Fortuna Minor

Fortuna Minor, the Lesser Fortune, is one of the sixteen figures of Western geomancy, the divinatory art in which meaning is read from a figure of four rows, each row holding either one dot or two.

The figure and its reading

Its four rows are Fire (one dot), Air (one dot), Water (two dots), Earth (two dots). Geomantic figures are attributed to the elements, the planets and the signs of the zodiac; Fortuna Minor is assigned to the element of Fire, to the Sun and the sign Leo. Its traditional divinatory sense is one of outward help, quick success.

These attributions are those of the mature Western tradition set out by writers such as Christopher Cattan (1558) and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (Book II of the Three Books of Occult Philosophy, 1533), and taken up in the modern revival by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888. The technique itself is older and reached Latin Europe through translations of the Arabic ilm al-raml, the science of the sand. The figure is described here as an element of that documented tradition.

The whole of a geomantic figure is its four rows, each single or double, and everything else the tradition attaches to it sits on top of that.

The pattern

Fortuna Minor is single, single, double, double, reading Fire, Air, Water and Earth from the top down, six points in all. The two light rows sit above the two heavy ones, the exact reverse of its partner.

Flipping every row

Change each row from single to double and from double to single and Fortuna Minor becomes Fortuna Major. The two are the most transparent pair in the set, because their Latin names already record the relationship rather than leaving it to be discovered in the points.

Greater and lesser, and what the distinction is

The tradition does not read these two as fortunate and unfortunate. Both are figures of success. The distinction the handbooks draw is between success that rests on the querent's own resources and success that depends on circumstance or on another party, the second being quicker to arrive and quicker to leave. Whether that reading was suggested by the point pattern or attached to it afterwards is not recoverable from the sources.

The rest of the record

Every figure has exactly one partner under the flip, so the sixteen fall into eight pairs and none is left over. The atlas records this figure's planet, sign and element separately. Those attributions come from the astrological layer, vary between Agrippa, Cattan and the later English handbooks, and are recorded here as tradition rather than as fact about the points.