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    Geomancy: A Method for Divination
    Geomancy: A Method for Divination
    Geomancy: A Method for Divination
    Ebook270 pages1 hour

    Geomancy: A Method for Divination

    By Franz Hartmann

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    About this ebook

    Geomancy, or "divining by means of the earth," was originally carried out by making marks in the dirt with a divining stick and then determining the geomantic symbols from these marks. It's based on the idea that our movement is influenced by the energies in circulation within and around us. This book explains the modern method of geomancy using just a writing tool and a piece of paper to obtain incredibly in-depth information.

    There are 16 geomantic symbols that correspond to planetary energies and zodiacal signs. The book explains the symbols, how to compile them, and how to read them. The three geomancy methods described herein are very simple but provide different levels of information.

    Included are 2,048 answers to 16 common questions and blank geomantic charts that you can photocopy to use for your divinations.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNicolas-Hays, Inc
    Release dateJan 1, 2005
    ISBN9780892546671
    Geomancy: A Method for Divination

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      Book preview

      Geomancy - Franz Hartmann

      PREFACE TO THE 2005 EDITION

      After a burst of activity in the 1880s and 1890s, Franz Hartmann wrote almost nothing of significance, although in the years before his death, in 1912 at the age of 73, he carefully reworked some of his earlier books. The revised edition of Geomancy was, perhaps, intended to be his swan song, but it did not appear until early in 1913, and far from being greeted with enthusiastic praise it fell surprisingly, but resoundingly, flat.

      Why this should have been so is unclear. The book was a new edition of a standard study of geomancy; indeed, it was then the only available study in English. It was well-received by critics. The reviewer in The Theosophist felt that the book should interest all students of astrology, while spiritualists were encouraged by their most intellectual journal, Light, to see geomancy as yet another means of inducing concentration whereby we can, sometimes, come into touch with the deeper manifestations of our mentality.¹ And yet despite these favourable reviews, the publishers, Rider & Co., did almost nothing to promote the book. It was poorly advertised and no review of Geomancy appeared in The Occult Review, which was effectively Rider's house journal.

      Hartmann's approach to, and interpretation of geomancy were not shared by all contemporary occultists, but no absolute canon of criticism on the subject existed, and there was thus no reason for any individual or organisation to be passionately concerned with preventing sales of the book. Equally, there was no one with any personal interest in its promotion: Hartmann was dead and no family survived him. Little more than a year after Geomancy was published, World War I broke out and in Britain everything with a German association became anathema, including books by German authors. Geomancy fell into the limbo of lost books and remained there for fifty years.

      It was a quite unjust fate, for both book and author deserved better. Hartmann's approach to geomancy followed that of Cornelius Agrippa, for he saw it as an entrenched part of traditional, Western divination, and as a tool to work on the practitioner at a psycho-spiritual level in order to unlock inherent intuitive abilities. In the first sentence of his preface, Hartmann makes clear that geomancy is in no sense to be treated as vulgar fortune telling: it will be of no value to those whose souls have no power of perceiving the truth. At the same time, he was certain of its efficacy unlike Agrippa who, in his De incertitudine [Of the Uncertainty and Vanity of Sciences and Arts], described earlier texts on geomancy and admitted that, I too have written a geomancy quite different from the rest but no less superstitious and fallacious or, if you wish, I will even say ‘mendacious.’²

      In its essence, geomancy involves the random scattering of seeds, sand grains, pebbles, or similar small objects on the earth, and then interpreting the position and pattern into which they fall. Agrippa's refinement of this traditional practice was to create a pattern by using a stick to make marks upon the ground. Nor did he isolate geomancy from other elemental forms of divination. In the first of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Agrippa noted that,

      There are, moreover, presages to be obtained out of the elements. From colours, motions, forms, and celestial congruities of earth, water, air, and fire, there are drawn those four famous kinds of divination: Geomancy, Hydromancy, Aeromancy, Pyromancy.³

      This view of divination is also closer to the Chinese understanding of geomancy, as a practice illustrating the relationship between human beings and the subtle energies of the natural world.

      There was, of course, a continuum between Agrippa and Hartmann. Various forms of geomancy were put forward during the 16th century, notably that of Christopher Cattan in 1558, and early in the 17th century Robert Fludd presented geomancy as a science of the intellectual soul in which intellectual rays emanated from the mind to mundane affairs and then returned to their center with tidings of the future.⁴ If Hartmann had known of Fludd's opinions (which he possibly did) then they would have delighted him.

      Geomancy, which from the 16th century had been inextricably intertwined with astrology, remained popular in astrological circles but faded from the public mind until the revival of published works on astrology in the early 19th century. It appeared with a flourish in 1824 in the ill-fated journal The Straggling Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century.⁵ Readers were offered a series of figures that had been cast for specific successful predictions—mostly concerning past events—and given a promise that,

      This most noble and curious science of Geomancy will shortly be explained in a familiar and perspicuous manner, by an experienced student in occult philosophy, so as to enable the slightest capacity to become, in a very short period, perfect master of this valuable branch of divination, so highly esteemed by the oriental nations.⁶

      Alas, the promise was not fulfilled and the readers were left uninstructed, but it was made clear that the first figure cast as an example was made on the earth. It is also intriguing to find that geomancy was recognised as being an oriental form of divination.

      When Hartmann's book on the subject appeared in 1889, finally providing astrologers and other occultists with a serious handbook, it was thoroughly Western—contrary to the Chinese view Hartmann noted that "it is believed by some that the Elemental spirits of Earth are guiding the hand of the operator —and gave the practitioner the opportunity of working indoors by the method of setting down at random lines of points on paper. In view of its western emphasis it is somewhat surprising to find Principles of Astrological Geomancy, the Art of Divining by Punctuation published by the Theosophical Publishing Company. Further, the review in the theosophical journal Lucifer was extravagant in praise of Hartmann (who had not yet fallen from grace with the theosophists) and recommended the book to tyros and specialists alike. There was evidence, the anonymous reviewer stated, of Hartmann's diligent study in the higher science and development of the intuition⁷ and he (or she) noted with approval that Hartmann had shown the folly of using divination for reasons of avarice or curiosity. At the same time he was gently reproved for attributing silver to the planet Venus rather than copper. Hartmann took note of his errors and omissions and they are all duly corrected in the present revised edition.

      But who was expected to read and to buy the book? There were few professional astrologers and no great number of amateurs, so that the obvious readership lay among committed Western occultists, most of whom were to be found within the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. That they had access to the book is certain, for a copy was in the Order library,⁸ but Hartmann's presentation and interpretation are markedly different from what is given in the instructions on geomancy provided for the Adepti of the Second Order (the Rosae Rubeae et Aureae Crucis).

      Practitioners within the Golden Dawn were instructed to [mark] down at random with a pencil sixteen lines of points or dashes without counting the number placed in each line during the operation & all the time thinking fixedly of the subject of the demand.⁹ This was essentially a paraphrase of Hartmann's instructions, but as far as correspondences, attributions, and interpretations are concerned, there is a great gulf between them. Some of the Golden Dawn material is manifestly wrong and was omitted by Regardie, who found it to be untrustworthy, giving answers in utter contradiction to the proper divination worked out by the readings which follow.¹⁰ if Regardie is correct, then it suggests that Mathers and others, who put together the material on geomancy, pillaged earlier texts and altered the figures and tables to avoid any sign of plagiarism from

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