Geomancy

Geomancy has traced the destiny of kings since the beginning. Today it is your questions it answers.

It is said to have been born from the sand of the deserts, where the diviner traced points with a fingertip and read the answer of heaven in their number. It is found everywhere: in the Arab world under the name khatt al-raml, the art of sand; in West Africa; in medieval Europe, where it advised the courts. It has crossed centuries and cultures without ever changing its rules.

This is not clairvoyance in the ordinary sense. Nothing is guessed: everything is built, from twelve numbers, by a method that can be checked step by step. What is divined is the meaning.

How a chart is built

Twelve numbers

Everything starts here. Twelve numbers, thrown down in one go by the querent, without thinking, the mind turned towards the question. It is the only moment of chance in the whole procedure, and it belongs to the one who asks. All the rest follows mechanically.

Sixteen figures

Each number reduces and designates one of the sixteen geomantic figures. A figure is a tetragram: four rows of points, one or two to a row, answering to fire, air, water and earth. Sixteen combinations, not one more.

They carry Latin names that state their nature. None is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on where it falls and what is asked of it.

The colour gives the element of the figure: fire, earth, air, water. It is from the meeting of these elements, from one house to the next, that most of the reading is born.

Twelve houses

The figures spread through the twelve houses of existence, which cover every domain of a life: the person themselves, their goods, those close to them, their roots, their creations, their work, their partnerships, their transformations, their search for meaning, their calling, their friendships, their trials. Nothing that happens to you falls outside this map.

The tribunal

Then the tribunal is formed: two witnesses, a judge, a verdict. The right witness says where the situation comes from; the left witness, where it is tending; the judge settles the present; the verdict announces what will remain once everything has settled.

It is the heart of the reading, and it is never taken piece by piece: the four are read as one.

What a chart looks like

Here is a complete chart sheet. On the left, the square of the world and its twelve houses, with the querent’s twelve numbers at the centre; the highlighted cells are those the elemental key designates, which governs the placing of the seven planets. On the right, the tribunal.

Every point counts. Change a single one and it is no longer the same figure, no longer the same house, no longer the same answer.

What it can do, and what it cannot

It lights up a present situation and the forces at work within it. It shows what pushes and what holds back, what comes from the past and still weighs, what things tend towards if nothing changes. It points to a right attitude.

It decides nothing in your place, and it fixes no destiny. What it shows is the state of the forces at your moment, not a sentence passed. That is exactly what makes it useful. One does not consult to learn what will happen, but to choose knowing what is at stake.

Geomancy never lies, even when what it says is unwelcome.

It also has its refusals. Some charts prove unfit for interpretation: tradition then requires that one give up and begin again later. A geomancer who has never abandoned a chart has not understood the art.

Going further

I have devoted two books to this discipline: the Guide d'interprétation géomantique, for traditional geomancy, and the Cours de géomancie astrologique, which sets out a method that had remained confidential until then.

You can also read real charts, read in full, in the request a reading.