Geomancy

Cast a figure

Sixteen lines of points, each counted odd or even, make the four Mothers, and from them the whole figure follows. Cast marks the lines for you; to use your own, count the points of each line you have marked and enter them.

Enter your own marks

Lines one to four make the first Mother, five to eight the second, and so on.

The sixteen figures

About the figure

Agrippa sets the points down "from the right hand towards the left", four lines to each figure, and takes every line as even or uneven: an uneven line gives a single point, an even one two. So the first Mother stands at the right of the shield. The four Mothers, read across their rows from the highest points to the lowest, give the four Daughters; each pair of figures, added point by point, gives the figure below it, an uneven sum a single point and an even sum two.

Agrippa puts the first twelve figures straight into the twelve houses and stops there. The two Witnesses and the Judge are not in his treatise, and Gerard of Cremona sets them aside by name: "neither are we here to regard the witnesses, or Judge". They are given here as John Case sets them down in The Angelical Guide of 1697: the Right Witness made from the ninth and tenth figures, the Left from the eleventh and twelfth, and the Judge from the two Witnesses; if these be good figures, the demand will be good, and if ill, it will come to a bad end.

The signs differ from book to book, and Agrippa himself gives two lists one after the other; the reading shows each beside the others rather than choosing. Where Agrippa's run of the figures through the houses says nothing of a figure in a house, the reading says so.

Sources

The sixteen figures, their planets, both of Agrippa's lists of signs, his elements, the meanings of the twelve houses and his judgements of each figure in each house are from Of Geomancy, attributed to Agrippa, in Robert Turner's translation printed in London in 1655, with the spelling and the illegible letters of that printing. The rising signs are from Astronomical Geomancy, attributed to Gerard of Cremona, in the same volume. The Witnesses and the Judge are from John Case, The Angelical Guide, London 1697.

In the 1655 sentence that gives the signs by the planets' houses, Puella is named where Puer is meant, since Puella has already received Taurus; the reading gives Puer the sign the sentence intends. Where a figure's name has no English in Agrippa, the plain sense of the Latin is given.