Fortuna Major, the Greater Fortune, is one of the sixteen figures of Western geomancy, the divinatory art in which meaning is read from a figure of four rows, each row holding either one dot or two.
The figure and its reading
Its four rows are Fire (two dots), Air (two dots), Water (one dot), Earth (one dot). Geomantic figures are attributed to the elements, the planets and the signs of the zodiac; Fortuna Major is assigned to the element of Fire, to the Sun and the sign Leo. Its traditional divinatory sense is one of inner strength, lasting success.
These attributions are those of the mature Western tradition set out by writers such as Christopher Cattan (1558) and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (Book II of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533), and taken up in the modern revival by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888. The technique itself is older and reached Latin Europe through translations of the Arabic ilm al-raml, the science of the sand. The figure is described here as an element of that documented tradition.