Geomancy: from the «science of sand» to the sixteen figures
A history of geomancy: from Arabic ʿilm al-raml to the Latin translations of the twelfth century, its sixteen figures and their legacy in Dante and Agrippa.
Among the divinatory arts of the Middle Ages, few spread as widely as geomancy. Its Greek name, «divination by means of the earth», is a European label: the texts through which the art reached the West were Arabic, and they called it ʿilm al-raml, «the science of sand». The practitioner drew rows of marks on the ground and then reduced them to patterns of single or double dots. From those dots arose figures with a name and a meaning, interpreted according to fixed rules.
An origin in the Islamic world
The earliest reliable evidence for geomancy comes from the Arab-Islamic world and dates to at least the ninth or tenth century, although its precise origins remain debated. Arabic tradition attributed its invention to the prophet Idrīs, sometimes identified with Hermes, or to a teaching of the angel Gabriel: legendary accounts that served to ennoble the practice. From North Africa and the Near East the art also spread into sub-Saharan Africa, where it took local forms such as the sikidy of Madagascar.
Some scholars have suggested links between Arabic geomancy and the Yoruba system of Ifá, which shares a structure based on binary combinations. This, however, remains a debated hypothesis rather than an established fact. What is certain is that geomancy remained alive for centuries in many regions of West and East Africa, where specialists passed it on orally and adapted it to local languages and beliefs.
The sixteen figures
At the heart of the system is a set of sixteen figures, each made of four rows of one or two dots. Sixteen is in fact the total number of possible combinations. The Latin names, fixed in the Middle Ages, remained stable for a long time: Populus, Via, Puer, Puella, Fortuna Maior, Fortuna Minor, Acquisitio, Amissio, Laetitia, Tristitia, Carcer, Coniunctio, Albus, Rubeus, Caput Draconis and Cauda Draconis.
The figures were arranged in a scheme called the «shield», with four «mothers», four «daughters», four «nieces», two «witnesses» and a «judge». To each figure the treatises assigned a planet, a zodiac sign and an element, thereby tying geomancy to astrology, which enjoyed great prestige in Europe. The judge was regarded as the decisive figure for the final answer.
Arrival in Europe and literary fortune
Geomancy entered Latin culture in the twelfth century through translations from Arabic made in the Iberian peninsula. Hugh of Santalla wrote one of the first Latin treatises, and other texts were attributed, not always with good reason, to Gerard of Cremona. By the thirteenth century the art was well enough known for Dante, in Canto XIX of the Purgatorio, to recall the hour when «the geomancers see their Fortuna Maior» rising in the east.
In the Renaissance geomancy found a place in the De occulta philosophia of Cornelius Agrippa, published in its complete form in 1533, and in the seventeenth century it was discussed by Robert Fludd. Spurious treatises also circulated, such as the so-called Fourth Book attributed to Agrippa, whose authorship learned circles themselves considered doubtful. Meanwhile printed editions and manuals in the vernacular appeared.
The history of geomancy shows how a body of knowledge born among the deserts and cities of the Islamic world became part of Europe's intellectual heritage. Translated, commented upon and interwoven with astrology, the art of the sixteen figures remained for centuries a meeting point between elementary mathematics, cosmology and the wish to know the future.