What is Geomancy?

I thought I knew quite a bit about the different forms of divination, but until a few months ago, I'd never heard of Geomancy. It's not surprising, as this method of divination is associated with Renaissance-era astrology and Hermeticism, and those are things I don't know much about yet. All forms of divination pique my interest though, so I decided to find out more about it.

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First of all, to give credit where it's due, I heard about Geomancy on the Rune Soup podcast: episode 94. The episode gives a very good description of what it is and how it works, but I'm more of a visual person, so it didn't really click for me until I read the Wikipedia page and saw the images.

To learn more about Geomancy, I purchased this book: The Art and Practice of Geomancy: Divination, Magic, and Earth Wisdom of the Renaissance by John Michael Greer. Several sources I read said that this book was one of the best, and I do think it gives a comprehensive and clear explanation of the system.

But let's start at the beginning. Geomancy is unfortunately a bit of a misnomer. The name implies divination using earth, and can sometimes be confused with dowsing or with fung shui. It is thought that it originated in either Africa or India, then spread to the Arabic world, and on to Europe during the Renaissance. Originally, it was performed by making marks in the sand or dirt, hence why it became associated with the earth. However, as I will explain, it can be done in many ways that don't involve earth at all.

There are 16 figures in the Geomantic system:

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The figures have Latin names and complex meanings which I won't go into right now -- the Geomantic Figures Wikipedia page explains each figure in detail. During divination, the figures are generated randomly line by line. Each figure has four lines, and each line has either one dot or two. This is a binary system (odds and evens). They can be generated in many ways: by making random marks in sand, flipping coins, rolling dice, using marked sticks, a random number generator, etc. In Mediaeval and Renaissance times there were even specialised tools and machines which generated the figures. So the system is more about randomness than about anything from the natural world.

Four figures are generated in this way and are entered into a Shield Chart (so called because in the traditional shape it resembles a shield as in the first picture above). These four figures are known as the Mothers. The lines from the Mothers are then re-arranged to form four Daughters. The Daughters are combined to create Nieces, the Nieces combined to make Witnesses and finally a single Judge. By the time this process is finished, there are 15 figures in total. This is called a recursive process, as the original figures are re-combined and whittled down to create a single final figure. For a simple reading, the Judge is taken as the final result. For a complex reading, all of the figures in the chart (plus sometimes an extra sixteenth figure) are read. An extra-quick reading would be to generate just one figure, but that really isn't in the spirit of Geomancy, and I think might be frowned upon!

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When Geomancy was taken up in Europe during the Renaissance, astrological principles were applied to it to create a very complex system. As well as the shield chart, the figures were inserted into a chart representing the twelve astrological houses, and additional interpretation was made according to the qualities of each house. A geomantic reading could only be done by a professional geomancer, and the rich and powerful would often consult with them. While this historical detail is interesting, I haven't researched too much into this yet because, as I mentioned before, astrology doesn't fit very well with my worldview. Plus, I have to admit, it makes the system so complicated that my intuition just seems to switch off. However, there's a thorough explanation of this, with examples, in the book in case I want to delve deeper into it in future.

Of course I wanted to try Geomancy for myself, and decided on dice as a good way to generate the figures, because I love dice! Another layer applied to the system during the Renaissance was the four elements. Each line of the figure was assigned to one of the four classical elements (top: fire, second: air, third: water, bottom: earth). I thought it would be interesting to have dice in four different colours corresponding to the elements. Having all the dice the same colour would mean that it would be my responsibility to decide which die should correspond to which line of the figure, and that would take some of the randomness out of it.

It was actually surprisingly difficult to find dice in the primary colours! All of the usual dice shops that Husband gets his dice from (he's a huge gamer) were either sold out or didn't have all four colours. In the end, he had to buy a set of 10 gamer sets in order to get the right ones. A gamer set has 7 dice in it, so that's 70 dice just so I can have 4! The rest weren't wasted though -- Husband just added them to his extensive collection.

I found a box lid to roll the dice in, and the book also fits perfectly into the lid for ease of storage. I love these kinds of little coincidences -- it makes it seem like it was meant to be. I've rolled the dice a few times now, but I haven't generated a full shield chart yet. I will be sure to post about it as soon as I do, though. There are so many other aspects of Geomancy to explore, such as the role of the four elements, stronger or weaker lines, or adding up the number of points in the figures to divine additional meaning.