Divination as Intel

One of my favorite webcomics (which is ending this year at 10+ years old, alas!) is Dominic Deegan: Oracle for Hire.  In addition to being a painfully/punfully witty and action-packed high-fantasy webcomic, it also centers around the young Dominic Deegan, a career seer, an oracle who receives visions, and occasional savior of the world.  Given my own divinatory inclinations, this shouldn’t surprise anyone that I like the comic so much.

Despite my guesses that DD’s artist Mookie isn’t an occultist or seer himself (though I could be wrong), he does hit the mark fairly close when it comes to certain topics and problems that come to divination.  Among my most favorite comics is the one from January 5, 2007, where Dominic says a bit about the nature of divination to his students in a class for second sight.  His students are shocked, shocked to know that part of their required reading involves the massive “A Brief History of Everything (Unabridged Version)” :

When a seer looks into a crystal ball and spouts some cryptic message, it’s not because second sight is inherently mysterious.  It’s because the seer doesn’t know what he’s looking at and he’s probably disguising his ignorance with cliché mysticism.  To master second sight you must have knowledge, which is found in books, which is why we have so much required reading for this class.

Later on, his students complain about the amount of homework he assigns on the first day of class, and assume that Dominic used his own second sight to find out that no other teachers had assigned them homework.  Dominic himself then pops by, having overheard the students, and says that he had actually looked at their other teachers’ syllabi in the teacher’s lounge.  After all, Dominic remarks, “knowledge is power”.  A few days later, while discussing how uncool of a teacher he’ll be with his girlfriend and his archmage-school dean mother, he explains why he sadly guesses most of his students will drop the class:

Second sight is hard.  It requires a solid knowledge of history, politics, religion, arcane theory and even geography to really be of any use.  Otherwise it’s just looking at pictures.

When I do a divination for someone, I often ask them what’s on their mind, what brings them to the shop, what problems they might have going on.  They might bring up a specific problem or a concrete, pointed query, which is awesome, but more often than not they’ll try to cover a broad swathe of their lives with something like “I wanna know what’ll happen in my love life” or something equally vague.  I’ll help guide them to specific questions, because geomancy really shines when given something like that, but also because I need a working context for a chart in order to understand what it’s telling me.  Knowing that Puella falls in the 7th house is all well and good, but without knowing how it specifically relates to the query and the other circumstances in the querent’s life, I don’t really have a way to understand what it means.

Unlike some traditions of diviners and seers who’re trained to be clairvoyant or mystic enough to not require knowledge of the query or its context, I need context.  It’s why I read so much on current events and why I read up on other practices, beliefs, cultures, sciences, histories, and the like.  It’s why I engage the querent in conversation first and see what’s generally going on in their life from their perspective.  It’s why I ask questions probing into their life during the reading to clarify some of the symbols (with only 16 geomantic figures to represent all the infinity of the cosmos, I use any and all help I can get to whittle down the possibilities).  Context matters in divination, and it helps me be more specific and, thus, more helpful to the querent than if I worked without it.

Some diviners and readers often work with vague queries and, through skill and mastery with no small amount of intuition, can delivery fairly specific answers relevant to the querent though the querent may not have said anything about them.  Some divination systems like Tarot can cultivate such an intuition, but more often than not it’s a talent.  Still, when one works with vague questions, much more often than not one is going to get vague answers.  It’s a result of having a limited number of symbols that can mean any number of things without knowing how to whittle it down.  This lack of context can take a potentially meaningful message and water it down into uselessness, effectively turning it into a Forer effect-style blurb (consider how general newspaper horoscopes can be).  It sucks when this happens, because it gives divination and diviners of all kinds, including astrologers, a bad name.

Divination is probably best seen as a form of intelligence gathering, in which one draws a distinction between data and information.  Data is a Latin word literally meaning “that which is given”, or things that one has at their disposal.  Information comes from Latin as well, originally meaning “to shape” but figuratively meaning “to instruct” (which has similar etymology and figurative meanings).  One can define information as “data that makes a difference”; if data tells us nothing new, it’s not really helping us to inform ourselves.  Not all data is information; some data is just noise or is erroneous.  Not all information is data; sometimes information can be obtained through patterns of the data or through an analysis of other analyses.  Divination helps one obtain data or to make sense of patterns in data, but it’s only one method.  To produce truly useful information, one should correlate divination and divined answers with historical research, official expertise, and other sources of information.  Although it’s good to trust divination, it shouldn’t be the only thing one goes by.

Marie Laveau, the queen of voodoo in New Orleans, was a renowned seer and reader, but she also worked as a hair stylist for professional high-class clientele.  Working in that kind of environment exposed her to a wealth of gossip, hearsay, and rumors that she was able to verify or refute on her own or with the help of others, which helped her be seen as much more intuitive to her occult clients.  Likewise, Jason Miller takes a dim view of just relying on divination.  Even as far back as ancient Greece, prophecies from the Oracle at Delphi were debated, tweaked, and analyzed in order to be made of use by the groups who received them (cf. the “wooden walls” that protected the Athenians).  Unless it’s really the only thing one has to go by (which is damn-near never in our modern information-based culture), divination needs to be correlated and buffed out with any and all other information out there.

Specificity and a refining of data matters in order to obtain useful information, especially in an occult art like divination.  No matter how real or vivid a vision may appear, or how explicit a Tarot reading may seem, any divined answer should always be reflected upon, backed up with other information, and analyzed in order to clear out any ambiguity, solve any riddles, and reduce any metaphors to their concrete basis.  Much of this can be fixed by having a wide breadth of knowledge, and many gaps can be filled simply by phrasing one’s query specifically and clearly to the diviner.  Still, as awesome as divination may be, it’s a flaw of any system that works with a finite number of symbols that one needs backup and thought to whittle down the infinite to the finite.

Required Reading for an Apprentice

Although I’ve made light of people who have asked for suggested reading for an introduction to the occult, I’ve had the idea to compile a basic library and resource set for anyone interested in the stuff I do.  While your path is probably going to veer from or cross through mine any number of times, there are some resources I wouldn’t be caught dead without for reference, assistance, and general help, especially in the traditions of magic I practice.  Besides, if I one day take on an apprentice, I may as well have a list of books ready for them to have for themselves.  That is, if I don’t already have my own personal collection and reference ready for them, but more information will always be nice.

Books for reference:

• Agrippa’s Three Books and Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy.  This is the mother of all reference books on magic, spirituality, religion, and the occult, and is pretty much the basis of all Western magic today, Hermetic or otherwise.  A lot of stuff is pulled or morphed from his collection of information, which itself is pulled from older sources.
• Betz’s translation of the Greek Magical Papyri.  It’s helpful to see how magic was done in the source and origin of the Hermetic tradition, as well as to take a hint about how different traditions of magic can be syncretized and folded into each other.
• Stephen Skinner’s Complete Magician’s Tables.  Correspondence tables are awesome and help link different aspects of the occult and open worlds together.  Agrippa covers some of this, but these books (I prefer Skinner’s book over Crowley’s 777) are invaluable.
• Robert Hand’s Horoscope Symbols.  This is one of the best books on astrological symbolism I’ve found, and despite the modernity of it, Hand is an expert I trust and who I know knows his shit.
• John Michael Greer’s Art and Practice of Geomancy.  I think geomancy is extraordinarily useful to the occult, despite its relative disappearance from occulture, and any apprentice of mine is going to learn the technique, art, and skill of geomancy and how to apply it in magic and spirituality.
• Eileen Connolly’s Tarot: A New Handbook for the Apprentice.  I’m not big into tarot, but I do use it every so often, especially for scrying and meditation.  This is one of the better books I’d recommend for someone as a reference of the cards.
• Wheelock’s Latin, because face it, a lot of this stuff is still in Latin and a working knowledge of it is going to help.  Greek and Hebrew will as well, but Latin especially so.  A good Latin dictionary helps loads, too.
• Carl Liungman’s Symbols: Encyclopedia of Western Signs and Ideograms.  This is a massive and awesome reference for all kinds of written symbols, ideograms, and other characters that have been used across the Western world from prehistoric times to the modern era.  It’s a good reference for alchemical, planetary, and a variety of other magical signs as well.
• Melody’s Love is In the Earth: A Kaleidoscope of Crystals.  Even though this is fluffy and light-hearted as hell, it’s also one of the best and most complete references on the different types of crystals, metals, and stones in magical use.
• Picatrix.  This is the classical grimoire, the archetypal spellbook from old medieval European types and based on Arabic star magic.  The spells and works are still as powerful as ever, and it helps to know where a lot of modern magic is derived or based from.
• Draja Mickaharic’s Spiritual Cleansing.  Even considering that Draja is one of the most underrated and undermentioned occult authors out there, the dude’s ancient and has the wisdom and experience to match.  His magic works, and this is one of the classic books on spiritual cleansing, protection, and safekeeping.
• Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle.  A rock-solid knowledge of Greek and Roman mythology cannot be underestimated in its help for understanding and working with the gods and spirits and forces of the world.
• The Bible (New American Version or similar modern critical edition, King James Version for art and style) and Jack Mile’s God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God.  As above, but for Judaic and Christian mythos is wonderful for the Western magician.  Plus, this is one of the most well-used, well-known, and well-loved spellbooks of all time.
• Brian Copenhaver’s version of the Hermetica.  As above, but for Hermetic and Gnostic mythos.
• Benson Bobrick’s The Fated Sky: Astrology in History for a good overview of the path of astrology in science, mysticism, and human life from ancient times to modern.
• Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos.  This is the foundational text on Western astrology, written by the man Ptolemy himself.  May as well get the most solid background we have.
• Richard Garfinkle’s Celestial Matters.  A modern alt-reality fiction showing what the world might be like if it were ruled by Aristotelian geocentric physics, different geopolitical and socioreligious sets of problem than we have, and how one really has to start from scratch to learn new systems of thought.  The depiction of how gods actually interact with mortals in a world where people still work with them is priceless alone; this is a book for any Hermetic or Neoplatonist to read and enjoy.
• Rex Bills’ The Rulership Book, containing a huge list of what planets and signs in astrology rule over which objects, places, professions, foods, people, and the like.  Uses a lot of modern associations with the outer planets, but still invaluable in figuring out what force goes with what thing.
• The Clavicula Solomonis, or the Greater Key of Solomon the King.  I like the Mathers’ version due to the pretty and redrawn seals, but the text as a whole is a fantastic resource to prayer, ritual setup, and tool consecration.
• Scott Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs.  Normally I’d stay away from Llewellyn and this author due to his fluff content, but credit where it’s due, he knows his stuff, and this is one of the best manuals on herbs and plants commonly available.  I may not agree with all the associations, but it’s certainly helpful.

Links and resources on the Internet (many of these are on the sidebar to the right, but it’s not like you ever click on them):

• Twilight Grotto: Esoteric Archives for a valuable cache of Renaissance Hermetic and occult texts, enough to go from beginner to magus, and contains a good number of the above books
• Internet Sacred Text Archive for any number of other holy, magical, or esoteric texts from a huge number of traditions
• Internet Classics Archive for various classical Mediterranean literature
• Whitaker’s Words for an excellent online Latin dictionary
• Hermetic Library, containing much early modern and recent Hermetic texts smattered with some ancient stuff as well
• ChaosMatrix, with much general magical tech focusing on Chaos, Lovecraftian, and some Enochian magic
• Aaron Leitch’s homepage, being a classic example of 1990s web design as well as a resource for tons on this
• Rufus Opus’ web page, because he’s my instructor and should be yours as well
• Renaissance Astrology, because Chris Warnock is likely the foremost traditional astrologer and astrological magician in the world

I think the above would cover all the bases for me to start teaching someone, with plenty of other supplementary or secondary material, including other grimoires, modern texts on magic, blogs and essays, and various references and stories.  I like to use a lot of reference material from a Renaissance Solomonic or classical Hermetic background, but that’s not to discount the value of other styles, traditions, or sources of magic.  What books, texts, and sources might you suggest, if you were to take on an apprentice?  Do you think there’s anything else I should consider to tack onto the list?

A Critique of a Summary of Geomancy

Fellow ambler freemanpresson commented recently on a recent post on geomancy, asking if I had listened in on a recent show of Poke Runyon (a.k.a. Frater Thabion) about geomancy.  I had seen it before, but I didn’t have the time to listen in when it came out in April, and promptly forgot about it.  I listened to it once he reminded me, and although I found it interesting, I have more than a few bones to pick with how Poke Runyon describes geomancy and its history.  Granted, I don’t know much about Poke Runyon or his work, but these are a few of the things I’d argue (in order of his talking points in the show).  The following are my thoughts on what he’s saying, so if it appears unstructured, it’s meant to be read alongside listening to the show.

• Geomancy can involve but does not require planets, planetary spirits, and the like.  They were later astrological add-ins to an already complete system that was practiced in the Sahara, and is still practiced in the forms of ifa and sikidy further south in Africa.  Although the house-based chart format of geomancy is popular, it was an astrological add-in as well, and the shield chart is still the most traditional and stable form of geomantic layout.
• The system is called “geomancy” as a calque from an earlier Arabic phrase `ilm al-raml, or “science of the sand”, and then called “rabolion” in Byzantine Greek before it got its modern name.  Geomancy, as a desert art, was originally practiced by making sixteen lines of points in the sand, and is still done by some traditionalists in sand or soil, whether on the ground or in a special box made for the purpose.
• Geomancy is not prehistoric or paleolithic.  The earliest writings we have from it are from the early 1000s A.D. from the Sahara and Middle East, and although some research has indicated the use of similar dot-forms to relate to planets or other phenomena, there is no indication that these were at all related to or an ancestor of geomancy (The astrological origin of Islamic geomancy, Wim van Binsbergen, 2004).
• Agrippa’s Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy does have a significant section on geomancy, but I wouldn’t call it the primary text of modern geomancy.  Geomancy was well-known and well-established in Europe and the Middle East for centuries, and only started to fall out of the limelight due to what I contend to be two primary reasons: the Industrial Age with its focus on hard science, and the rise of Tarot, New Thought, and other occult systems of knowledge.  Various texts have survived, some in manuscript and some printed, that have helped geomancy survive, Agrippa only being a minor text among them.  Agrippa being a famous author handed down to us in the ceremonial and Hermetic traditions, however, did help geomancy stay alive in those traditions.
• Honestly, I wish Poke Runyon chose a more updated selection of geomancy texts to choose from.  I haven’t gone over Israel Regardie’s A Practical Guide to Geomantic Divination, but I do own a copy of Stephen Skinner’s long-out-of-print The Oracle of Geomancy.  Both of these books came out in the 1970s, and a good deal more has come out on geomancy since then, including John Michael Greer’s book The Art and Practice of Geomancy and Stephen Skinner’s updates to his first book on geomancy, Terrestrial Astrology and Geomancy in Theory and Practice.  Donald Tyson’s commentary on the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy is a good start and fairly thorough, though, but isn’t great on history if I recall rightly.
• I don’t have an issue with Poke Runyon or the OTA having their own tradition of geomancy, and that sounds pretty awesome to me, really; heaven knows the art could use an influx of new methods and innovation!  But attributing Biblical or paleolithic origins to the art isn’t much better than attributing it to Hermes Trismegistus, Idris, Gabriel, Daniel, Mohammed, or other prophets or angels.  They may give geomancy a kind of spiritual authority, but it’s hardly a factual history.
• Everything from the figures’ traditional names in the earliest Arabic writings reflecting a nomadic society to the right-to-left orientation of the figures indicates a Bedouin, Arabic, or otherwise nomadic Semitic origin.
• Hermetic philosophy isn’t that old; although some people put Hermes Trismegistus as a contemporary of Moses, we don’t start seeing distinctly Hermetic ideas until after the rise of Platonism and Neoplatonism in the Roman Empire.  This still well predates any mention of geomancy in the historical record by a good five to nine hundred years at the earliest.
• I don’t know much about Parzival, but that geomancy appears in literature throughout Europe doesn’t surprise me.  I know of two places it makes a cameo: in Dante’s Purgatory (canto XIX), and in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (Parson’s Tale).  It also appears in the Arabic of One Thousand and One Nights to find treasure, and Shakespeare used it for comic relief in some of his works.  Geomancy being second in popularity and authority only to astrology back in the day, I’ll bet it appears in a lot more literary works than these as well.
• Granted that ifa and sikidy, African derivatives of geomancy, are very old, Oruban and Madagascan cultures indicate in their own historical records and stories that they got the art from what we would conclude to be Middle Eastern travelers, lending further support to the idea that it had a Saharan or Arabian Bedouin origin.
• Although the I Ching and geomancy are superficially similar systems, they aren’t related.  For one, the I Ching is based into trigrams (three lines) or hexagrams (six lines), while geomancy has always been equivalently tetragrams (four lines).  For two, the I Ching is historically ancient, having written documentation stretching back to 500 B.C. in manuscript and as far back as the second millenium B.C. in composition, while geomancy has no such historical documentation.  For three, although there does exist a variety of I Ching symbols that have four lines with its origins around 2 BC, they also have three values for each line, in contrast to the two values for the classical trigrams and hexagrams of the I Ching and figures of geomancy: a solid line, a line broken once, and a line broken twice.
• Two systems alone sharing a binary system of mathematics or development does not mean those systems are related.  Africa has a long history of using binary mathematics in writing, notation, and engineering, which again leads credence to an African/Saharan/Arabian origin (Bamana Sand Divination: Recursion in Ethnomathematics, Ron Eglash, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 99, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 112-122).  Besides, binary systems of thought are helpful and can get one pretty far, but pose problems of their own that can’t be solved except by translating things into a trinary or n-ary system, or by reducing things to the One Thing, which is kinda hard to do if you’re not already Divine.
• The placement of figures from the shield chart into the house chart depends on what specific method you’re using.  Poke Runyon suggests putting the first four figures (the Mother figures), into the cardinal houses of the house chart, then the next four (Daughters) into the succedent, and the next four (Nieces) into the cadent.  This, I believe, has its origins in the Golden Dawn methods, while traditional European methods (maybe Islamic/Arabian, I haven’t seen them use houses like how European geomancy uses houses) simply put the figures into the houses in the order of their generation: the first four figures into the first four houses, the next four into the next four, and so on.  This is a bit like quibbling over what house system to use in astrology (Placidus, Regiomantus, Koch, equal, etc.), so while not a bone to pick, I would just like to say that there are other ways of making the house chart.  Personally, I follow the sequential, traditional method.
• The Judge figure is always there, not if the geomancer didn’t like the other figures.  It’s the figure after the Judge (called the sixteenth figure, the result of the result, the Reconciler, the Sentence, and so on) that isn’t always used depending on the geomancer.  Personally, I always use the Sentence, and insist that the Judge always be looked at no matter the query.
• I know of one method that uses geomancy to make horoscopes (On Astrological Geomancy, Gerard of Cremona), but this is a very derivative method of geomancy that doesn’t make use of the traditional geomantic procedure.  It’s a neat system all the same, though.  Otherwise, I haven’t heard of people substituting geomancy entirely for astrology in any time period; although geomancy was considered “astrology’s little sister”, they’ve always been distinct, at least to the sources I can find.
• Although divination with dice, especially that knucklebones, is definitely ancient, I strongly doubt that they were related to geomancy for reasons stated above.  Ifa uses shells or nuts to make their figures in a similar way, but this was probably an innovation on their part and not something passed down from paleolithic antiquity.
• Urim and Thummim?  Er…really?  And fluorite crystals?  I’m really confused at this apparently random inclusion.  I get the connection of Urim and Thummim to cleromancy and divination (because that’s pretty clearly what they were used for), but their connection with geomancy is tenuous even given the best of times, especially given the lapse of time between the Temple Period of Israel and the documented use and development of geomancy.
• Just because a single animal could produce a set of four hucklebones with four sides each (4d4, essentially) possible to be marked with simple dots and figures, I don’t see why this would indicate a connection with geomancy, especially considering the time frames Poke Runyon is talking about (ancient prehistory and medieval-modern occultism).  16 is the fourth power of two, and so is likely to come up in any system that involves the numbers 2, 4, or 8 (or any combination thereof, because math is awesome).
• Using dice to do geomancy is well-attested, though, despite what I’m saying above.  Modern geomancers with connections to tabletop RPG players might use a d4, d6, d8, and d20 (related to the Platonic solids of fire, earth, air, and water, respectively).  I’ve seen racks of old dice that have four points in a square, three points in an upwards-pointing triangle, three points in a downwards-pointing triangle, and two points aligned vertically; two of these dice rolled and placed atop each other form a single geomantic figure.  Geomancy, being a binary system, is very adaptable to anything that can give a binary answer (heads/tails, even/odd, white/black, etc.).
• One issue I find with Poke Runyon’s method of geomancy is that it restricts the number of possible charts drastically.  In traditional methods of making a geomantic chart, it is possible to have more than one figure appear amongst the Mothers; it’s even possible, though it’s a 1/32768 chance, to have all four Mothers be the same figure.  In his method, if I understand it right, you only have the possibility of one figure appearing once, and even then it’s restricted based on what figures are engraved together on the same die.  Although there are a total of 32768 possible geomantic charts (one of sixteen figures, one of sixteen figures, one of sixteen figures, one of sixteen figures), his method yields something like 256 (one of four possible figures, another of four different possible figures, another of four different possible figures, another of four different possible figures).  This is a major handicap.  Compare either of these to Tarot, where in a simple ten-card spread and ignoring reversed cards you may have  6.12344584 × 10¹⁰³ possible spreads. Geomancy in its full style is sufficient enough to be adaptable to many situations, but not in Poke Runyon’s style, if I understand his method right.
• It’s pretty clear in Biblical and historical records that the Urim and Thummim were not shewstones, but were used for cleromancy, even in the books of Exodus and Samuel; one possible etymology of their names effectively renders them to mean ”guilty” or “innocent”, using them to show the truth of a certain legal or religious matter.  I’m unclear where he got the shewstone idea from.  I don’t know about the legitimacy of their shapes being octahedrons, so I can’t say anything on that, but I feel like that something like that would be reflected in Biblical or Talmudic texts.  Again, the link between geomancy and these divination stones is highly suspect to me.  Plus, fluorite crystals do give their names to the phenomenon of fluorescence, but they only glow under UV light, which was not really documented until the 1500s A.D.; their etymology comes from the Latin verb ”to flow”, referring to their use in smelting and metalworks.
• Geomancy does not give “nasty, brutal, and short” answers unless you’re reading an old text that has a list of answers for a given figure/figure combination or figure/house combination (like everything the Golden Dawn was using), and I’ve been able to tease out whole stories on all kinds of topics with it.  It’s down to earth and snarky, sure, because it still has its origins in the earth, but it’s by no means limited to strictly important yes/no queries.  However, it does function best with yes/no queries, filling in lots of details along the way with any number of techniques to determine the speed of resolution, favorability, interference, origins of concern, hidden resources and factors, intents and spiritually destined factors, and the like.
• I do like his idea of ceremonial divination, calling upon the genius/spirit of a query (as sorted according to the planet it’s ruled by) and using a particular ceremonial setup for divination; John Michael Greer suggests something similar as one valid and potent means of divination, too, in his works.  However, that’s hardly how most people function, especially most people involved with magic and divination today (freeform, neopagan, chaotes, etc.).  I hardly use a ceremonial framework; I might stick to using days and hours of Mercury or Saturn for divination and call on Tiriel, the intelligence (not spirit!) of Mercury, for help, but that’s about it.  With or without the timing or spiritual aid of Tiriel, though, I’ve gotten pretty consistent and accurate answers for years now.  Read up on the methods available and pick what method appeals to you most.
• Carcer ruled by Mercury?  Puella ruled by the Moon?  What on earth has he been reading from?  I’ve seen Carcer attributed to Saturn or the Moon, but Puella only ever by Venus; I know of two distinct methods of attributing the figures to the planets, but whatever one Poke Runyon is using is definitely not among them.
• The resolution of the query found in the house opposite the significator?  The seventh house is in opposition to the second?  Now I’m really confused, guys.  I’ll grant the first as a quirk of his particular method of geomantic divination, but the second is just plain wrong unless he’s using a ten-house chart (which isn’t attested anywhere).
• I fully agree when he says that queries should always be “brief, simple, direct, and practical”.  This is how any divination should be posed, no matter the method or diviner.  A good third of the time I spend with clients myself, I spend on refining the query so that it makes sense with a definite answer.  The more detail in the query, the more detailed the answer; the vaguer the query, the vaguer the answer.
• “In those days, astrological malefics were much, much more malefic than they are today, as any astrologer will tell you.”  Uh…no.  Unless he’s referring to the perceptions of them, no.  Saturn sucks.  Mars sucks.  The Tail of the Dragon sucks.  Generally.  They’re favorable for some queries, yes, but more often than not they’re inimical to what humans like.  That hasn’t really changed in the few hundred years since this has been going on; that’s like saying our brains have dramatically increased or decreased in functionality in the past few decades or so.  No.  “Modern interpretations” require a modern restructuring and reevaluation of the entire system; you’d risk muddling the system with meaninglessness.  Saying Carcer represents delays and restriction is fine, because it does; saying it’s going to help you out in matters in which you need speed and freedom is a lie. 
• Although Poke Runyon says otherwise, the Judge was always used and always referred to as the answer of the query.  I’ve never heard this being done in any other way in any source; it wasn’t a conditional thing to be used in case the rest of the chart was confused or unfavorable.
• When Poke Runyon says “traditional geomancy”, I think he’s referring more to the generation of the Mothers (a stick and sand, a pen and paper, etc.).  The generation of the Mothers can be done in any way that involves a binary process or that gives figures in their entirety; I myself use a deck of geomancy cards I made with 64 cards, four cards per figure, and Poke Runyon mentions Paul Huson’s method of popsicle sticks and another method of Regardie’s.  I’ve even read of people counting the eyes on sixteen potatoes plucked from a field, which is about as earthy as you can get.
• Granted the saying “different strokes for different folks”, I can claim my own experience with traditional geomancy as being highly in favor of its accuracy.  Since I’ve never used Poke Runyon’s method of ceremonial geomancy, I can’t say much about its accuracy, but I’ve noted above a few things awry with either it or my interpretation/his explanation of it.
• Oh lord, incorporating the dreidle (those Chanukah tops) into all this?  It’s a children’s gambling game made to make the Jewish equivalent of a Biblically-mandated V-Day more fun while the parents are praying and getting sloshed.  That’s distinctly not related to the Urim and Thummim, and certainly not to geomancy.

Geomancy and Gaming

I…I honestly don’t know what’s going on, but I like it.

I got a referral on my blog’s stats today from a Bungie forum post.  Apparently, there’s some puzzle going on that involves geomantic figures.  At the bottom of one of their news posts, they included seven geomantic figures (Via, Conjunctio, Amissio, Fortuna Minor, Rubeus, Laetitia, Carcer).  This spawned a fairly quick burst of activity of people wondering anything from what geomancy is, to what the figures mean, to how geomancy works and relates to other parts of reality, the body, numbers, and the cosmos.  Plus, it also resulted in this fantastic web-based geomantic chart generator, for which I’m very pleased about (it’s about damn time someone made something like this!).

Although I’m still somewhat confused at what’s going on, this is like a dream come true.  Geomancy, one of my favorite arts, suddenly bursting into the public eye like this?  It’s fantastic!  I highly suggest any gamers in the crowd to get involved with what’s going over on Bungie, if anything is still going on, to at least bring the puzzle to a close.  More hip geomancers than me might get further, combining the elite art of geomancy with the L337 skillz of gaming.

And if you’re one of those people linked here from Bungie or wondering what’s going on, post questions about geomancy in the comments and I’ll be glad to ask.  I have a few ideas, but since I don’t have a Bungie account, I can’t really contribute much on the proper thread.