearance of the new moon portends in each sign of the zodiac. In the Persian Rivāyats it immediately follows the Mārnāma.