Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

Rubeus: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

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

A geomantic figure is four rows of one or two points. That description is complete, checkable and identical across the tradition.

The pattern

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

Flipping every row

Change each row from single to double and from double to single and Rubeus becomes Puella. Its colour partner Albus pairs instead with Puer, so the two colour figures are not each other's partners under the operation. That is a genuine mismatch between the naming and the structure, and it is worth knowing about before reading any handbook that treats paired figures as commentaries on one another.

The reputation

Rubeus has the worst reputation of the sixteen in the Latin handbooks, glossed as passion, danger, deceit and vice, and several authors instruct the reader to discard a chart in which it falls in a particular position. That instruction varies between books and is a rule of practice rather than a property of the figure, so the atlas records that the rule exists and that its form is not consistent, rather than stating one version of it.

The attributions

The planet, sign and element recorded for Rubeus elsewhere in the atlas belong to the astrological layer, vary between sources, and were not derived from the points.

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.