Divination: Astrology, Geomancy and Tarot

Divination is the attempt to gain knowledge by reading a pattern that has been produced, or has arisen, apart from the reasoning mind: the positions of the planets, the fall of dots in sand, the order of shuffled cards. It is the most popular of the esoteric arts and the most abused. Within the Hermetic tradition it has a definite and limited place, as a means of reflection and a training of the intuitive faculty.

The idea behind divination

If the cosmos is a single fabric, as the Hermetic picture holds, then any part of it taken at a given moment bears the stamp of the whole at that moment. A pattern produced at random, with a question held in mind, is a small sample of the same moment to which the question belongs. This is the traditional rationale, and it is the principle of correspondence applied to time.

There is also a plainer account. A divinatory system is a rich, ordered set of symbols. Laid out in response to a question, the symbols force the mind to consider the matter from angles it would not have chosen, and they give the intuition something to speak through. On this account divination works whether or not the cards know anything, in the way that a good question from a friend works.

Both accounts agree on the practical point. Divination shows the shape of a situation, including the parts one has been avoiding. It does not issue verdicts.

Astrology

Astrology is the oldest of the three and the foundation of the others. It reads the positions of the seven planets against the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve houses, which divide the sky as seen from a particular place. The system that the West inherited was assembled in Egypt in the last centuries before the common era, from Babylonian observation and Greek geometry, and some of the earliest astrological handbooks circulated under the name of Hermes.

For the student of magick the importance of astrology is less in prediction than in language. The planets and signs supply the vocabulary in which the whole tradition is written, and the practice of timing by days and hours is a branch of it. Some acquaintance with the planets, the signs and their relations is part of basic literacy in the art.

Geomancy

Geomancy, literally divination by earth, was the everyday oracle of medieval and Renaissance Europe and is now much less known than it deserves. It reached the Latin West from Arabic sources in the twelfth century, where it was called the science of the sand.

The diviner makes sixteen rows of marks at random, without counting, and notes whether each row is odd or even. From these are built four figures, each consisting of four lines of one or two dots. There are sixteen possible figures, with names such as Via, the Way, Populus, the People, Fortuna Major, the Greater Fortune, and Carcer, the Prison. By a fixed procedure the first four figures generate eleven more, ending in a judge that sums up the answer. The figures are assigned to elements, planets and signs, and the finished chart can be read much as an astrological one.

Geomancy needs only a pencil. It gives direct answers to practical questions and is an excellent first system for a student who wants to learn how divination behaves.

Tarot

The tarot is a pack of seventy eight cards: four suits of fourteen cards each, and twenty two picture cards called trumps. It was devised in northern Italy in the fifteenth century for playing a card game, which is still played. There is no evidence that it was used for divination or thought to hold secret teachings before the late eighteenth century, when French writers proposed that the trumps preserved the wisdom of ancient Egypt.

That claim was mistaken as history, and it began one of the most creative episodes in the Western tradition. During the nineteenth century the trumps were matched with the twenty two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the paths of the Tree of Life, the four suits with the four elements, and the numbered cards with the ten spheres. The pack became a portable picture book of the whole system of correspondences, and most esoteric decks made since are built on that scheme.

Besides divination, the trumps are widely used as subjects for meditation. A single card set up and contemplated daily for a week yields more than many spreads.

Practicing well

• Ask a real question. Write it down before you begin. Questions of the form what do I need to see about this serve better than questions that demand a yes or no.
• Ask once. Repeating a question until the answer suits you teaches the mind to disregard the whole proceeding.
• Record everything. Note the question, the figures or cards, your reading and the date. Return later and mark what proved accurate and what did not.
• Read what is there. Learn the traditional meanings thoroughly before improvising. Intuition works best with something definite to push against.
• Keep your judgment. A reading is one advisor among several. The decision remains yours, and so does the responsibility.