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Geomantic Figures
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Origin Attested in the Islamic world from about the ninth or tenth century, and in Latin Europe from the twelfth.
Geomancy reads sixteen figures, each made of four rows of one or two dots, generated by marking the ground or paper at random and counting the marks. The system is documented as ilm al-raml in the medieval Arabic world and passed into Latin Europe in the twelfth century, where it became one of the most widely practised forms of divination. Each figure carries a name, a planet, an element and a range of meanings, and the figures are arranged into a shield or house chart.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodAttested in the Islamic world from about the ninth or tenth century, and in Latin Europe from the twelfth. 1 Place of OriginThe medieval Islamic world; transmitted into Latin Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 1 Origin of the NameLatin geomantia, from Greek ge, "earth", and manteia, "divination": a rendering of Arabic ilm al-raml, "the science of the sand". 1 Overview
Size of the Traditional SetSixteen figures: every combination of four rows each holding one or two dots, so 2 to the fourth power 1 Structure
StructureFour "mother" figures are generated at random; the daughters, nieces, witnesses and judge are then derived from them by fixed rules. 2 Learn More
Reading the Sixteen Figures
Geomancy is a divinatory system that reads sixteen figures, each made of four rows of one or two dots. The figures are generated by making marks at random, originally in earth or sand, later on paper, and counting whether each row comes out odd or even, building up the four-line figure from the result.
The sixteen figures have names (Via, Populus, Fortuna Major, Puer, Amissio and the rest), and each carries a character and a set of astrological and elemental associations. From an initial set of figures a full chart is derived by fixed rules and interpreted.
From the Arabic world to Europe
The system is well documented in the medieval Arabic world as ilm al-raml, the science of the sand, and passed into Latin Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, where it became one of the most popular forms of divination, treated as a kind of shorthand astrology. It has parallels in, and connections to, West African sand divination such as Ifa.
The atlas records the sixteen figures, their meanings and correspondences, and the method by which a reading is built, describing the system historically without ruling on its claims. The figures' link to the astrological houses connects geomancy to the astrology categories.
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