Four Views of the Figures

[sdi]

Over at conjunctio, I mentioned a technique that I’ve been exploring concerning assigning a score to a chart to help give context to how positive or negative a day should be assumed to be. The technique was ignored, with all of the commentary instead going towards my choice of scores. This was surprising to me, since I had assumed that part to be uncontroversial! I thought I’d expound a little bit over here.

I’ve been casting daily and monthly charts for a couple years now. It’s hard to do this and not develop some sort of Pavlovian response to the figures, as one sees them and then feels their effects over the course of the day or month. In meditation the other week, I was exploring how I’ve come to see the figures:

Very Positive
Mildly Positive
Neutral
Mildly Negative
Very Negative

This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't really pass the smell test to me: something feels very off about it. For one, there's no balance between paired figures at all; for another, the Dragons (traditionally very malefic) are things I see as neutral-to-positive, while the Fortunes (traditionally positive) are things I tend to see negatively, and arch-malefic Acquisitio is almost literally the opposite of where it is traditionally considered. (But I can't see where else it ought to go! I am very nearly afraid when I see the figure in a chart, as its effects are so detrimental.)

So, I took this as a sign that I got turned around somewhere and needed to recalibrate my perceptions. The most obvious way to do this, or so I thought, was simply to use each figure's astrological associations and try to see them through that lens:

Benefic
Neutral
Malefic

When I posted about this, I got some push back, with people mentioning that Amissio is traditionally negative, while Fortuna Major is traditionally the most positive figure of all. You can see from my first chart that these associations strike me as suspect, and so it never even occurred to me to look at the geomantic tradition and see how it sees the figures—though, in my defense, I've don't think I've ever seen a table of these anywhere! I took a stab at looking through various texts (and especially Geomancy in Theory and Practice), though, and think this is more or less how the figures are described:

Very Positive
Mildly Positive
Neutral
Mildly Negative
Very Negative

I find quite a bit of fault with this set of descriptions, but that should not be a surprise given my first chart. Over on conjunctio, somebody was wondering if perhaps my astrological natal chart could shed some light on the discrepancy, but I couldn't find anything obvious: my Jupiter is positive (not negative, like my perception of Acquisitio would suggest), my Sun is mixed (not negative, like my perception of the Fortunes would suggest), and my Venus is very negative (not positive, like my perception of Her figures would suggest). I'm still digging into it.

Anyway, in all of these ways of looking at the figures, I should probably note that I should expect true mastery of the system to be achieved when all of the figures appear to one as neutral. After all, they're just energies: neither good nor bad of themselves. Rather, the question is what are they good or bad at? All of them have their place, and it is only proper to use the appropriate tool for the situation at hand. (It should be noted that this is explicitly how The Art and Practice of Geomancy describes the figures, to it's merit in my opinion.)

Neutral

These four ways of looking at the exact same thing reminds me of an old koan from the Tetteki Tosui ("The Iron Flute," compiled in 1783 by Genro):

An old hermit lived in a small hut in the mountains. As a reminder to himself, he labelled the door, the window, and the wall of the hut with the word "mind." As time passed, the hermit died, and another came to take up residence in the hut, but he was dissatisfied with the labels he found. He replaced them such that the door read "door," the window read "window," and the wall read "wall." As time passed, this hermit also died and another came to take up residence in the hut. He, also, was dissatisfied with the labels, and he simply erased each one. As time passed, this third hermit also died and a fourth came to take up residence in the hut. As with the two before him, he found the situation unsatisfactory, and labelled the door "window," the window "wall," and the wall "door."