Lesson One: Introducing Geomancy
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Welcome to the Collegium Geomanticum’s Geomantic Divination Course! In this introductory lesson we’ll discuss what geomancy is, explore a little of its history, introduce the sixteen geomantic figures, and present a simple method of divining with them. A set of practical exercises and study questions comes at the end of the lesson. The full course consists of twelve lessons that cover the full symbolism of the figures and the entire process of casting and interpreting a geomantic reading, including introductory, intermediate, and advanced methods.
Too many modern books on geomancy teach students to go through all the work of casting a chart, and then have them look up canned answers from a set of tables. This approach loses essentially all of the power, subtlety, and flexibility of geomancy; it’s no wonder that very few people practice it nowadays! Things were quite otherwise in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when geomancy was one of the most popular divination methods in the western world. These nearly forgotten approaches to the art are the basis for this course, and give the geomancer a set of divinatory tools that produce clear, meaningful, and precise answers to life’s questions.
The lessons are designed so that you can proceed at your own pace, working through them as quickly or slowly as you wish, with as much help from the instructor as you need. If you decide that you’re ready to proceed with the rest of the course when you’ve finished this lesson, the information you’ll need to enroll in the Geomantic Divination Course can be found online on the Collegium Geomanticum’s enrollment page.
The Art of Geomancy
The word “geomancy” comes from the Greek words ge, “earth,” and manteia, “prophecy” or “divination.” It was first used in late Roman times for one of the four elemental branches of omen divination – aeromancy, pyromancy, hydromancy, and geomancy, which paid attention to omens and unusual signs coming from the elements of air, fire, water, and earth respectively. In the eleventh century Hugh of Santalla, the scholar who first translated into Latin an Arabic treatise on the sort of geomancy we’re talking about, borrowed it as a convenient equivalent for the Arabic word ilm al-raml, “the science of the sand.” From then until the nineteenth century, when people talked about geomancy, they meant what Hugh meant by it – an art of divination using sixteen patterns of single and double dots, the geomantic figures, to reveal the secrets of past, present, and future.
Starting in the nineteenth century, the word came to be used far more widely, and this has caused a great deal of confusion. These days, if you look up the word “geomancy” on the Internet, you’ll find plenty of sites on feng-shui, the Chinese art of placement, and earth mysteries studies such as ley lines and megalithic geometries – valid and interesting studies, to be sure, but almost completely unrelated to geomancy in the original sense of the word. If you’re looking for
Geomancy was a very common system of divination in medieval Europe, but it wasn’t invented there. It first appeared in North Africa in the ninth century. Nobody knows for sure where it came from before then, but central Africa’s a good bet. Many African divination systems – the hakata oracle of the Shona and other southern African peoples, the dizzyingly complex Ifa oracle of the Yoruba of West Africa, and more – use the same basic symbols as geomancy, and trade routes across the Sahara made cultural contacts easy.
Whatever its origins, geomancy’s simplicity and flexibility quickly made it the most popular oracle throughout the Muslim world. It was called khatt al-raml, “cutting the sand,” and ’ilm al-raml, “the science of sand,” because most Arab geomancers used the desert sands as a convenient working surface. It became a part of everyday life and found its way into folktales; the famous story of Aladdin and the magic lamp, for example, makes much use of geomancy – a detail that somehow didn’t manage to get into the recent Disney version. Once Hugh of Santalla and other medieval European scholars translated Arabic geomantic texts into Latin, the stage was set for geomancy to become one of the most popular divination systems in the western world.
It’s easy to see why geomancy achieved this status. Astrology was also popular, of course, but in the days before computers, casting a horoscope required expensive books of planetary motions and a solid background in some fairly advanced mathematics. Tarot was just another card game; nobody thought of using cards for divination at all until the very end of the Renaissance, and it was the nineteenth century before tarot cards pulled ahead of the competition to become the world’s most widely used divination deck. Palmistry was always popular, but it’s difficult for a palmist to answer more than a narrow range of questions about personality and destiny. The same problem faced metoscopy, a now-forgotten method of divination that reads faces the way a palmist reads hands, and most of the folk divination practices common in medieval and Renaissance culture were even more limited.
In comparison to these, geomancy had immense advantages. A geomantic chart takes only a few minutes to cast and interpret, it can be done on a scrap of paper or even a square foot of bare soil, and anyone who can count, tell the difference between odd numbers and even, and work out the sums 1 + 1, 1 + 2, and 2 + 2, knows all the mathematics involved. At the same time, it gives clear, detailed, and easily interpreted answers to any question. If you’re used to divination systems that produce vague general answers, practicing geomancy may be a startling experience at first, because a full geomantic reading is anything but vague!
There are many other divination methods in the market these days, but geomancy’s simplicity, its flexibility, and its exactness still make it one of the most practical and useful divination systems in existence. It takes a certain amount of study and practice to learn how to use it, but the same thing is true for anything worthwhile.
First Steps in Geomantic Divination
The purpose of this course is to make you a capable geomancer – a practitioner of geomantic divination. As with most other things, the only way to learn divination is by doing it. The full classical method of geomantic divination requires a fair bit of groundwork, which will be provided in the lessons to come, but a simplified form will get you started and provide a foundation on which the rest of your studies can build.
The first thing you’ll need to begin work on geomantic divination is a question. Geomancy always starts with a question that needs an answer. A skilled geomancer can ask and answer any question the human mind can imagine, but for your first ventures into this very simple form of the art, it’s best to have a question that can be answered “yes” or “no.” Choose your question carefully, and think it through, so you can be sure exactly what a yes or no will mean. (This may seem obvious enough, but a surprising number of people try divination when they’re not sure what they’re asking, and end up puzzled or angry when they get confusing results.)
The second thing you’ll need is a method for producing “random” odd or even numbers. The word “random” belongs in quotes because, as we’ll see in a later lesson, the traditional magical wisdom underlying geomancy teaches that nothing in the universe is actually random. This is why seemingly chance events such as the shuffling of cards or the tossing of coins can provide unexpected insights into the unknown.
In the days when Arab geomancers cast their charts on the desert sands, the usual way to generate odd and even numbers was to take a sharp stick and tap on the ground with it, making a line of marks without counting them. Geomancers in Renaissance Europe often used a sheet of paper and a pen instead, and this remains one of the most popular methods. Simply put a pen in your hand and a sheet of blank paper in front of you, close your eyes, and make a line of marks. Repeat the process until you have four lines, like this:
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Now count the marks in each line and figure out whether the total number is even or odd. It’s traditional, and convenient, to connect each pair of marks together with your pen. That way you don’t have to worry about losing track while counting; you just have to see whether there’s a mark left over at the end of each line.
On another part of the paper, for each line that has an odd number of marks, put down one dot; for each that has an even number, mark down two. Stack the dots in the same order as the lines of marks. The result is a figure made of four lines of dots, with either one or two dots in each line. The example above produces this figure:
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There are other ways to get the same result. You can use a bowl or bag containing small pebbles, take out a random number of them, and count to see whether it’s odd or even. You can also roll dice four times, or flip a coin four times after deciding which side is odd and which is even. Anything that will give you a “yes” or “no” answer can be done four times to create a geomantic figure.
In any case, you’ll end up with one of the following sixteen figures. Each of these figures has a wealth of symbolism and meaning surrounding it, but for this simplest form of geomantic divination, the following table gives the important details. The first entry is the traditional name of the figure, the second is what the name means, and what follows is the basic meaning of the figure.
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Puer (Boy): Energy, activity, enthusiasm. Favorable for beginnings, action and risk-taking, unfavorable for all other questions.
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Amissio (Loss): Loss and letting go. Favorable for love, or any situation where you hope to lose something; unfavorable for other questions, especially for gain.
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Albus (White): Clarity and peace. Favorable in business, and in all questions except those involving violence or passion.
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Populus (Crowd): Neutral and passive. Favorable for moving with the current, unfavorable for taking any positive action.
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Fortuna Major (Greater Fortune): Great strength and victory. Very favorable in all questions, though there may be difficulty at the beginning.
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Conjunctio (Meeting): Interaction and combination. Favorable for contacts and meetings, but there will be both positive and negative aspects.
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Puella (Girl): Beauty and creativity. Favorable in all questions, but unstable and subject to change.
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Rubeus (Red): Passion, fierceness, and violence. Unfavorable in all questions except for sexuality or conflict.
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Acquisitio (Gain): Profit and acquisition. Favorable if you hope to gain something; unfavorable if you want to lose something.
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Carcer (Prison): Restriction, limitation, binding. Unfavorable in most questions, but favorable for stability and limitation.
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Tristitia (Sorrow): Downward movement, unhappiness, tears. Favorable for questions involving land, earth, things underground, and keeping secrets, but unfavorable for all other questions.
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Laetitia (Joy): Upward movement, happiness and rejoicing. Favorable in almost all questions, but secrets will be revealed.
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Cauda Draconis (Dragon’s Tail): Ending and departure. Unfavorable in most things, but favorable for letting go or bringing something to an end.
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Caput Draconis (Dragon’s Head): Entering and beginning. Favorable in all, especially for gain, and for starting new ventures.
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Fortuna Minor (Lesser Fortune): Swiftness. Favorable for change and anything done quickly, unfavorable for anything intended to last.
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Via (Road): Change and travel. A mix of favorable and unfavorable factors for most questions, but favorable for journeys and voyages.
Once you’ve found your figure, think about how it relates to the question you had in mind. A favorable figure means a “yes,” an unfavorable figure means a “no.” For more details, pay attention to the image suggested by the figure’s name. If you get Acquisitio, for example, the situation is about getting and holding onto something; this is good news if you’re trying to get a job, but bad news if you’re trying to keep from catching a cold. In the same way, Carcer stands for a situation where you’re isolated and restricted, like someone in prison; if you’re trying to get somewhere and Carcer comes up, you know that there are serious obstacles in the way, but if you’re trying to make something fixed and stable, getting Carcer is an excellent sign.
The full traditional method of geomantic divination starts out with four figures, not one, and uses those four to generate other figures that fill out the complete geomantic chart. Still, the process as you’ve just experienced it is geomancy in a concentrated form: using chance (or, rather, what we usually think of as chance) to form a geomantic figure, and then using that figure to cast light on a question or a situation.
In the early lessons of this course, you’ll be using this one-figure method exclusively while we explore the structure, symbolism and meaning of the sixteen geomantic figures. Too often, modern students of geomancy skim past the figures and plunge right into the complexities of the geomantic chart. As a result, much of the richness and flexibility of geomancy is lost or ignored. By concentrating on the figures one at a time, and drawing out as much meaning as possible from a single figure, you’ll lay the foundation for more successful divinations later on.
Exercises for Lesson One
The exercises for each lesson are meant to be worked through at your own pace. No two students have the same needs, talents, and schedules, and there are no prizes for speed; the goal is to learn as much as possible from the experience.
Exercise One: The Geomancy Journal
Keeping a notebook or journal of your geomantic studies is one of the most useful things you can do while you work with this course. You can use any form of journal you prefer, from a blank book to a private blog online. Your journal is a place to copy down your geomantic divinations, note the results of your exercises from this course, write your reactions to the study questions, and keep track of your experiences, feelings, and responses to geomancy as a whole. As you begin working out your own understandings of the geomantic figures, those will go into the journal as well. Start it as soon as possible, keep it up to date, and refer to it frequently as you work with this course; if you do this, you’ll find that your geomancy journal quickly becomes your teacher, advisor, and friend.
Exercise Two: Copying Out the Figures
While you’re learning the figures, you’ll need a chart of all sixteen of them, each with its name and the meanings given above. It’s traditional to copy it out by hand, since this helps fix the figures in memory. If you find it helpful, you can even copy the figures on note cards, note their names and meanings on the back, and use them as flash cards. The sixteen figures should become so familiar to you so that you can recognize them at a glance; this will help you no end when you’re casting and interpreting geomantic charts.
Exercise Three: Beginning Geomantic Divination
The two most important things you can do in the beginning stages of learning geomancy are learning the sixteen figures and their meanings, and becoming familiar with the process of generating them. The best way to do both is to start doing simple readings. The simple method just outlined is the best way to start. You can concentrate on one method of generating the figure if you like, or try several of them to find out which one works best for you.
It’s important to copy down each reading in your geomancy journal so you can learn from the results. Note down what the question was, what figure you got, and how you interpreted it. Later on, go back and compare your reading with what happened, and see if the event you were trying to understand casts any additional light on the reading. This is the most effective way to begin getting a personal understanding of the figures and how they relate to the world around you. Plan on doing at least ten simple one-figure readings before you go onto the next lesson.
Exercise Four: Thinking with the Figures
Another good way to work on learning the sixteen figures and their meanings is to look at the things going on around you and ask yourself, “what geomantic figure does this remind me of?” Sometimes the answer is obvious – a young woman walking past will probably make you think of Puella, a bright red car will bring Rubeus to mind, and so on. Sometimes the conections between the figure and the thing will be a little less obvious. Still, every time you relate the abstract patterns of the figures to something in the world of your everyday experience, you enrich your grasp of the figure and take a step toward making sense of geomancy. Don’t worry about getting things associated with the “wrong” figure; just draw the connections that make sense for you now. Do this until you’ve noted at least one thing that relates to each of the sixteen figures. Keep notes in your geomancy journal.
Study Questions for Lesson One
The study questions for each lesson are meant to challenge you to think about the material in the lesson. There are no right or wrong answers.
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What are the advantages to using a system of divination with a long history and a tradition behind it? What are the disadvantages?
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Look at the geomantic figures and their names as given in this lesson. Do you notice any patterns in the way names are assigned to figures?
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Do the figures themselves, taken as visual images, suggest anything to you?
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What did you learn from doing the simple form of geomantic divination given in this lesson?
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What did you learn from “thinking with the figures,” as described in the exercises for this lesson?
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Which four sentences in this lesson seem most important to you?
Going Onward
Feedback on this lesson, and access to the other 11 lessons of this course, are available only to enrolled students in the Collegium Geomanticum. If you haven’t enrolled by the time you finish this lesson, instructions for signing up for the course can be found on the Collegium Geomanticum website.
In the next lesson of the Geomantic Divination Course, “Fundamentals of Geomancy,” we’ll explore the meaning of the four elements in the magical wisdom that underlies geomancy, and begin working with the symbolism and meanings of the sixteen figures. I look forward to welcoming you to the next phase of your journey into divinatory geomancy!