Arcanist's Guidebook Tarot · Runes · Astrology · Ritual · Shem

Geomancy

Sourcing & Approach
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Geomancy is divination by the earth: sixteen figures, each made of four rows of single or double points, cast without counting and read through the twelve houses of the heavens. This module presents the figures, their attributions, their judgments in each house, and the full scheme of Mothers, Daughters, Nephews, Witnesses and Judge.

  • Israel Regardie (ed.)The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic. The geomancy papers: Volume 2's Notes on Geomancy; Volume 3's zodiacal attributions; Volume 5's Geomantic Talismanic Symbols, attribution tables, qualities of the figures, and the divinatory method.
  • S.R.M.D. (S. L. MacGregor Mathers) — the Volume 5 material, itself compiled from Christopher Cattan's Geomancie, John Heydon's Theomagia, and the Geomancia Astronomica of Gerardus Cremonensis.

The sixteen figures are drawn, not photographed — generated from the same point-pattern that defines each entry. Those patterns were checked against the source's own arithmetic: Volume 5 states how many figures carry eight, seven, six, five and four points, and every one of those classes matches. A mistyped figure would have broken the count.

The casting engine is likewise checked rather than asserted. The Golden Dawn scheme derives the Daughters from the Mothers, the Nephews from those, the two Witnesses, and finally the Judge, entirely by the parity of points. Run against the worked example printed in the source, the engine reproduces its published result exactly — the same four Daughters, the same four Nephews, and Populus as Judge. The source also notes that a correctly calculated Judge always carries an even number of points; the tool states the count so the check is visible.

The casting itself follows the method's own instruction that the marks are made rapidly and without counting — only whether each line came out odd or even matters. Rather than simulate dots, the tool hides the state entirely: you mark as often as you like, and submit to set each line. The pentagram drawn before the casting is the invoking Earth form the source describes, traced from the top point down to the lower left, and it draws itself so the order is visible rather than merely claimed.

Two things are deliberately absent. The sigils of the planetary Rulers are not reproduced, because the source states that the geomantic sigils differ from the same spirits' sigils taken from the planetary kameas — they cannot be derived, and an approximated sigil would simply be a wrong one. The medieval interpretations built on the Judge and Witnesses alone are also omitted, following Regardie's own note that he found them unreliable.

— Evander Blackwood