Earth Divination, Earth Magic: A Practical Guide to Geomancy - Brossura

Greer, John Michael

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1912807076 ISBN 13: 9781912807079

Casa editrice: Aeon Books Ltd, 2019

Riassunto

Here is a complete guide to the lost art of geomancy--one of the major divination systems that are a part of the Western magical tradition.

Geomancy is simple, quick, and direct--anyone can get answers to a question in a matter of moments by learning how to read the patterns revealed by the 16 symbolic figures formed of single and double points. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, geomancy was used by everyone from popes to peasants because it provided practical, useful results.

Often mistaken for feng shui or ley lines, or hidden within poorly explained tables and charts, geomancy has become something of a lost art--until now. Earth Divination, Earth Magic provides a fascinating look into the history, theory, and practice of geomancy, including a thorough set of instructions for both casting and interpreting a chart for yourself or a friend.

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Informazioni sull?autore

John Michael Greer has been a student of the occult traditions and nature spirituality for more than twentyfive years. He is the author of numerous articles and more than ten books including Natural Magic, The New Encyclopedia of the Occult, The Druidry Handbook, and The Druid Magic Handbook. He is also the coauthor of Learning Ritual Magic and Pagan Prayer Beads. He lives in Ashland, Oregon with his wife Sara.

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Earth Divination, Earth Magic

A Practical Guide to Geomancy

By John Michael Greer

Aeon Books Ltd

Copyright © 2019 John Michael Greer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-912807-07-9

Contents

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 
PART I: EARTH DIVINATION, 
CHAPTER ONE The forgotten oracle, 
CHAPTER TWO The figures, 
CHAPTER THREE Casting the chart, 
CHAPTER FOUR Reading the chart, 
PART II: EARTH MAGIC, 
CHAPTER FIVE Geomancy and magic, 
CHAPTER SIX Consecrating instruments, 
CHAPTER SEVEN Meditation and scrying, 
CHAPTER EIGHT Sigils and talismans, 
APPENDIX A medieval handbook of geomancy, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
INDEX, 
BLANK CHARTS, 

CHAPTER 1

The forgotten oracle

Geomancy is a traditional Western way of divination based on intuitive contact with the subtle energies of the Earth. Nowadays, it's probably the least well-known of the major methods of divination belonging to the Western world's magical traditions; it's no misstatement, in fact, to call it the forgotten oracle of the West.

Even using the word "geomancy" in modern times risks a good deal of confusion. This term, which is derived from the Greek words ge, "earth," and manteia, "prophecy" or "divination," has come to be used in recent years for a flurry of different and mostly unrelated topics — from feng shui and related systems of spatial design, through ancient traditions of omen interpretation and prophetic lore based on earthquakes and other geological events, to speculations involving ley lines, megaliths, and hidden patterns embedded in the landscape. Each of these has something to do with the Earth, and something (although not always much) to do with divination; none of them have anything significant in common with the subject of this book.

From the high Middle Ages until the end of the Renaissance, by contrast, the word geomancy (and its equivalents in other Western languages) meant one thing only: a specific method of divination using a series of sixteen figures formed of points, and the philosophy and practice centered on that method — a philosophy and practice based on a deeply magical understanding of the flow of elemental energies through the living body of the Earth. This same meaning of the word remained standard within the secret or semi-secret magical orders that carried on the traditions of Western occultism during the heyday of scientific rationalism, and it is the meaning that will be used here. This is not to dismiss the other traditions and teachings just mentioned; some of them deserve careful study on their own. The point that needs to be made here is simply that they have nothing to do with the kind of geomancy we will be discussing, and should not be confused with it.

A glimpse of geomancy

So what is geomancy? The best way to learn that is to see the method in action on a first-hand basis. As a first step in that direction, pick up a pen or pencil and a piece of paper. Think about a situation you are facing, one that is likely to have either a favorable or an unfavorable outcome, and then clear your mind and make a line of dots or dashes at random on the paper. Don't count the number of marks while making them. Do the same thing three more times, so that you have four lines of marks on the paper, like the ones below:

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Now count the marks in each line separately. If the first line has an odd number of marks, that equals a single dot • at the top of the geomantic figure you're producing; if an even number, that equals two dots ••.

If the second line has an odd number, put one dot as the next part of the figure, or two dots if the number of marks is even. Count the other two lines in the same way, to produce a figure made of four elements, each one a single or double dot. The result should be one of the figures in Diagram 1-1.

The favorable or unfavorable nature of the figure shows the most likely outcome of the situation. The meanings and symbolic name of the figure you have produced offer keys — some of the many used in more advanced approaches to geomancy — to the context of forces surrounding and shaping the situation and your place in it.

The traditional method of geomantic divination starts with four figures, not one, and then uses those four to generate a series of other figures that contribute to the meaning of the complete geomantic chart. Still, the process as you've just experienced it is geomancy in a concentrated form: using what we usually think of as "chance" to derive one of the geomantic figures, and then using that figure to cast light on a question or a situation.

The eclipse of geomancy

From a historical point of view, it's surprising that the art of geomancy needs even this much introduction. Geomancy was among the most popular of all divinatory methods during the last great magical revival in the Western world, the time of the Renaissance. Henry Cornelius Agrippa and Robert Fludd, two of the most important writers of that revival, both produced significant works on the subject. So did John Heydon, that master plagiarist of the English Renaissance magical scene, whose Theomagia, or the Temple of Wisdome contains a wealth of half-understood geomantic lore rarely touched since his time. These and other Renaissance texts drew on an entire literature of medieval European and Arabic works on geomancy, in which the basic techniques of geomantic divination had been expanded and applied in a vast range of ways.

Astrology was always the most important of medieval and Renaissance divination methods, because of its more extensive vocabulary of symbols and its deep connections to the way the entire universe was understood before the scientific revolution. Still, geomancy also had a significant role as a system of divination and a tool for thought. It made use of a great many astrological elements for its own purposes, and it may have been more commonly used as a means of ordinary divination.

The reason for this last point is not hard to find. In the days before computers, at least, the compilation of a horoscope required a substantial amount of paperwork and a solid grasp of mathematics, but a geomantic chart could (and can) be produced by anyone willing to learn a fairly simple process. This same simplicity makes geomancy perhaps the best introduction to traditional Western divination for the modern student.

Unfortunately, these advantages have been all but lost in the few modern presentations of the art. Unlike the medieval and Renaissance methods, the forms of geomancy practiced these days are rigid, limited, and difficult to use effectively. The blame for this, surprisingly, must be laid at the door of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the most important of the source groups behind the modern magical revival.

Founded in 1888, the Golden Dawn sought to collect the fragmentary legacy of Western magical practice into a single coherent system, and succeeded at this Herculean task as well as anyone ever has. In the process, the Golden Dawn's founders came across the half-forgotten art of geomancy and gave it a significant place in their Order's curriculum of esoteric studies. The Order's founders were better magicians and ritualists than diviners, though; furthermore, they were borrowers and synthesizers for the most part, rather than creative thinkers, and their treatment of geomancy betrays their limited approach to the subject.

The entire Golden Dawn "knowledge lecture" on geomancy was made up of a few basic instructions and some tables of general meanings for the geomantic figures extracted from Heydon's three-volume Theomagia. In their original context, these tables provided a general overview of certain aspects of the reading, and were meant to be supplemented and clarified by the more extensive discussions in the remainder of the text — as well as by the intuition and insight of the geomancer using them. All by themselves, though, these fragments of the complete system provide a badly distorted image of the process of interpreting a geomantic chart.

These problems have been amplified by the fact that practically all later works on the subject have taken the Golden Dawn version of the system (with or without acknowledgment) as their primary source, drawing little if anything from the other readily available sources — Agrippa and Heydon are only two of these — much less from the vast number of manuscripts on the subject, dating from the Middle Ages and Renaissance, that can be found in major European libraries. In most modern versions of geomancy, as a result, the interpretation of a geomantic chart has been reduced to a process of looking up cut-and-dried, arbitrary meanings from a set of tables. This is a sharply limiting approach at best, and one which offers far too little scope for the intuition of the diviner — which is, after all, the crucial factor in the whole process.

In the chapters that follow, we'll be exploring geomancy from a very different perspective. In place of canned answers from a collection of tables, we'll be treating the geomantic chart as a pattern of interacting meanings that can be grasped easily and quickly with the aid of a few simple guidelines, and interpreted through a combination of the figures' symbolism and the diviner's intuitive awareness. Although very few modern geomancers seem to have any knowledge of this approach, there is nothing new about it — a point that will be shown in detail in the appendix to this book, where I have given a short but complete medieval handbook of geomantic interpretation, Modo Judicandi Questiones Secundum Petrum de Abano Patavinum ("The Method of Judging Questions According to Pietro de Abano of Padua"), translated into English for the first time from the original fourteenth-century Latin text.

The origins of geomancy

As mentioned above, geomancy was a very common system of divination in medieval Europe, but it was not invented there. The first medieval books on geomancy were translated out of Arabic by Hugh of Santalla and Gerard of Cremona in the early twelfth century, and historians agree that the Arabs unquestionably had it long before that. It seems to have appeared in North Africa by the ninth century, and to have quickly become one of the standard systems of divination throughout the Arabic world.

Beyond this, however, there is little agreement. Persia, India, and the Arabic countries themselves have been proposed as the original sources for the art, but a careful look at the way it relates to other systems of divination suggests that the true origin lies elsewhere.

Geomancy belongs to a large family of divinatory methods founded on what modern mathematicians call binary or base-2 numbers. The most famous member of this family is the I Ching, or Book of Changes, the most ancient and most important of the divinatory systems of China. (The link between these systems and binary numbers is a matter of history as well as structure; G. W. Leibnitz, the mathematician who first outlined the basic concepts of binary mathematics in the West, originally got the idea of base-2 numbers from studying early Jesuit translations of the Book of Changes.)

The principle underlying the whole family of methods is by no means limited to a Chinese context. It can be seen at work in the simple divination process of flipping a coin. Certain random or quasi-random events can be made to produce one of two definite results, and if meaning is assigned to the results, a clear answer can be found to any desired question. This principle has been used around the world in simple forms of divination, and in a few places it has become the foundation for more complex and informative approaches to divinatory work.

In consulting the I Ching, for example, the diviner tosses coins or shuffles yarrow stalks to produce six "heads" or "tails" — solid or broken lines, in this system — which are assembled, in order, into a kua or hexagram. With six lines, each of which can have two possible states, there are 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 or 64 possible hexagrams, and each of these has its own complex of meanings, with moving lines (determined by certain details of the divination process) adding another level of complexity.

Geomancy works in the same way, although it makes use of a smaller vocabulary of symbols. In geomantic divination, four heads or tails — single or double dots, here — are generated through the divination process to make up each figure. With only four binary digits to each figure, there are 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 or 16 possible figures, and these form geomancy's basic symbolic units of meaning.

It's worth noting that the vast majority of divination systems based on binary mathematics come from sub-Saharan Africa, and most of these use four binary elements, just as geomancy does. The simplest of them, which has been practiced over most of Africa for many centuries, involves simply casting four cowrie shells or half-nuts at the same time and noting how many fall face up or face down. Here no attempt is made to put the results into a specific order and create figures; the result of the divination simply depends on whether four, three, two, one, or no nuts or shells land face up.

More complex, and much closer to geomancy, is the hakata divination practiced by the Shona and other southern African peoples. Here four pieces of bone or wood, called man, woman, boy, and girl, and marked accordingly, are cast and used to produce one of sixteen figures. The same figures are produced in the West African agbigba divination method by the use of divining chains, which have four half-nuts that can spin freely to land face up or face down when the chain is cast; a set normally consists of four divining chains and is used to create four figures at once — another close similarity with geomancy in its Arabic and European forms.

The most complex of these African systems is the Ifa oracle of the West African Yoruba people, one of the most subtle and powerful methods of divination known anywhere in the world. Each of the Ifa odu or divinatory figures is made up of two of the sixteen basic figures we've been discussing, so that there are a total of 256 odu, each of which has a series of traditional verses assigned to it. A skilled babalawo (Ifa diviner) has memorized thousands of these verses, and works together with the client to select the verse most appropriate to the question once the odu have been cast. Here again, though, the intricacies of the Ifa system have been built atop the same set of sixteen figures used in so many other African methods — and in geomancy.

By contrast, there are very few systems of this binary type outside Africa. The I Ching has some degree of similarity, although it makes use of six binary elements rather than four. There is also a divination method from the islands of the South Pacific that uses eight binary elements. Then, of course, there is geomancy, which shares many structural elements with these various African systems of divination, and which first appeared in the Arabic countries of North Africa, at the other end of the caravan routes that connected sub-Saharan Africa with the Mediterranean and the lands around it.

It is just possible that the Arabic method came first, and the rich complexity of African binary divination methods evolved from it. On the other hand, this doesn't seem to have happened anywhere else geomancy has penetrated, and many African peoples themselves practice Arabic geomancy alongside their traditional divination systems, treating it simply as one more option for divinatory work. It seems a good deal more likely that geomancy has its roots south of the Sahara, and represents one of the major contributions of African cultures to the Western magical tradition.

The spread of geomancy

Whatever its actual origins, geomancy as we now know it reached the Arab world sometime prior to the ninth century. The Muslim conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries carried the Arabic language and culture as far as Spain in the west and Iran in the east, and once the fighting was over the conquerors quickly settled down and adopted much of the learning of their new subjects — a legacy that included most of what survived from classical Greek and Roman culture. For a period of several centuries, while Europe finished tearing itself apart into a patchwork of feudal kingdoms in which classical learning survived only in remote outposts such as Ireland, Arab scholars took up the legacy of the ancient world and became highly skilled in philosophy, mathematics, literature, science, and magic. Arab occultists studied alchemy and astrology, perfected the art of making magical talismans — in fact, our word talisman is derived from the Arabic tilsam — and practiced a wide range of divinatory methods.

In such a context, geomancy was bound to become popular. Its simplicity and flexibility quickly made it one of the standard approaches to divination throughout the Muslim world. It had numerous names; the most popular were khatt al-raml, "cutting the sand," and 'ilm al-raml, "the science of sand," because most Arab geomancers used the desert sands as a convenient working surface to trace out the figures of the art. As Arabic culture spread in all directions, geomancy followed: east to Persia and India; south along the East African coast to Madagascar, where it was combined with local divinatory traditions to create the sikidy oracle; and north, finally, to the feudal states of Europe.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Earth Divination, Earth Magic by John Michael Greer. Copyright © 2019 John Michael Greer. Excerpted by permission of Aeon Books Ltd.
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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Aeon Books Ltd
• Data di pubblicazione: 2019
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1912807076
• ISBN 13: 9781912807079
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 192
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile