Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Albus: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

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Albus: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

Four rows of one or two points is the whole of a geomantic figure. The colour names, the planets and the signs all sit on top of that.

The pattern

Albus is double, double, single, double, reading Fire, Air, Water and Earth from the top down, seven points in all. One light row sits third from the top among three heavy ones.

Flipping every row

Change each row from single to double and from double to single and Albus becomes Puer. Eight such pairs cover the sixteen figures with none left over, because inverting the state of every row maps the set onto itself and fixes nothing.

Albus and Rubeus

Albus and Rubeus, white and red, are the only pair of figures in the set named for colours, and the pairing of the names is older than the Latin. They are not partners under the flip: Albus pairs with Puer and Rubeus with Puella. Readers who expect the colour pair to be the structural pair are working from the names rather than the points, and the atlas notes the mismatch rather than smoothing it over.

The attributions

A planet, a sign and an element are recorded for Albus elsewhere in the atlas. They come from the astrological layer that Latin Europe added, the handbooks differ on several of the sixteen, and none of the assignments was derived from the rows. The point pattern, by contrast, is the same wherever the figure appears.

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