Poem: Quatrains on Geomancy

Like the Digital Ambler, I’m pretty interested in Geomancy. Geomancy is one of the divination systems of uncertain origin, although Ron Eglash and others believe it originated in west Africa, possibly among the kingdom of Mali, Ghana and the like.  It eventually became part of medieval European lore by translation through Dar al-Islam and Caliphate-era Spain.  Thanks to Alphonso the Wise and other medieval royal patrons, it entered the Western magical vocabulary, and was in use frequently from Spain to Slovenia up through the mid-1500s, when its use began to decline. There was a brief revival in the mid and late 1800s, but now it seems to be making a genuine comeback.

Which means that it’s the perfect time to launch a poem about the sixteen signs of Geomancy, this Double-Quatrains on Geomancy.  Each of the unrhymed stanzas deals with one of the sixteen signs of Geomancy, and serves as a way of encapsulating the lore and information about each sign.  Enjoy.

BOY more strong than good,  beardless sword-swinger
acting before thinking: heading for trouble.
Fire-headed ram: martial, heady, rash,
blood-spattered white-head, questing here and there.

LOSS — escaping wealth, purse emptying fast;
transience and loss, all things pass away…
Earthy-throated bull, loving yet losing.
yellowing white-neck: all beyond your grasp.

WHITE chalice upright, mind’s peaceful wisdom,
favors intellect, rarely works alone.
Twins of strong shoulders, stable quicksilver,
pure white spotted red, mystical madness

PEOPLE mill in crowds: multitude muddles
without goal or plan: stable inertia.
Crab full of sweet milk: watery full moon:
unfocused sea-green — no real direction.

GREAT FORTUNE coming: fair river valley!
inner strength achieved; stabilized glory.
Great-hearted Lion noble in Sunlight:
green, yellow and gold…press onward: succeed!

CROSSROADS diverging: multiplied choices,
ranges of options, many paths open.
Virginal belly — Mercury’s swiftness
honest purple earth: temperance restored.

GIRL of bright beauty: desire’s mirror,
fickle happiness, impermanent joy.
kidneys on the scales, breath born of Venus —
white and bright greenness: impermanent joy.

RED and hot-tempered, shot-glass upside-down
passion, pleasure, sex: drunk on life and love.
big-cocked scorpion: wild-running Mars
red, for town-painting — hard-partying star!

GAIN, the full wallet: fat purse of bounty,
successful prudence, profitable care.
Hips of the archer, Jove upon firey throne;
red, yellow and green, material gain.

PRISON, cold jail cell: lonely enclosure.
binding, restriction, impairment, delay:
the kneeling sea-goat beached on Saturn’s lead;
fixed russet and dun: focused work alone.

SORROW, in the pit: illness or failure,
grudging permanence — woe, pain and trouble.
hobbled water-man breathing Saturn’s myrrh:
dirty, tawny, dark, grounded in mourning.

JOY, singing, laughing, raw vitality,
creative genius, health and inner light,
koi swimming ’round feet — Jove swimming in pond,
glittering emerald — health, success and smiles.

DRAGON’S TAIL — endings, completed efforts,
concluded cycles, and finished labors.
Left-handed archer, Moon in south station
robed in dark crimson, endings wreathed in flame.

DRAGON’S HEAD — blessings, beginnings, grand starts,
benefic outset, change for the better.
Virgin on her throne, Moon in north station.
pure white with citrine: well-made beginnings.

SMALL FORTUNE — lucky, happy accidents
man on mountain-top, luck comes from outside.
Fast-leaping Lion, breezes of summer,
yellow fickleness, unstable success.

ROAD — Journey begins, change can’t help coming,
travel and motion, nothing stays the same.
Crab swims in Ocean, Moon has full stomach.
White flecked with azure, Pilgrim walks alone.

This piece bears more in common with the Rune Poem than most of the poetry I’ve ever written.  It’s a mnemonic device more than it is a poem, although the sound of the lines being read aloud is kind of cool.  And I suppose that it could be turned into a mini-book of sorts.  I may have to work on that.  A note on the text: in English, it’s customary for the Geomantic signs to be given their Latin names, e.g. Puer, Amissio, Albus, Populus, Fortuna Major, Conjunctio, Puella, Rubeus, Aquisitio, Carcer, Tristitia, Laetitia, Cauda Draconis, Caput Draconis, Fortuna Minor, and Via.  I belong to the Druidical Order of the Golden Dawn, and we learn the Welsh names of the signs: Mab, Colled, Gwyn, Pobl, Bendith Fath, Cyswllt, Merch, _____, Gyr, Carchar, _____, ______ , Bendith Fach, and Ffordd.  I was tempted to work those names in.  But something John Michael Greer said recently in a private list made me realize how much of this lore is hidden behind the

An Artistic Endeavor Now for Sale

One of my little projects, to learn how to draw the Geomantic Figures and their attendant visualizations, has yielded some fruit.  It’s now available as a poster for sale through my store on Zazzle.com.

I must admit, I don’t know yet whether the poster will print nicely or not; or if the image is quality enough to try to offer for sale as a poster/print.  But it couldn’t hurt to try, right?  Fortune favors the bold!

The Kavad solves a divination question

Tonight my friend J came down to see me. She’s been through a lot lately, and we usually catch up with one another once or twice a year. She’s interested in my creative projects, and I in hers, and we usually share for a while before we go back to our lives. Together we wandered down to the river and back, and then had coffee in my favorite coffee place. There, we found one of those posters: “take what you need”, it said, and then it had a bunch of those cut-apart and tear-off tabs along the top and bottom. The choices were things like peace, love, stability, happiness, integrity, honesty, dignity, kindness, mercy, friends, and so on.

J chose magic. And, in the course of our discussion over coffee, an opening to do a divination arose, using geomancy. So I did. I did the shield chart and the house chart, and in general it was a very positive reading. I think she was pretty pleased with the results, and so was I.

But she asked me a question that threw me for a loop. “I like divinations to tell a story,” she said. “When i work with Tarot cards, or oracle cards, i try to tell a story with the meanings of the cards. But i can’t tell… What’s the story here?”"

My initial response to this perfectly straightforward question was, isn’t that your job? I have no idea— it’s your story, and your process. I don’t know what the story is.

I realize this is going to sound crazy.

But the Kavad — which was quite a long ways away, in another building on another block, lying on my desk and totally incomplete, with lots of missing illustrations still — the Kavad answered her question. My brain went to the geomancy panel on the side of the box, processed her question using the existing planning sketches, and got the answers. Not in words. That would be absurd. The Kavad doesn’t have any words of its own. It’s all pictures, after all. That’s all it has to work with.

But that’s just it. Stories are made up of scenes, just as divinations are made up of discrete symbols, semi-randomly arranged. And the Kavad provided me with the images and narrative of the story I needed to tell — and it provided me with the memorable glyph or sigil that I needed to make the story true.

Sounds ridiculous, I know. I mean, I am an eccentric but sane adult. I don’t believe boxes made of foamcore can help me solve problems. Except, of course, that the process of illustrating the Kavad has helped fix these images in mind, and helped me read and randomize the information in the images to draw meaning from them on the fly.

None of this took more than a few seconds. It was nearly instantaneous, in fact. About as fast as a Google search usually takes. I guess that’s sort of the point: the Kavad is becoming a hermetic computer.