Carcer

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.

Carcer carries single points in the Fire and Earth rows and double points in Air and Water, six points in all.

Reading the four rows

Read from the top down, the rows are Fire, Air, Water and Earth. In the common reading a single point marks the element active and a double marks it passive, so Carcer reads as an active Fire and an active Earth with a passive middle. Drawn out, the figure shows a single point at the top and a single point at the bottom with the two doubled rows between them, which is the visual reason for the name: something shut in on both ends.

What flipping it produces

Turn every row from single to double and back and Carcer becomes Coniunctio, whose points sit in exactly the opposite arrangement. The pairing is a fact about the point structure and not a claim about how the two are read.

The attributions

This atlas records Carcer under Saturn, the sign Capricorn and the element Earth. The point pattern is intrinsic and can be verified by anyone who draws the figure. The planet, sign and element were attached to the figures by the astrological tradition rather than derived from them, and the Latin handbooks differ from one another on several of the sixteen.

The name means prison. In the Latin tradition the figure is read as restriction, delay, binding and a matter held in place, and it is one of the figures whose traditional meaning and whose drawn shape agree with one another closely enough that the reading is easy to remember.