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Laetitia: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

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Laetitia: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

Everything intrinsic to a geomantic figure is in its four rows, each holding one point or two. The names, planets and signs are layers added later.

The pattern

Laetitia is single, double, double, double, reading Fire, Air, Water and Earth from the top down, seven points in all. One light row sits above three heavy ones, which gives the figure a narrow top and a broad body. Drawn the traditional way, it is often described as a tower or a raised thing, and several handbooks note the resemblance.

Flipping every row

Change each row from single to double and from double to single and Laetitia becomes Caput Draconis. There are eight such pairs in the sixteen, and this is one of them.

The heaviest and lightest figures

At seven points Laetitia is one of four figures with a single light row, the others being Tristitia, Albus and Rubeus. Populus at eight points and Via at four are the outer limits, and no figure has an odd count above seven or an even count below four. That distribution is a consequence of the arithmetic rather than a choice: four rows of one or two points can only total between four and eight.

The attributions

A planet, a sign and an element are recorded for this figure elsewhere in the atlas. They belong to the astrological tradition that was laid over geomancy in Latin Europe, they vary between authors, and they were not derived from the points.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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