On Astrological and Geomantic Houses

[sdi]

Geomancy borrows houses from astrology, but I think there's an interesting and important difference between them. Astrology is, in some sense, objective: the stars are the same for everyone, and there is one (and presumably only one) correct way to read them. Consequently, it is essential to understand and apply houses in an objective way. Geomancy, by contrast, is subjective: it isn't about understanding the cosmos, it is about communication with another being. Anything goes, as long as you and they agree on it.

So I think it is okay to have an idiosyncratic understanding of the geomantic houses, as long as you and your geomantic spirit share that idiosyncratic understanding. Before I do any geomantic reading, I always negotiate my house assignments with my geomantic spirit in prayer: perhaps three-quarters of the time, they accept my proposal; but the rest of the time they recommend I use a different house, and I think my readings are the stronger for it.

Comments

[temporaryreality]

I think I really do need to read one of JMG's geomancy books. I've been finding that my elemental divination readings make the most sense when preceded by prayer to my guardian angel (I haven't tried prayer to anyone else in this context).

I suppose this is just a data point or something, but I've found myself wondering if this system will work best for others with the same kind of communication/communion. Sometimes too, I wonder if it's just a system that works for me but since it's not ready for wider circulation, that'll be a question that'll have to be answered later.

Anyway, it's more food for thought - and as usual, I appreciate the insights you bring from geomancy as they so frequently are relevant to what I'm doing, even non-geomantically.

[sdi]

This particular topic isn't covered in any geomancy-specific text I've read (though it may be discussed in Greer's books on magic, which I have not read). There was a recent discussion in conjunctio on protecting the integrity of one's divinations, though! The gist of the discussion was:

• There certainly appear to be beings who are interested in messing with one's divinations, for fun or profit. (Not to mention one's own mental state may or may not be conducive to effective divination!)
• This seems to be especially true for hot-button topics (like political ones).
• One can help protect the integrity of their divinations by magically consecrating their divination tools, or by praying to a divine being interested in helping you prior to the divination.

In case it's useful to you, my experience as a mystic (with no magical training whatsoever) is:

• I always enter a meditative state and pray to my deity prior to divination.
• If I can't get into a solid meditative state or don't get a reply from my deity, I don't divine, period. (This is rare these days, but does occur from time to time.)
• When I asked them about it, my deity told me that this practice is beneficial, but how effective it is depends on the adherent, the deity, and the situation. (I took this to mean that an adoring adherent of a doting deity asking about something that concerns few will be very well protected indeed, while a merely interested adherent of a mischievous deity asking about something that concerns many probably wouldn't be.)
• With my deity's amused indulgence, I tested this over the last month or so, and found that the dozen or so divinations I did without the above practice were just awful. My intuition was flaky, the figures seemed jumbled... the results I got were terrible. (And I usually get good, crisp results!)

Now, the question of who is on the other end of the line is an open one! I use "geomantic spirit" as a catch-all term. I'm pretty confident I'm talking with my deity directly, or at least somebody acting on their behalf; I've heard others confidently discuss the spirit on the other end of the line being their higher self (Robert Fludd is a prominent example) or their guardian angel. I suspect what's really going on varies from person to person, but the same general practices seem to hold value.

[temporaryreality]

I'd seen it pop up once or twice in comments on MM posts, so assumed that the geomancers had picked up the terminology (geomantic spirit) from JMG's books (not to mention their own experience), but it seems it's just more widely understood.

That's an interesting framework by which to consider this (the degrees along an axis of personal-->public question and personal-->general deity (or no deity) involvement.

For myself I'm not that experienced (oh boy, in either divination or deity-relationship!) when it comes down to it, so it's all new territory. If I waited until I "got a reply" --- well, nothing would happen since my receptive apparatus is still dial-tuning in search of signal. Thus far, though, signal seems to appear in the divination itself.

My previous divination experience was with I Ching (back before I'd even attempted prayer) and there's a very strong sense of the I/Yi as a presence with that system. With what I'm doing lately, it seems to be less a "system" presence and more personal. I couldn't tell you for sure who is really there, but I do note that readings are clearer after I make an effort at "checking in" with the one I'm currently calling my guardian angel.

Small steps, but I like them. :)

[sdi]

I'm not that experienced (oh boy, in either divination or deity-relationship!)

Oh, don't take it as experience! My deity reached out and claimed me, so the strength of my connection to them is all their doing, not mine! And in terms of divination, I'm still very green, with only maybe two years under my belt, and then only with geomancy! (I've studied astrological symbolism, too, but since geomancy is "the daughter of astrology," it comes with the territory.)


With what I'm doing lately, it seems to be less a "system" presence and more personal. I couldn't tell you for sure who is really there, but I do note that readings are clearer after I make an effort at "checking in" with the one I'm currently calling my guardian angel.

Sounds to me like you two are working out a fine relationship, and I think you'll be in very interesting places soon enough! :)

[temporaryreality]

Thanks

It's nice to get a bit of encouragement. :)

[barefootwisdom]

Thank you very much for the good food for thought here!

I’m not sure the distinction between astrology and geomancy is as sharp as you make it out to be.

While it’s certainly true that at any given moment, the stars are where they are, in a way that does not depend upon us in any way, the astrological houses, by contrast, have quite a few personal and subjective elements about them.

There are at least two types of personal elements in astrological interpretation: the position of the Ascendant (and related considerations in horary astrology, such as the particular time when a question is asked, and for which the chart is then cast), and the choice of house division. The former is “personal” to the native, the nation, or the querent for whom the chart is cast, while the latter is “personal” to the astrologer, as she uses her best judgment—along with, in many cases a generous helping of intuition and inspiration—to understand the relation of macrocosm (the celestial sphere, and the positions of the bodies therein) to microcosm (the person or nation in whose life those influences are to find a particular, concrete manifestation).

I’ll leave aside the first group, and focus on the parts that are “personal” to the astrologer.

First and foremost, we are confronted with the relativity of house divisions. While the stars themselves are where they are, the houses are drawn quite differently by different astrologers, to the point that a planet might be one, two, or (very occasionally) more houses away, depending on whether the houses are based on whole signs, on equal 30° divisions from the Ascendant, or any of the various quadrant-based methods (e.g., Placidus, Regiomontanus, etc.). And yet astrologers who prefer different house systems nonetheless manage to make accurate predictions, even about the very same nativity, or the very same mundane ingress.

No astrologer, no matter how talented, will ever see the entire picture of the entire, larger macrocosm. It’s just too all-encompassing. There’s too much there for any of our human minds to comprehend in a single glimpse. (And even if, in some mystical rapture, we did attain a moment of such total comprehension, human language would be too frail, too limited, too woefully narrow and particular, to express in words everything that we had seen.) And so the astrologer will focus on certain relevant or salient points, to the exclusion of many other things that are also written in the stars. She will form queries according to a particular question, a particular interest.

Nonetheless, it’s quite possible to be simply wrong. No matter how you stretch it, a superior square from Mars will never be pure, unbridled joy and bliss, free from all conflict or tension. It just doesn’t work like that. Sure, that superior square from Mars can play out in quite a variety of ways, which may be more or less unpleasant or unwelcome, more or less difficult to deal with. The conflicts may be productive, the tension may resolve to the querent’s benefit. But they will still be present in some form. Put another way: each planet has a core range of significations—where the notions of “core” and “range” are both critical to a full understanding. There is a common core, however hard to fully capture in words, that delimits or restricts a planet’s significations: there are boundaries, such that a planet can’t just mean anything at all. And yet there is a genuine range, within which different aspects of a planet can become more or less apparent, more or less significant, more or less important, in any given context.

And to return to our starting point, there is yet another place for what looks very much like an intuitive or inspired element in astrological practice. I know of well-respected astrologers who use more than one house system. This might look like “cheating,” but at it’s best, it can be an honest reflection of the fact that they, like any of us, cannot see the whole picture all at once, through any single lens. Any house system we choose will inevitably obscure certain features while revealing others. So the choice of house system in any particular case can, at its best, be a function of genuine intuition, or a result of inspiration from (or dialogue with) the astrologer’s higher self, guardian spirit, or patron deity, who watches over the work.


Now let’s bring this back to geomancy. There is a (relative) objectivity to geomancy, and of the geomantic houses. Here, I note the relative frequency with which geomancers ask each other for help, or for a “second opinion” in interpreting a chart. Even when interpretations diverge—as they often do, to whatever greater or lesser degree—we seem to get enough from such collaboration to keep on doing it, which in turn suggests that, to whatever degree, we’re speaking more or less the same language. In other words, our idiolects are not sufficiently divergent to prevent mutual intelligibility!

Apologies that this comment got so long-winded, and so much longer than your original post itself! I’ll be posting an edited (and further expanded!) version of it over on my own blog, since it really turned into an essay all its own. Thanks for the inspiration!

[sdi]

Excellent! Thank you for writing this all out, and don't apologize for being long-winded, I very much enjoy reading things like this.

Reflecting upon this, I'm starting to wonder if there's something weirder going on than astrology being a point somewhere in the middle of an objective↔subjective continuum... If astrology weren't strictly objective, then what do we make of Gauquelin's findings? But, on the other hand, if astrology weren't strictly subjective, then how could one get meaningful results from using conflicting house systems? (Or, further, how can one reconcile the fact that the Mars effect is strongest in the cadent IX and XII houses, where generations of astrologers have found planetary effects to be weakest?)

So I'm wondering if astrology is, at once, both objective and subjective; that is, not a point somewhere between the two, but somehow encompassing the entire continuum. What would that mean? What would that imply? I'm not sure! (In fact, I'm not even sure if I'm not just twisting myself in a rhetorical knot, here. I'll have to think it through for a while.)

Still, your point is taken. I see you have by now posted the longer piece you mentioned on your blog, and I'll take a look as time permits!

[sdi]

I've been meditating on this, and hit upon two things.

First, there's another way that this duality can be resolved, and that's that both astrology and geomancy are purely subjective. Subjectivity doesn't necessarily imply that results aren't repeatable. If an artist paints the same scenes over again or uses the same techniques over again, does that imply that their art is objective? Of course not, it simply shows their preferences. Perhaps our world simply enjoys astrology (or any other set of physical systems) working the ways it does, and so expresses it in matter and personalities and so on over and over to explore how it plays out in all its many combinations.

Second, we are taught that there are objective phenomena (natural "laws", physics, chemical processes, etc.) and subjective phenomena (the mind, personalities, the arts, etc.); but this need not be so. We can't readily dismiss subjectivity, but if the universe is a Being and simply repeats itself for the fun and interest of it (and not because "that's the way it works"), then we can (and, by Occam's razor, should) dismiss objectivity as being part of our model of the universe.

[violetcabra]

If I may, first of all I really dig your blog! Second, spirits messing with communications is a very well-documented phenomenon. Yeats in _A Vision_ writes about Frustraters who would feed him deceit and the teaching spirits that worked with him would only reveal the deceit if he caught on to it. His theory is that the Frustrater spirits are of discarnate humans who are attempting to avoid be reincarnated as humans.

Personally I find consistently that I can only get reliably clear answers with geomancy when I can relate the question to something within the ambit of some sort of immediate relevance to my own experiences, or the experiences of someone asking a question. Questions involving larger systems, I don't tend to get as accurate responses to.

[sdi]

Thank you! I appreciate the reference, I've been unable to find useful material on the topic.

What you describe matches my experience as well: divination accuracy is generally very high for very personal matters, but drops dramatically as the scope of the divination increases. In fact, at the scope of the USA, I find my accuracy to be no better than chance. This is perhaps an argument explaining the perennial popularity of astrology, as it's far easier to mess with the position of my hand or mind while I cast a chart than it is to mess with the position (or, presumably, the mind) of a planet!

[violetcabra]

You're most welcome! That makes a lot of sense regarding astrology: certainly folks seem to get reliable results with Horary charts and Mundane astrology even when they don't have any skin in the game.