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Agrippa, Cattan and Fludd: The Books It Came Through

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Agrippa, Cattan and Fludd: The Books It Came Through

The Latin and Renaissance handbooks are why any of this is still legible, and their disagreements are as informative as their agreements.

Agrippa, and the book that is not his

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533) discusses geomancy among the divinatory arts, but the detailed treatment attributed to him is in the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, printed later and translated into English by Robert Turner in 1655.

The attribution is not accepted. Agrippa almost certainly did not write it. It is nonetheless the most copied English source for the figures' astrological attributions, and a great deal of what circulates today as Agrippa's geomancy descends from a text he did not write.

Cattan

Christopher Cattan published La Geomance in French in 1558; the English translation appeared in 1591. It is a practical handbook (how to generate the figures, how to build the chart, what each figure means in each house), and it is the most systematic of the Renaissance treatments.

Cattan and the pseudo-Agrippa do not agree on every planetary and zodiacal attribution. The disagreements are not large but they are real, and any modern table of correspondences has silently chosen between them.

Fludd

Robert Fludd included a substantial treatment, De Geomantia, in his Utriusque Cosmi (1617-21). Fludd is the interesting case because he was a physician, a Fellow of the College of Physicians, and a serious natural philosopher who took public criticism for defending the art.

His defence was that geomancy worked through natural causes and the world-soul rather than through demons, the standard line of argument by which Renaissance scholars tried to keep divination inside natural philosophy and out of the reach of the charge of sorcery.

That argument was ultimately lost, which is a large part of why geomancy declined while astrology limped on.

Why Carcer

The prison is a suitable place to record this, because it is the figure whose meaning has stayed most nearly constant across every source in the chain. Arabic, Latin, French, English: a bound and enclosed figure, restriction, delay, confinement, a matter that cannot move.

Where the correspondences drifted and the attributions were disputed, the core readings of the sixteen figures travelled remarkably intact.

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