Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Puer: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
Puer: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

A geomantic figure is four rows, each holding one point or two, and that is the whole of what the figure is before anyone interprets it.

The pattern

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

Flipping every row

Change each row from single to double and from double to single and Puer becomes Albus. The traditional readings of the two, drive and conflict against peace and clarity, look like opposites, but the atlas records the pairing as a fact about the points and not as a claim that the tradition intends the two to be read together.

The name and its framing

Puer means boy. The handbooks read the figure as energy without judgement, initiative, and a readiness for conflict, often in explicitly martial terms. As with Puella, the early modern glosses carry the assumptions of their period in their wording. The atlas records what the tradition says and where it says it, and does not reproduce the framing as though it were the atlas's own reading.

The attributions

The planet, sign and element recorded for Puer elsewhere in the atlas come from the astrological tradition laid over geomancy after it reached Latin Europe. Those assignments differ between sources. The point structure is intrinsic, identical in every handbook that carries the figure, and can be checked by counting.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.