By.the same author A Narghile ofPoems The Search for Abraxas(with Nevill Drury) Techniques ofHigh Magic (withFrancis King) The Oracleof Geomancy Enocbian Magic Edited AleisterCrowley'sAstrology AleisterCrowley'sTao TebKing In Pursuit of Gold The Magical Diaries ofAleister Crowley The Complete Enocbian Dictionary 'Terrestrial Astrology DIVINATION BY GJEOMANCY Stephen Skinner ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL LONDON, BOSTON AND HENLEY Part one 1 2 3 4 5 6 Contents Acknowledgments · Xll Author's note · xiii Introduction · 1 HISTORY The roots of geomancy · 11 Raml and Islamic 'origins · 30 Fa, ifa and voodoo · 53 The sikidy of Madagascar · 71 European geomancy in the middle ages · 88 The Renaissance: the apogee of geomancy · 120 7 The great astrological revival · 140 8 Geomancy in the twentieth century · 156 Part two 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 PRACTICE Method and manipulation · 167 Generation of the Judge · 176 The sixteen figures in detail · 184 Practical divination · 198 Astrogeornancy . 204 Summary of technique and interpretation · 215 Astrogeomantic examples · 225 vii ix viii Contents Part three APPENDICES I Zodiacalattributions of the geomantic figures · 233 II Element attributions of the geomantic figures · 235 III Allocation of the geomantic figures to the Houses · 237 IV Times ofplanetary days and hours · 240 V Names ofthe sixteen geomantic figures in Arabic, Greek, Provencal, Hebrew, Berber, Malagasy, and various west African dialects . 242 Notes · 250 Bibliography · 257 Index · 287 Illustrations FIGURES 1 Origins and lines of transmission of geomancy · 7 2 Arabicmanuscript attributed to Tum-Tumvshowing a geomantic talisman for finding water (MS Arabe 2697, fol. 16, Bibliotheque Nationale) · 21 3 The expansion of Islam and spread oframlAD 635-760.· 25 4 Geomantic talisman against diseases of various parts of the body, from an eighteenth-century Arab manuscript attributed to Idris (MS Arabe 2631, fol. 64v, Bibliotheque Nationale) · 43 5 Geomantic talisman to uncover hidden treasure showing attribution of geomantic figures to compass points (MSArabe 2631, fol. 65r, Bibliotheque Nationale) · 45 6 Medieval geomantic manuscript of Geomantia Nova by Hugh of Santalla (Florence, Laurentian MS Plut, 30.29 (cod. 25 v.) · 93 7 The geomancy of Richard II 1391 (British Museum, MS Royal 12. c. v) · 113 8 Tabulae Humfridi Ducis Glowcestriae (British Museum, MS Arundel 66 ) . 11 5 9 The geomantic figures as portrayed in Henry Cornelius Agrippa's 'Of Geomancy' in Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, London 1655 · 124 10 Geomantic consultation by Simon Forman, 1597 (Bodleian MS) · 130 x Illustrations 11 Section title page from Robert Fludd's Utriusque Cosmi, 1618, showing geomancyas 911e of the seven microcosmic arts". 133 12 Two cards from The Astro-Mythological Game by MIle Lenormand showing geomantic squeezer marks . 153 13 The pattern of generation of the figures · 182 14 Planetary groupings of the sixteengeomantic figures . 187 15 Complete table of.geomantic figures and attributions.'. 196-7 16 Plan of a sample geomantic divination .201 17 Houses of Heaven · ·206 18 Angular,Succedent and CadentHouses .". 209 19 The geomanticfiguresdistributedamongstthe Twelve Houses of Heaven. House numbers are in Arabic numerals, geomanticfigures.designated by Roman numerals . 211 20 Zodiacal attributions using Appendix 1 (col. 2) . 213 21 The complete astrogeomantic figure including planetaryequivalents ·214 22 A traditional geomantic chart · 217 23 GeomanticchartWill-the proposedbusiness partnership be a success for me? . 226 24 Astrogeomantic chart: Will the proposed business partnership be a success forme? •... 227 Illustrations xi 3 Two divining chains (9Pt;1~). Left figure madeof f)p~l~ pods and brass chain with cowries at each end. Right figure cast in white metal with coins at each end. The left chain shows thegeomantic figure Qse-Ofun, the right chain shows the geomantic figure Ofun-Ose 4 Wooden Yoruba divination plate for responses from the oracle of Ifa 5 The figure adabara (Fortuna Major) obtained by sikidy and used as a charm to protect a village in Madagascar PLATES between pages.66-7 1 Two divining trays with the face ofEshu at the top, the lower tray with a set of sixteen palm nuts 2 The divining tray being used to. mark a figure. The sixteen palm nuts are in the left hand of the diviner and the tray is covered with wood dust Acknowledgments Acknowledgments to Helene Hodge who had the idea of writing an up-to-date manual on geomancy, to Beverley Lawton and Christine Galea who undertook the task of typing it, and to the staff of the British Library, Museum of Mankind, Warburg Institute and the School of Oriental and African Studies, for helping in so many ways. My thanks especially to Dr Nicholas Tereshchenko, Dr Donald Laycock and to Abdurahman ben Yahya who assisted respectively with translations from French and Arabic. Lastly my thanks to Eileen Castle for bibliographic assistance. The author and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce illustrations: Editions Bordas, Dunod, Gautheir-Villars, Paris, for Figures 2, 4 and 5 (from manuscripts in the Bibliotheque Nationale), Biblio- teca Medicea-Laurenziana, Florence, for Figure 6; the British Library, London, for Figures 7,8 and 11; Askin Publishers, London, for Figure 9; the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for Figure 10; B.P. Grimaud, Paris, for Figure 12, the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, for Plates 1-3, from William Bascom, Ifa Divination (Indiana University Press, 1969); the Frobenius-Institut, Frankfurt-am-Main, for Plate 4; Presses Universitaires de France. for Plate 5, from Andre Caquot and Marcel Leibovici, La Divination (1968). xii Author's note The word 'geomancy' covers two completely distinct areas. The original use of the word, dioinatory geomancy, was a technique which used sixteen figures composed of dots to foretell the future. Telluric geomancy is a comparatively recent use of the word to designate both the beliefs of feng-sbui (concerning the interrelation of man, his buildings and tombs with the life force, or cb'i, which flows through his environment) and its recently evolved western counterpart concerned with the study of megalithic alignments and ley lines. This work is concerned solely with dioinatory geomancy. However, a second volume on [eng-sbui and telluric geomancy is currently in preparation. xiii Introduction This book is aboutdivinationby earth: it is abook of the art ofgeo-mancy.The New English .Dictionary .defines geomancyas 'divination by means of lines, figures or dots on the earth .or on paper, or by particles of earth cast on the ground'. The word is derived from two Greek words, 'Yata or 'Yil·· (gaia or ge) meaning the earth,and uaureia tmanteia) meaning divination. The techniques of geomancyare many and varied.They include inspecting. the configurations made by scattered pebbles, the manipulation of handfuls of palm nuts or seeds (themselves born of the earth), or the making. of marks haphazardly in the ground with •.a stick. Divination by marking the earth or casting things on the ground also developed into the interpretation of lines or dots made more or less haphazardly on paper with a pen or pencil. Divinatory geomancy has its roots in Arabic sand divination, which. appears also in various guises as African divinatoI)T systems on the West Coast (ifa and fa) and Madagascar (sikidy).. The first chapter· considers their history in outline, while ·the subsequent chapters consider the varying ·techniques of interpretation in each area in detail. Geomancy has come to be one of the three or four great European methods of divination, like the tarot or astrology. It is also the most easily apprehended of the four elemental modes of divination: pyromancy (divination The geomantic figures and their basic meanings 2 INTRODUCTION by fire), hydromancy (by water), aeromancy (by air) and geomancy (by earth). Geomancy could be defined as the art of obtaining insight into the present or future by observing the com- binations of patterns made in the earth or on paper by a diviner allowing his intuition, or 'the spirits of the earth', to control the movement of his wand or pencil. To become familiar with the basic practice of geomancy let us try a very simple geomantic divination, using paper and pencil. First formulate a question and write it at the top of the paper. Place the paper at arm's Iength. Then, with eyes half closed .and thinking only of the question, make four lines of random dots, making as many dots as you. feel inclined in each line. Repeat this procedure four times, so that you generate four lines of dots. Next, mark off the. dots <you have made in each line, a pair at a time. Take each line in turn and you will be left with either: o if there is an odd number of dots o 0 if there is an even number ofdots. Starting with the first line, transcribe the one or two dots remaining. Below this, mark the one or two remaining dots of the second line. Do the same with the third and fourth lines. You have now created a geomantic figure. Somewhere in the sixteen possible combinations in the table below will be the geomantic figure you have generated. Look it up and read off the answer to your question. FortunaMajor - great . o 0 fortune o 0 o o Fortuna Minor - lesser o fortune o o 0 o 0 Via. - the way o o o o Acquisitio -- acquisition o 0 o o 0 o Puella - girl o o 0 o o Conjunetio - conjunction o 0 o o o 0 Puer - boy o o o 0 o Career - prison o o 0 o 0 o INTRODUCTION 3 Populus - people o 0 a a a 0 o 0 Laetitia - joy o o 0 o 0 o 0 Amissio -loss o o 0 o o 0 Albus - white o 0 o 0 o o 0 Rubeus - red o 0 o o 0 o 0 Tristitia - sorrow o 0 o 0 o 0 o This simple operation may· be extended by producing four such' figures which are referred to as Mother figures. From these" by .a form ofaddition,·are produced a further dozen figures. The final or Judge figure derived from them by .mechanical means, gives the answer. In Part Two this practical technique is explained in detail, together with its astrological associations. Here it is sufficient -to grasp the basic technique so that the historical chapters that follow make sense. 'The performance of casting the figures may well remind the reader of'.the yarrow stalk syst(:Jn ofestablishingthe hexagram for I Cbingdivination. The mechanics are less complicated, but the system is the ..•. same. The binary mathematics which govern both. the 26 hexagrams of the I Ching and the 24 figures of geomancy are the basis of the physical work of both divinatory systems. In this century when. computers now make many .of man's economic, political and commercial forecasts, it is easy to forget that these machines work on the same principle of binary mathematics as the infinitely more ·ancient machines of the TChing and geomancy. It isintere~ting to note that Leibniz (1646-1716) who is the father of modern binary mathematics and the algebra of classes, drew much of his inspiration from the Jesuit translations of the I Ching which were just beginning to reach Europe in his lifetime, and was quite probably familiar with Flacourt's work on sikidy, the geomancy of Madagascar, which was published in Paris in 1661. It might seem as ifgeomancy provides a very simple set of meanings with which to discover the answer to any 4 INTRODUCTION Caput Draconis - head of o 0 the o Dragon o o Cauda Draconis -- tail of o the o Dragon o o 0 INTRODUCTION 5 question, but these are just the beginning, useful. for getting quick answers to simple questions..The modus operandi described above is a very simplified version of geomantic practice, but adequate to introduce geomancy and itsfigures. Having outlined divinatory geomancy in its original fcrm.it is worthwhile to considerbrieflythe more recent applications of the word ·to telluric geomancy. When the Chinesestience of divining the presence of the subtle currents in the earth and their effect On" man was first investigated by Europeans, the Chinese term [eng-sbui was translated'geomancy'. Certainlyfeng-sbui· was concerned with the earth, but the .appropriation of a word .which applied to a divinatory technique to describe this practice was rather confusing. Around 1870 writers on the strange art of [eng-sbui began to call it 'geomancy' for want of a better name, 'falsely connecting it with the system -of divination which is completely different from its Chinese sibling.'Topomancy'or even 'geoscopy' might have been a much better translation of [eng-shut, the art of discovering 'dragon veins', the subtle telluric currents of cb'i whichthe Chinese supposed affected the propitious- ness of any particular site for building or burying. Stephan Feuchtwang, who has written the most comprehensive work to date of[eng-sbui in English, saysip. 224): 'I draw attention to the fact that Chinese geomancy would .be defined .more accuratelyas topomancy. ·It is not divination by means of an earth .or sand tray, which is the .rnost common type ofdivination to be described as geomancy.' However, as we have now been stuck with the name forjust over a century,'geomancy' has come to describe both dot-divination andfeng-shui. Once [eng-sbui began to .be· known more popularly in the West, .thehardworked term'geomancy'was applied to yet another study. Exponents of the ley-line theory, noticing superficial similarities between ley-lines and 6 INTRODUCTION dragon lines, christened their own work'geomancy'. There is however a world of difference between Alfred Watkin"s old 'straight tracks' connecting sites in England apparently on the<same ley-line, and the sinuous coilingsof the dragon veins of feng-sbui. Nevertheless 'geomancy' acquired yet another meaning. Finallyvthere .is a mention In Agrippa of .divination by earth movements: 'The first, therefore, is Geomancy, which foreshows future things by the motions of the earth, as also.the noise, the. swelling, the trembling, the chops, the pits" and exhalation, and other impressions thereof, the art of which •Almadel, the Arabian, sets forth.'! Polydore Virgil ascribes this .type of, geomancy to the Persian Magi.2 Livyalso wrote at length about the meaning of earthquakes, and their, effect on the destiny of Rome, referring their cause, to the .goddesses Ceres and Libera, and the god Liber. This fourth. use of the word, despite the observations "of DiodorusSiculus or 'Almadel .the Arabian'ipartakes more of seismographythan geomancy. 'Geomancy' has come therefore to have several meanings. We have, (i)a system derived, from Arabic sand divination, •• which developed into African systems of divination by earth,nuts and beads,and into medieval divination by binary mathematics north of the Arab world; (ii) an independent Chinese.method for determining the location, of, dragon veins in the earth; and (iii) ley-line theories "coupled with the interpretation of the siting of Megalithic monuments; not to mention (ivjseismography. In this book we will.treat only of the various systems of diuinatory geomancy. The geographical' dispersion of belief in both dioinatory and telluric geomancy is shown in Figure 1 to clarify the different origins, provenance and extent of these two subjects.! This map will also serve to elucidate the next chapter. INTRODUCTION 7 ~ >. 0 ~ -. >. Cd >. .... E u ::3 c:: ...., o Cd c:: 0) E 8 ~oO) >'0)...., .... ~Cd ~ u E Cd·- .- c:: .... >< ._ ::3 0 > =.... • - 0) Q. o f-l Q. ____ Cd PARTONE • History I · The roots of geomancy One of the difficulties of writing even a short history of geomancy is that. to date studies of its emergence in one culture have tended to disregard manifestations of the same divinatory technique in other cultures. Even within Africa there are few studies (with one or two exceptions, notably Rene. Trautmann, Bernard Maupoil and. J.C. Hebert) which even. appear to realize ··thatifa and fa on the west coast of Africa are ·exactly parallel with sikidy in Madagascar, and that both stem from rami, a common Arab .origin. The position gets worse when the question of comparison between African and European manifestations of geomancy arises. A classic example of such lack of cross-cultural information occurs in Lars Dahle's study of sikidy, one. of the more comprehensive works -in English to date.' When Dahle .comes to· assessing the work. of Flacourt on geomancy,.he fails to followup the references of his predecessor to 'the authors of Europe'..Flacourt, who was .much wider read then Dahle, described the sixteen figures of the sikidy by giving each its equivalent Latin name,rather than by drawing the. figures in full. Instead of looking up the many works on European geomancy, Dahle criticizes Flacourt for 'merely translating' the Malagasy into Latin, and proceeds to guess (wrongly) what figure each Malagasy term applied to. Dahle then satirizes Flacourt: 11 12 HISTORY He adds that 'all these figures have the same meaning and power as are attributedro-rbemby the authors of Europe'. As it would almost amount to an. insult to my readers to suppose that any of them are ignorant of what 'the authors of Europe' teach with regard to geomancy, I shall of course abstain from commenting upon .rhisvery conclusive information! He abstains from commenting because he has no idea which authors Flacourt refers to, or even. that .there was a flourishing European interest in geomancy contemporary with Flacourt's study of its appearance in Madagascar! There is nothing new in 'authorities' ignoring each other's .work, except that in the case ofgeomancy, many European field-workers •have not realized that geomancy was just as much apart of the undergrowth of European magical beliefs as it is of the North African Arabs, Malagasy of Madagascar, tribes of Benin (Dahomey), or of the voodoo .cult in the Americas. Furthermore, such a lack of'historical identification has also led to some false ·identifications, based on semantic confusion rather than a thorough study of the system concerned, such as thatof Chinese feng-sbui. Because so many geomantic works are anonymous, and because it .has become .. fashionable .among scholars to doubrgeomancies attributed to famous men (sometimes on no better grounds than 'so-and-so would not have written a geomancy"), in examining the written sources of this art I have for the most part attributed works according to the title .. pages of their first printed version, or manu- scriptincipit and .catalogue entry. 'In doing so, some will be falsely ascribed works, but this is a preferable course of action to listing unlimited anonymous texts of uncertain .date. Besides, in many cases of disputed authorship, the critics can suggest no more likely an author than the one they dispute. Finally, geomancy was not looked upon during the middle ages as the poor relation of the divinatory sciences, The roots of geomancy 13 as it has come to be, an attitude which has biased-many scholars. to thepoint where they look upon the subject, which was important in its own time, as below the notice of the great men of the period under. study - a situation rather similar to doubting that Newton was interested in alchemy, when in terms of written output it -farexceeded his interest in physics. THEORIES OF ORIGIN Classical references The earliest mention of the word is made in Archimedes (278-212 Be), in which he reputedly drew geomantic figures in the sand during the siege of Syracuse to deter- mine the outcome of the situation, but the nature of these signs cannotsatisfactorily be established. Roman divination by augury has sometimes been pointed to as a possible origin for geomancy, but this too is a red .herring, for the rules of augury have been carefully preserved for us by writers. such as Cicero and bear no resemblance to geomancy. The method of augury consisted chiefly in the augur using a crooked staff (lituus) which is free of knots (like a magic wand), to frame an area of sky or land within whose bounds an omen was to appear. He then settled down to watch and wait for a sign. The lituus, according to Livy, 'marked off the heavens bya line from east to west, designating as "right" [dextrae partes] the regions to the-south, as "left" [laeuae partes] those to the north, and fixing in his mind an [easterly] landmark opposite to him and as far away as the .eye could reach'. The augur 'next shifting the crook to his left hand and, laying his right hand' on the head of the person for whom the augury was performed, uttered a prayer to Jupiter. Within 14 HISTORY the bounds of this templum any natural phenomena now would be interpreted by the augur as a message from the gods. This interpretation of the signs, was extremely complex and, although some of the detailed rules have now been lost to us, it is known that the meaning of the appearance of specific varieties of birds in particular quarters and in particular numbers was clearly defined. Factors taken into account included the height and manner of flight, perch, tone of call, and the direction from which the bird came. Obviously this description is not of the' sixteen figures of geomancy, and so it is that when Marcus Terentius Varro (116-28 Be) speaks of geomantia he also does not refer to the present method of divination.? Greece Normally one would 'examine the ,etymology of a word to derive data on its origin. However in the case ofgeomancy the classical Greek and Roman uses of the word had only a general meaning which persisted throughout, the early middle ages to mean simply divination by observing patterns or cracks in the earth, just as the three other elementary methods of divination, pyromancy, hydro- mancy and aeromancy were basically techniques of divination by inspection rather than systematized mathematically based practices with specific rules, figures and formulations. As Paul Tannery, the well-known French historian of science, has pointed out." the Greek words"which now refer to this form of divination had in ,antiquity only a general meaning. In the middle-ages,in the West this name was given to an Arabic practice by the translator Hugh of Santana, who lived in Aragon in the first half of the 12th century. The later Byzantine Greeks did not use the word geomancy in this context, but called the practice by a different name which had been derived from the Arabic raml (meaning sand). The roots of geomancy 15 A translation of Paul Tannery's letter dated 15 June 1897 confirms this." Their exist in Greek treatises of geomancy, which are said to be translations from the Persian with the title 'oaunAWv rhamplionor alternatively 'pa(30AtOv rabolion which seems to indicate a Semitic route from ,,::3-' as in Byzantine Greek, the letters 1J1T are equivalent in sound to b. On the other hand this word seems,to be translated into Greek under the form Aa~evr'l1Pwv, laxeuterion, which is a Greek word meaning 'the stone cutter's chisel'. The metaphor is perhaps justifiable by the shape of the geomanticlines which will be a point of departure for further combinations. But I have vainly tried to find the Arabic or Persian word transcribed a.s rhamplionor rabolion and translated by the word 'chisel'. Nor have I seen either that geomancy has 'been designated in Arabic by a similar word, but this has relatively little. importance. To sum up, in such Byzantine Greek manuscripts as that of Georges Midiates (1462), rabolion is a Greek trans- literation of the Arabic raml which means sand, while the word laxeuterion probably refers to the method of divination, involving the poking of holes, which is an act which has been compared with chiselling a stone. As laxeuterion is simply a figurative word for the divinatory procedure, Tannery instead used the word rabolion when speaking about geomancy. With the exception of two anonymous manuscripts, the word geomantia does not appear in any Greek manuscripts on the subject, the word rabolion being much more common. Thus the etymological incorrectness of the word 'geomancy' is sufficiently established, The fact that portions of the practice of geomancy first appear in Greek manuscript, translated from the Arabic.s and not in any classical sources, indicate quite definitely that the practice was of Arab origin rather than Greek. This .is contrary to the usual line of cultural transmission (in which many of the Greek sciences passed into Arabic), but nevertheless supported by a number of facts which we will consider later in this chapter, and again in chapter 5. 16 HISTORY Persia Other origins have been posited for the practice of geomancy, often motivated by the 'romance of the East' rather than historical fact. One such study is the historical appendix written by Dr Alexander Rouhier in Eugene Caslant's Traite iBlementaire De Geomancie. Rouhier supposes that geomancy was established in Persia at least as early as the eighth or ninth centuries, during that epoch of Iranian culture which flourished at the universities of Conde..Shapour and Baghdad which attracted the intellectual elite of many countries. However, he does not educe any proof in support of this theory, merely asserting that the Arab and Jewish scholars who attended these universities, and brought various .sclences back to their homelands with them, .also carried the science of geomancy to the University of Damas[cus] , Alexandria, and eventually to Cairo. The. attribution of the origins of geomancy to Persia is shown to be completely false because all of the words connected with geomancy have come originally from Arabic rather than the Greek or Persian. The reason for this is that from the thirteenth century the Greeks were no longer in direct communication with the Arabs, and it is to Persia that they looked, on the other .side of the Turkish hordes, for the centre of the civilization and the science of Islam. For. the same reason the great authority on geomancy, az-Zanati is often called a Persian, although he is in fact a.north African Arab of the twelfth to thirteenth century. This false nationality lent colour to the hypothesis that Persia was the home of geomancy. India India as a possible origin is however harder to dispose of. The basis for attributing the roots of geomancy to India The roots of geomancy 17 probably lies in the reputed. authority on geomancy called Tum..Tum el-Hindi,6 The epithet has been thought by many commentators to indicate India as his birthplace, however eel-Hindi' was applied to a number of other writers including Apollonius of Persia (who certainly was not an .Indian) which in his case at least evidently meant 'the ingenious'. In addition, the word bindasi meant a geometer, arid hindi is more likely to have been an indication of the occupation of the person so designated, rather than his country of origin. The other half of the name, 'Tum-Tum', has sometimes been construed by ·French savants as a corruption .of Ptolemy. Whilst this is not proven, it would at least .tiein with the tradition concerning the Islamic derivation of geomancy through Idris, Tum-Tum and Hermes Trismegistus. This last mentioned line of adepts will be examined at greater length in chapter 2. Suffice it to say that India is less likely as an origin for geomancy, when the only basis for this ascription rests on, the epithet el-bindi. Medieval geomancies often claim a connection with India. One condemned at Paris in 1277 began, 'The Indians have believed ...', and several geomancies have been called lndeana indicating their supposed origin. Another manu- script in the British Library7 begins, 'This is the Indyana [i.e. geomancy] of Gremmgi which .is called the daughter of astronomy and which one of the sagesof India wrote ...' However it was almost as common practice to attribute a work of this nature to a fabulous country of origin as to a fabulous author, and although it is possible, it seems unlikely that India was the fountainhead of geomancy. Hebraic origins Daniel, the Biblical prophet, was in great vogue in the middle ages as the reputed author of various books of