Divinity Atlas

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

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Puella: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

Four rows of one or two points describe a geomantic figure completely, and the description is the same in every source that carries the figure at all.

The pattern

Puella is single, double, single, single, reading Fire, Air, Water and Earth from the top down, five points in all. One heavy row sits second from the top with light rows above and below it.

Flipping every row

Change each row from single to double and from double to single and Puella becomes Rubeus. That pairing is worth noticing precisely because the traditional readings of the two figures have nothing in common: one is glossed as harmony and the other as danger. The flip is an operation on points and carries no interpretive weight of its own, which is a useful corrective to handbooks that read paired figures as commentaries on each other.

The name and the caution that goes with it

Puella means girl. The Latin and early modern handbooks read the figure as beauty, harmony and agreeableness, and several of them add that its favour is not deep, a caution usually phrased in gendered terms that reflect the period rather than the figure. The atlas records the traditional reading and notes its framing rather than reproducing it.

The attributions

A planet, a sign and an element are recorded elsewhere in the atlas for this figure. They belong to the astrological layer added in Latin Europe, they are not consistent across Agrippa, Cattan and the English handbooks, and they were not derived from the points.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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