Fal, Gematria, Abjad, Adorno, Death and the Compass

Working in a Turkish office with Turkish women, I often see people getting their Fal read. Fal is when someone ominously stares into the dry grounds pooled at the bottom of someone's else's cup of Turkish coffee and deciphers their fortune, love, work life, family, all there in the muck. I don't know what symbols Turks use when they look into the fal, because not anyone can do it. When someone mentions they read Fal, people act surprised and excited like if someone said "I'm a hairdresser, and I work for free". Then they all brew a cup of coffee, and wait impatiently for it to dry so that it can be read. The Falci (fortune teller) then stares, narrates, swirls the grounds a bit, narrates, and of course all in a hushed seriousness.
but I thought, as Adorno says, a “climate of semi-erudition is the fertile breeding ground for astrology”, and being semi-erudite, that I should give it a try. One time at a party with students I claimed that I could read Fal, and two minutes a later a cup had been drank and was sitting upside-down on its saucer waiting to dry. I pulled it up off the saucer, squinted, hemmed and hawed, moved the cup closer to the light. It's basically like seeing shapes in clouds. I saw two ghouls grabbing at each others throats, and mentioned something vague about a cat fight, which apparently was spot on. My reputation was sealed. I've had my fal read to and have learned from the falci that the only accreditation you need is a furrowed brow.
I think that is interesting how much Fal reading goes on here, and how it is both done at cafes. When you walk by they often have a sign that says "kahve sizden, fal bizden" (the coffees on you, the fortune telling is on us). Fal is also read between friends at cafes, offices and at home. One time I had a student who worked in International finance tell me that she and her husband had gone to have theirs read and this women who specialized in the all-too-real minutiae of currency swapping said the Falci shocked her into belief with what she said.
Adorno says this all comes from the drabness of consumer capitalism, and I think in a way consumerism is still relatively new to Turkey (I've heard you couldn't buy marlboro cigarettes until the 80's) and you could compare 1950's California to the excitement for consumerism here, but fal reading seems sort of harmless compared to his likening of the occult to fascism. Besides, it's not reader's digest housewives who do it, I've seen a feminist Freudian do it. I especially don't see the link between Fal and Fascism because people simply don't take it seriously. It's just something to do when you're bored in the office. I think it is more like the Zizekian object that believes in our stead. Anywho.
So I read my co-workers fal this morning (after declaring my oracle-like accuracy) and when I pulled up her cup I saw a rushing river splitting at a fork "there will be an important decision to make in your near future but you will not have much time to decide" and waited for her reaction. 'What will the decision be about?' I looked at the base of the river, and there, in plain sight, were four letters in Hebrew. Sure it was a stretch on two of them, but the Gimmel was sitting there, carved in coffee grounds, clear as day. I mentioned to her my casual relationship with Gematria (the idea that each letter in the Hebrew alphabet corresponds to a number and that deciphering those numbers can lead to mystical results) and said we should look at the letters to see what her future held.
(on a side note, I once read this fantastic article( Irvin Cemil Schick: the iconicity of Islamic Calligraphy in Turkey) about how the changing of the Turkish alphabet to roman instead of Arabic letters cut Turks off from a religious, literary, and mystical heritage. In one example it showed a Hilye (written description of the Prophet Muhammed (you know, since you can't draw him) which incorporated both letters that physically resembled things like ladders to heaven as well as complexly coded Abjad numerology (sort of the Islamic version of Gematria). The point being that I wonder how popular Islamic numerology would be in an alternate universe without Ataturk where Turkish was still written in Arabic numbers)
So the letters I saw were Aleph, Tav, Gimmel, and Lamed.
לגתא
which adds up to 434, which didn't have any significance to her, and I couldn't think of anything, so we looked up the word itself, which in Aramaic means plate or dish. Then we thought about all that that could mean. "something could be offered to you on a plate, you know like presented easily, but you will still have to decide quickly" "the decision will have to do with food". But I warned her, in order to add the ominous tone that makes any fal reading more credible, to not over think things or to pursue the mysteries of Gematria too much like Lönnrot does in "the death and Compass" and in which he is led by his cleverness into his own murder. I thought about the story and thought that when I read fal I should say really Kabbalistic things like "The second letter of the name has been uttered" or even better, from now on when I read Fal I'll use Abjad to spice things up. I'll sullenly look into their cup and then pronounce in Arabic (your one-stop shopping for mystifying a Turk)

في كل كتاب سر، وسره في القرآن فواتح القرآن

For every book there is a secret and all of its secrets are in the Qur`an in the

opening letters of the chapters

Now if someone read my fortune I hope they could divine that I have a bright future in charlatanism.