Why Tétragramme

Arms composed for this site. They have no official heraldic existence and claim no antiquity.

The word comes from the Greek tetragrammos, formed from tetra , four, and gramma, the written character. It enters French as an adjective in 1549 and as a noun in 1834, though it appears far earlier in its long form: a text of 1483 speaks of the « hault tetragramate ». The dictionary grants it three senses. They resemble one another so little that they seem unrelated, and yet each says something about what I do.

The first sense: sixteen figures of four rows

A geomantic figure is a tetragram in the most literal sense. Four stacked rows, each carrying one point or two. The first row answers to fire, the second to air, the third to water, the fourth to earth. A row with a single point says the element is active in the figure. A double row says it sleeps there.

Four rows, two possible states to a row: two to the power of four, that is 16 figures. Not one more, not one fewer, and this arithmetic has been closed since the first day. No one has ever been able to add anything to geomancy, which is why it has crossed centuries and continents without changing a single one of its rules where other arts have crumbled.

The whole discipline therefore fits into sixteen tetragrams. That is the first reason for the name, and the simplest.
See the sixteen figures

The second sense: the name that is not pronounced

The Tetragrammaton, capitalised and unqualified, denotes in the Jewish tradition the four Hebrew consonants of the divine name. Four letters, no vowels. The dictionary puts it with a caution I am fond of: the pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton being unknown, it is better to leave the divine name without vowels.

There is an idea that ought to serve as a rule to every practitioner of a divinatory art. Four signs are given. What makes them sound is not. One may read the structure, and one must refrain from supplying the rest.

A geomancy chart behaves in exactly this way. It gives consonants. It does not give the vowels. The practitioner who believes he hears the whole word is adding his own voice to the chart’s, and calls it intuition.

That is why I always show you how an answer was built. Not out of pedagogy, but because the part I cannot prove must remain visible as such.

The third sense: the four essences

The same dictionary gives a third sense, properly hermetic, and it is the one that decided me. There the tetragram denotes the four essences that compose human nature, where ordinary thought distinguishes only two or three. Body, soul and spirit are not enough: four are needed.

A geomantic tetragram says precisely this about a situation. It breaks it into four storeys that do not mix. What burns, what is thought, what is felt, what weighs. Fire, air, water, earth. A difficulty that seems insoluble often turns out to be blocked at only one of these four storeys, and knowing that changes everything one can do about it.

That is what a reading seeks to make legible. Not your future — your present composition.

Reading the arms

The arms at the head of this page were drawn for the site, and I say so all the more willingly because nothing would be more contrary to this art than to lay claim to an invented antiquity. They are read as follows.

• The shield is divided into four horizontal bands, one for each row of the tetragram, and carries the points of Caput Draconis, the head of the dragon, figure of what opens from above. It is the mark of the house, and the one you see at the top of every page.
• The crest is reduced to four points rising in a coronet. It is the gesture of the diviner tracing his points in the sand, from which the whole discipline proceeds.
• The scroll carries the four elements in the order they are traced: ignis, aer, aqua, terra.
• The mantling is not foliage but two jets of points, as the sand falls back once the question has been asked.
• The tinctures are limited to or and argent, two metals and no colour. In heraldry, placing metal on metal is a fault. It is deliberate here: an art that works only with points and rows has no need of colours.

And the domain name

It is written without an accent, tetragramme.com, because a domain name accepts none. The word itself carries one.

For what follows, see what geomancy is, the how a reading unfolds.