Frequently asked questions

Geomancy is a divinatory art founded on calculation. It begins with twelve numbers that the querent throws himself, without thinking, his mind turned towards his question. These numbers are reduced and yield sixteen figures made of dots, which are then distributed among the twelve houses of existence. A tribunal of four figures is then formed and delivers its verdict.

It was born of the sand, where the diviner traced dots with his fingertip. It is found in the Arab world under the name khatt al-raml, the art of sand, in West Africa, in Persia, and in medieval Europe where it advised the courts. It has crossed centuries and continents without its rules changing, which is rare among the divinatory arts.

In clairvoyance, the answer comes from the person consulting on your behalf. In geomancy, it comes from a construction that any trained practitioner can rebuild and verify point by point. Two geomancers casting the same chart obtain the same figures, the same tribunal, the same verdict.

What is left to the practitioner is the interpretation, and it counts for a great deal. But it bears on a stable object, one that exists independently of him. That is the essential difference, and it has a practical consequence. You can ask me to show you where an answer comes from, and I can show you.

They are two distinct disciplines that met. Traditional geomancy is read with the sixteen figures and the tribunal, with no recourse to the sky. Astrological geomancy, the kind I practise and to which I have devoted a book, adds to the chart the twelve signs of the zodiac and the seven traditional planets, arranged according to a key calculated from the throw itself.

The gain is real. The planets indicate the forces at work and their quality, the signs give the ground, and the aspects between planets tell how those forces speak to one another or ignore one another. No birth chart is required. Everything is derived from the throw and the hour.

No, and experience suggests rather the opposite. What is asked is not belief but sincerity of the question. A sceptic who asks a real question gets a real answer. A believer who asks a question for form's sake gets a confused chart, when he gets one at all.

What matters is that the question genuinely engages you, and that you throw the numbers yourself while holding it in mind.

A card reading proceeds by images, and an image is open. It calls for association and intuition, which is both its richness and its fragility. A geomantic chart proceeds by construction. Nothing in it is left to the practitioner's judgement before the stage of interpretation.

There is another difference, and a more important one. A card reading almost always answers. Geomancy knows how to refuse. Some charts prove unfit for interpretation, and tradition then requires that one give up and begin again later. This capacity to say no is what guarantees the value of the answers it does give.

Three options. Thirty euros for the answer to a single direct question, with thirty minutes of conversation. Fifty euros for the full analysis of a situation, with one hour. Seventy euros for an annual chart, with an hour and a half.

All three include the preliminary conversation in which your question is settled, the casting of the chart, the reading, and the written document you receive afterwards. Nothing is paid for on this site and there is no per-minute billing.

Exactly as it does in person. You write to me, I call you back within forty-eight hours for a first exchange with no commitment, and we settle your question together. You then throw your twelve numbers and send them to me. I cast the chart and check that it can be interpreted. Then we meet again by telephone or video call for the reading, which is a dialogue and not a lecture.

Distance changes nothing as to the validity of the chart. It is your numbers, not your physical presence, that make the throw.

Yes, up to a point, and by a detour that tradition provides for. One does not read a third party's chart without his having thrown the numbers; that would make no sense. What can be read, however, is your own situation in relation to him, which is almost always the real question.

The procedure is called the derivation of houses. The house that designates that person in your chart becomes the first house of a second chart, in which what concerns him in his relation to you is read. I use it when the question calls for it, and I tell you when I do.

Sometimes, and never with the precision one hopes for. The chart gives time frames through the nature of the figures and the houses involved, which allows one to say that a matter will be decided within weeks, within months, or not before the end of a cycle. That is almost always enough to act on.

When a practitioner announces a precise day to you, be wary. He is giving you a certainty the method does not produce.

Once. It is a strict rule and it protects the querent as much as the reading. To ask the same question again because the answer displeases amounts to looking for the throw that will suit you, and one always ends up finding it. At that point it is no longer divination, it is selection.

A question can, on the other hand, be reformulated if the first was badly put, or taken up again later if the situation has genuinely changed. The difference between the two cases is easy to see and we shall see it together.

It happens, and it is not a failure. Tradition defines several conditions a chart must meet in order to be read, beginning with what is called radicality. A chart that does not meet them means nothing, or means that the question is not yet ripe.

In that case I tell you so, I explain why, and we begin again later at no further cost. A geomancer who has never set a chart aside has not understood his art.

No. Geomancy does not work from the birth chart. It works from the moment of the question and from the numbers you throw. Two people born on the same day at the same hour will obtain two entirely different charts if they ask about two different matters.

So I ask for neither your date nor your place of birth, nor any data of that kind.

One can question the sixth house, which covers health and the body, and read there a climate, a tendency, a relation to one's own vitality. That is all, and it is already useful.

I make no diagnosis, I give no opinion on any treatment, and I never advise interrupting medical care. Faced with a question that belongs to medicine, I direct you to a doctor, and I do so plainly.

No. I do not do it, and I would not do it even if I thought I could. An announcement of that kind renders no service and does lasting damage to the person who hears it.

The eighth house deals with deep transformations, with the ends of cycles and with what comes undone in order to be reborn otherwise. That is how I read it. Anyone who announces a death or an illness to you on the strength of a throw is abusing your trust.

Never, in any form and at any price. I sell no protection, no return of affection, no lifting of spells, no objects. No reading with me leads to the offer of an additional service meant to correct whatever the chart is supposed to have revealed.

That is the most widespread mechanism of abuse in this field, it ruins people, and it is the opposite of what I do. If a practitioner announces to you an affliction whose remedy he alone holds, leave him.

I am asked this often and it deserves better than a reassuring answer. Geomancy was practised for centuries by Muslim scholars, by Christian clerics and by learned men of Africa and Asia, which shows at least that it has never been regarded everywhere as incompatible.

That said, it is for you to judge according to your own tradition, and I shall not try to persuade you. If your faith forbids it, do not consult. I am not seeking to convert anyone to anything.

The chart is not wrong; the interpreter can be wrong, and the question can be a bad one. These are three different things and it is honest to distinguish them.

Most often, when a reading disappoints, it is because the question was beside the point. Someone asks whether a project will succeed when what he wants to know is whether he will have the courage to see it through. The chart answers faithfully what was asked of it. That is why I devote the first conversation to the question rather than to the answer.

Tell me so. A reading is a dialogue and you have every right to contest what I put forward. I sometimes take the wrong angle, and your objection sets the reading back on its feet more often than one would think.

What I will not do is soften what the chart shows. You have not paid to be reassured. A successful reading is one you come away from with clear sight, which is not the same thing.

Yes, and that is why I have written. The complete method is set out in the Cours de géomancie astrologique, and traditional geomancy in the Guide d'interprétation géomantique, both published by Éditions Arcana Sacra.

Casting a chart can be learned in a few weeks. Interpretation takes years, because it presupposes having seen many charts and many lives. There is no shortcut and no one should be selling you one.