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Geomantic Figures

Puella

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Origin 1100 to 1300

Puella (the Girl) is one of the sixteen geomantic figures, formed of single Fire, double Air, single Water, and single Earth, a graceful and mostly balanced figure sometimes pictured as a woman looking in a mirror. It is attributed to the element Air, the planet Venus, and the sign Libra. Its name means girl or maiden, and it signifies harmony, beauty, pleasure, affection, and gentle attraction. Ruled by Venus, Puella is a favorable figure, especially in matters of love, relationships, art, and peaceful agreement, promising sweetness and accord. Its one caution is a certain fickleness or superficiality: its charm is real but can be changeable, and its favor is best trusted in matters of feeling and harmony rather than hard practical results.

Facts
Origins
Origin Period
1100 to 1300 4Tradition: Latin geomancy, translated from the Arabic
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
1533 5Tradition: Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy
Origin Period
800 to 1200 CE 1Tradition: Arabic ilm al-raml, the science of the sand
Origin PeriodSourced to the subject's own account
Puella belongs to the sixteen figure system of geomantic divination whose figures took shape in the Arabic tradition of raml, attested there and in North Africa from the eighth to the twelfth century; the technique reached Latin Europe by the eleventh to thirteenth century, and Cornelius Agrippa set the figures into their now standard planetary and zodiacal correspondences in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, published in 1533. 5
Place of Origin
North Africa and the wider Islamic world; carried into Latin Europe through the twelfth-century translation movement, chiefly in Spain. 1
Attributed Author / Compiler
No single author. The Latin geomantic corpus is anonymous and pseudonymous, circulating under the names of Hermes, Aristotle, Ptolemy and others, none of whom wrote any part of it. Having no author is itself the fact about this tradition worth recording. 4
Language
Classical Arabic 1
Language
Latin 4
Attributions
Mode (Stable / Mobile)
Mobile (per the medieval Martin of Spain/Means tradition, disagreeing with the modern mainstream synthesis above) 2
A real, sourced dissent from the modern classification, not an error: recorded as a second coexisting claim rather than silently picking one tradition.
Mode (Stable / Mobile)
Stable 3
Modern mainstream classification. GENUINE DISSENT: the medieval Martin of Spain/Means source's own worked example calls Puella Mobile; see the second claim below on this same key.
Ruling Planet
Venus 1
Zodiac Sign
Libra 1
Figure Points
Fire single, Air double, Water single, Earth single 1
Identity
English Name
The Girl 1
Element
Air 1
Reading Keys
Keywords
Harmony, beauty 1
Partially Attested
Exaltation House (Attributed)
5th house (exaltation) 6
Sourced to the subject's own accountReported exaltation house, attributed to Pietro d'Abano, sourced only through a secondary blog summary. Not a ruling-house claim; see Via's note for the full caveat.
Learn More
The Figure Puella and Its Attributions

Puella, the Girl, 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 (two dots), Water (one dot), Earth (one dot). Geomantic figures are attributed to the elements, the planets and the signs of the zodiac; Puella is assigned to the element of Air, to Venus and the sign Libra. Its traditional divinatory sense is one of harmony, beauty.

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.

Puella: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

Four rows of one or two points describe a geomantic figure completely, and the description is the same in every source that carries the figure at all.

The pattern

Puella is single, double, single, single, reading Fire, Air, Water and Earth from the top down, five points in all. One heavy row sits second from the top with light rows above and below it.

Flipping every row

Change each row from single to double and from double to single and Puella becomes Rubeus. That pairing is worth noticing precisely because the traditional readings of the two figures have nothing in common: one is glossed as harmony and the other as danger. The flip is an operation on points and carries no interpretive weight of its own, which is a useful corrective to handbooks that read paired figures as commentaries on each other.

The name and the caution that goes with it

Puella means girl. The Latin and early modern handbooks read the figure as beauty, harmony and agreeableness, and several of them add that its favour is not deep, a caution usually phrased in gendered terms that reflect the period rather than the figure. The atlas records the traditional reading and notes its framing rather than reproducing it.

The attributions

A planet, a sign and an element are recorded elsewhere in the atlas for this figure. They belong to the astrological layer added in Latin Europe, they are not consistent across Agrippa, Cattan and the English handbooks, and they were not derived from the points.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Originates in Language

Classical Arabic, Languages
Source Islamic Geomancy and a Thirteenth-Century Divinatory DeviceEmilie Savage-Smith and Marion B. Smith
Latin, Languages
Source Recherches sur une technique divinatoire: la geomancie dans l'Occident medievalTherese Charmasson
Sources
1. Islamic Geomancy and a Thirteenth-Century Divinatory Device
Emilie Savage-Smith and Marion B. Smith, Undena Publications, 1980On ilm al-raml and the sixteen figures before their Latin transmission
2. Martin of Spain, De Geomantia, translated by Laurel Means (1994)
Martin of Spain (medieval author); translated and edited by Laurel Means, 1994
3. John Michael Greer, The Art and Practice of Geomancy (2009)
John Michael Greer, 2009
4. Recherches sur une technique divinatoire: la geomancie dans l'Occident medieval
Therese Charmasson, Librairie Droz, 1980On the Latin figure names and the medieval tradition
5. Three Books of Occult Philosophy
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Llewellyn, 1533Book II, on the geomantic figures and their planetary and zodiacal attributionsView the Source
6. Nick Farrell, "Geomancy Aspects, Dignity, Occupation, Conjunction, Mutation and Translation" (nickfarrell.it)
Nick Farrell
The Geomancie of Maister Christopher Cattan, Gentleman
Christopher Cattan, John Wolfe, 1591On the figure Puella and its significations
Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy: Of Geomancy
Pseudo-Agrippa; Robert Turner (trans.), J. C. for John Harrison, 1655On the planetary and zodiacal attribution of PuellaView the Source

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