GEOMANCY – ORIGINS OF THE WORD FROM THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY

by Prudence Jones

The Oxford English Dictionary, as the editor of Antiquity is only too eager to point out, defines geomancy as:

divination by means of jotting down on paper a number of dots at random.

This definition is supposed to invalidate the modern use of the word as applied landscape geometry, that is in the macrocosmic and technological sense, as opposed to the microcosmic and speculative sense which the OED favours.

A glance down the page at the actual quotations given by the OED in favour of its reading, however, reveals quite a different picture. Several quotations are given in the modern sense from J.H. Gray’s volumes on China of 1879. Also one from The Times of 7/10/1892. Readers of IGR Occasional Papers will of course be aware that the Rev. J. Edkins used the word in a similar context in 1872; however, the general time of introduction of the modern sense seems to be the 1870s, in the context of a China which was newly open to the West. Gray’s discussion of his new usage, as I found when following up the OED’s references, appears to mark a radical departure from established usage, but in fact gives one important clue:

Geomancers … visit hills and mountains almost daily in search of lucky places for tombs. … The word geomancy is a compound from two Greek words, namely ge, the earth, and mantis, a diviner. It probably owes its origin to the fact that in ancient times it was customary to scatter stones or marbles upon the ground, and to form opinions of the issue of certain events according to the arrangement which they presented. In course of time, instead of this plan, dots were made at haphazard, or, it may be, according to astrological {4} considerations, on a sheet of white paper, and good or bad omens were drawn from the various shapes or figures which they presented. Polydore Virgil says that geomancy is a species of divination effected through the medium of fissures made in the earth. He considers that the Magi of Persia were its first professors. To the geomancers of China these two methods are altogether unknown. Each Chinese geomancer is provided with a compass to ascertain the position of the neighbouring and distant hills in relation to any plot of ground which he may think of selecting for a tomb. (v. 1 p. 7)

The geomancer’s compass, or luopan, related the chosen site to the five elements and to the heavenly bodies. The luopan had to be modified every few centuries to take into account the precession of the equinoxes, which suggests that Chinese geomancy had an essential link with empirical observation. The Western link between geomancy and astrology, mentioned by Gray, is more complicated than he supposes. Peter Cornelius Agrippa, in his recantation On the Vanity of All Arts and Sciences (1569) (again a source from the OED), tells us:

All they which write hereof do affirm that Geomancie is the daughter of Astrologie … which castinge certaine pointes made by chance, or by a certaine force, of the which by certain equall and unequall numbers, fashioneth certaine figures attributed to the heavenley signes, by which they Divine (ch. 36)

and:

Al for the most parte doe attribute Geomancie to Astrologie, for the like manner of judgement, and also because they gette the vertue thereof, not so muche out of numbers, as out of Movinges, according to that sayinge of Aristotle, in the first Booke of the Meteores: The movinge of the Heaven is everlasting, and is the beginning and cause of all inferior Movinges. (Ch. 13)

This is all very tantalizing, because all this discussion has definitely to do with microcosmic geomancy. Christopher Cattan (1591), quoted in {5} the OED, explains:

every pricke signifieth a Starre, and every line an Element, and every figure the fore quarters of the worlde … wherefore it is easie to knowe that Geomancie is none other thing but Astrologie and a third mean, that is to say, participating of the two, which is Alquemy.

In this sense, geomancy is a short cut to astrology. Gerard of Cremona, whose work is referred to by Agrippa, uses geomantic casting of dots instead of the proper (and laborious) calculation of the horoscope’s ascending angle:

It is expedient therefore, to make from unequall lines, by the pointes casually set down; and to joine together those pointes; and out of the pointes which are not joined together, which do remain in the heads of the lines (as it is done in Geomancie), extract one figure; and the sign of the Zodiacke which answereth to that figure, put for the Ascendant, for the wordes sake.
Astronomical Geomancie, 1575

The geomancy textbooks by Agrippa (predating his recantation!), Cattan and Gerard all contain tables of figures and their meanings and/or astrological equivalents. Incidentally, the ‘casting’ of a horoscope is precisely this geomantic determination of a substitute ascendant, resulting in a kind of ‘astrology’ which is as near clairvoyance as casting the Tarot is. A time map of the heavens is calculated, not ‘cast’.

So far we are definitely dealing with the ‘casting of dots at random’. A word about the concept of randomness, however. The idea that randomness precludes any meaningful interpretation is entirely modern. Gaming is traditionally a holy or sacrilegious pastime, because the ‘chance’ outcome which it invokes is entirely at the mercy of supernatural powers. These may be invoked harmoniously, as in the casting of lots, whose relation to city planning survives in our word ‘allotment’, or invoked in vain, as in secular gambling. Geomantic clod-casting is just one of Agrippa’s ‘inferior Movinges’ which is a reflection of the {6} ‘Movinge of the Heaven’, and as such it was thought to bear interpretation on a cosmic scale.

The symbolic equation of clod-casting with the signs of the zodiac is still far from the planning and modification of human and natural features in accordance with a preordained canon of harmony, which is our modern sense of ‘geomancy’. Gray cites Polydore Virgil as using ‘geomancy’ for divination by means of fissures in the earth. Agrippa (On the Vanity ch. 36) gives a rather extended meaning in a similar sense, which could have to do with macrocosmic landscape-reading:

There is also an other kind of Geomancie, which Almadal the Arabian introduced and brought in, the which doth divine by certain conjectures taken of similtudes of the cracking of the Earthe, of the moving, cleaving, swelling, either of it selfe, or else of inflamation and heate, or of thunderings, that happen, the whiche also is grounded upon vaine superstition of Astrologie, as that which observeth houres, the newe Moones, the rising and forme of the starres.

He appears to be talking of earth movements, and in the context of an astrology which we would rather call applied astronomy, based not on the symbolic reading of a horoscope, but on the observation of the phases of the moon and the celestial seasons. Unfortunately I have not been able to trace Almadal the Arabian.

We know already (JOG 4/3 p. 4) that the practice of macrocosmic geomancy was extant in Ben Jonson’s England, under the name of ‘necromancy’. By faulty etymology, linking it with the Latin ‘niger’ (black) not the Greek ‘nekros’ (dead), the word ‘necromancy’ was used between the 13th and 16th centuries to indicate the black arts of {7} any description, not just raising the dead. It included geomancy, hydromancy and Cabbalah at least. The quotations given for ‘necromancy’ in the OED include the one already quoted in context in the previous JOG:

1610, B. Jonson, Alch. I(iii) I would know … which way I should make my dore, by necromancie.

Also this interesting reference which I have not followed up.

c. 1530 L.D. Berners Arth. Lyt. Bryt. (1814) 43: A passage of the bred of a spere length made by nigramancye.

The ‘spere length’ will be the length of the blade, an Ancient Canonical measure.

Here is another, from Chaucer, linking necromancy/geomancy with hydromancy:

1386 Chaucer Pars. T. P529 (Hall MS): As donne these false enchauntours or nigromanciens in bacines full of water.

The practice of macrocosmic geomancy certainly existed. How does it link with the recognized microcosmic practice?

Two more quotations from the OED are of interest here. The first is from R. Harvey, Philad(eus?), telling us that:

Bladud found the hot Bathes in this land by his Geomanticall and Hydromanticall skill and subtiltie.

Bladud was the king of Britain who according to Geoffrey of Monmouth was killed in an air crash in 843 BC. Now he may have been using the microcosmic subtle arts, i.e. casting dots at random and scrying into a basin of water, as being appropriate to the search for a body of water hidden in the earth. Or he may have practised landscape geometry and dowsing.

Geomancy and hydromancy have come together macrocosmically in recent years in the work of dowsers such as Tom Graves and Colin Bloy, {8} divining for earth energies not water, and in The Ley Hunter’s ‘dragon Project’. Microcosmically, they are traditionally linked as twin branches of necromancy. And they are linked ‘a priori’ through the complementation of their rulers Saturn, planet of earth and stability, anciently the farthest planet from the earth, and the Moon, planet of water and inconstancy, anciently the nearest planet to the earth. The numbers of the magic squares of those planets both reduce to 5 (Moon is 41), astrologically the number of harmony and outwardly opposing forces. It is obvious for us, living in an age when subtle energies are seen as an analogue of electro-magnetic energy, where electricity was originally modelled upon water, to envisage macrocosmic geomancy as the orientation of landscape points and their dowsable energies in accordance with astronomical alignments. The archetypal link of geomancy and hydromancy through Saturn and the Moon, and the textual links hinted at several times in what has already been quoted, only encourage us to look for a much wider knowledge of the large-scale applications of these two methods of divination in earlier times.

Gray attributes the discovery of geomancy in his and our sense to the Emperor Kwok Pok of the Tsun dynasty who wrote the Tsong-King, or Burial Classic. The Emperor Wu-Tai of the Han dynasty (140 BCE) was a great upholder of geomancy, but Tai-Tsung, of the Tang dynasty (627 CE) reversed the (by then venerable) practice and employed a scholar called Lu Tzo to expose its absurdity. A memorial was presented to the throne in 960 CE to petition for the suppression of geomancy, but the imperial ministers advised against it, and so the practice of geomancy continued.

What was going on in the West all this while? From where did the practice of Jonsonian ‘necromancie’ spring? The OED has another set of quotations supporting the argument for a macrocosmic practice, all translations of {9} Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 19, to the effect that geomants see the figure known as the Greater Fortune rise in the east before the dawn: “At the hour when the heat of the day can no longer withstand the cold of the Moon, overcome by the Earth and sometimes Saturn, then geomants see their Greater Fortune ascend in the east before the dawn, along a path which does not stay dark for it long, then …” The commentator to my edition remarks that ancient astrologers believed that Saturn below the horizon brought cold. The commentator also says that ‘geomant’ was used interchangeably with ‘necromancer’ and ‘hydromancer’!

The figure known as the Greater Fortune is the cusp of Aquarius and Pisces – I have not so far traced this in geomancy manuals. Nor have I found access yet to tables telling on what dates of the early 14th century year the sign Pisces was on the horizon in Italy at dawn. Indeed, this additional knowledge would only be the icing on the cake, so to speak. What matters is that the geomants were out there looking at the dawn, practising macrocosmic geomancy or ‘necromancy’. If Dante had told us that this was the hour at which the figure which geomants cast on paper and call the Greater Fortune can be seen in the sky, then the reference would be indisputably to microcosmic clod-casting. But he tells us that this is the hour at which the geomants see the figure rising before the dawn (“veggiono in oriente, innanzi l’alba, surger”). They are applying microcosm to macrocosm, seeing the heavens aligned in the figure of the Greater Fortune; not interpreting clods of earth as though they resembled the ‘Movinge of the Heaven, the beginning and cause of all inferior Movinges’.

The astrologer Julie Parker relates (The Compleat Astrologer, p. 24) that astrology was considered under two heads in the Middle ages and early Renascence: the forbidden black art of fortune-telling, ‘casting’ horoscopes and foretelling the future; and the newly-arrived Arabian science of planetary motion, astronomy, {10} complete with tables of planetary positions and houses. The latter approach derived from Aristotle’s dictum cited at the end of the previous paragraph. Similarly, Agrippa distinguishes ‘judiciall Astrologie’, i.e. fortune-telling, from ‘Astrologie, otherwise called Astronomie’. Aquinas, according to Parker, accepted astrology insofar as it was free of necromancy, it was a fit subject for scientific study. This acceptance of astrology and its ‘daughter’ according to Agrippa, geomancy, would exclude communion with:

Those geomantic spirits
That Hermes called ‘terrae filii’
Greene, Francis Bacon c. 1590

which Cattan also says are necessarily contacted in geomantic working, and obviously also the practices alluded to by Jonson which governed the arrangement of business premises. Clearly there existed an official practice and an ‘underground’ practice.

The evidence of the Oxford English Dictionary, then, thought among the vulgar to disestablish the modern use of the word ‘geomancy’, in fact reveals a much more complex usage than either party to the dispute thought was the case. The would-be knock-down citations about ‘points, prickes and lines’ themselves reveal the essential dependence of geomancy on astrology, and further, the battle raging between the divinatory and empirical applications of astrology. Both parties to the dispute were convinced that the earth and the heavens had symbolic meaning, but the divinatory geomants and astrologers took the mere similitude of a figure to the heavens to augur the same meaning that the empirical (geomants and?) astrologers read into the heavens as observed and calculated by scientific means. It is rather like the difference between dream interpretation and behaviour modification, both sides calling themselves ‘psychology’ and both claiming their successes. It appears furthermore that geomancy was not clearly distinguished from what we and our ances- {11} tors variously called ‘hydromancy’ and ‘necromancy’. In fact ‘necromancy’ covered a multitude of sins: for only 32 quotations containing ‘geomancy’ and cognates, and 15 for ‘hydromancy’, the OED cites 88 for ‘necromancy’. All three terms took a sharp drop in citable occurrences during the 18th century, and all three (apart from ‘geomancy’, revived during the 19th century to apply to the Chinese practice) had their period of greatest citable usage during the 17th. Usage of all these terms dropped off sharply after 1640–50, and it is tempting to ascribe this feature to the Puritan revolution with its clampdown on publishing and practice in these subjects, rather than, as is quite possible, to the simply less imaginative usage of writers during the period, resulting in fewer instances worth mention in the OED. (Greater standardization of language is, of course, significant in its own right, but not as a direct indicator of the occurrence of its subject-matter). The 18th century references tend to talk about the usage of the word ‘geomancy’, rather than talking about the subject, as earlier sources do. We do not have then an unbroken tradition of usage, either of ‘geomancy’ or ‘necromancy’. ‘Hydromancy’ has a more constant usage, although the small number (15) of examples may give a misleading picture. The indubitable association of geomancy with astrology now requires more investigation into the history of astrology.

Following up the sloppy scholarship of Professor Daniel has revealed material of great interest to geomants in general. I hope to follow these leads further and record my findings in subsequent issues.

To refresh the memory, and for new readers, this is Professor Daniel’s response to the founding of the I.G.R.: (From Antiquity)
“The lunatic fringes of archaeology are becoming too large. Why is this? And what is geomancy anyhow? The OED says it is ‘the art of divination by means of lines and figures, formed originally by throwing earth on some surface, and {12} later by jotting down on paper dots at random’. Dots at random? It seems to us that the geomants are dotties at random.”
Such is the enlightened attitude of the intellectual elite of Britain. – editor.