Via

Geomancy is the most mathematically transparent of the divinatory systems, and the number sixteen is not a choice anyone made. It is forced.

Generating a figure

The practitioner makes a line of marks, traditionally poked into sand or earth with a stick, later dots on paper, without counting them. The line is then counted, and only one thing about it is retained: whether the total is odd or even.

Odd gives a single point. Even gives a double point.

Four such lines produce a figure of four rows, each row either single or double. The four rows are read as Fire, Air, Water and Earth, from the top down.

The arithmetic

Four rows, two possible states each, gives two to the fourth power: sixteen. That is every figure that can exist. There is no seventeenth, and no figure has been left out of the tradition by oversight.

This is why Via and Populus are the two extremes of the set, all singles and all doubles, and why every other figure is a mixture. It is also why each figure has exactly one inverse, obtained by flipping every row, and why the sixteen fall naturally into eight inverse pairs.

The system is a four-bit binary code with an interpretation attached to each of its sixteen values, arrived at several centuries before anyone described it in those terms.

Where the figures came from

The names in use here are Latin (Via, Populus, Acquisitio, Carcer), because the system reached Europe through Latin translation. The Arabic tradition had its own names, and behind those the individual figures are older than any of the naming systems.

What the attributions are not

Each figure carries an element, a planet and a zodiacal sign, and this atlas records them. Those attributions were added to the figures, not derived from them, and the sources do not entirely agree with one another. Agrippa, Cattan and the later English handbooks differ on several assignments.

The point structure is intrinsic and can be checked. The astrological correspondences are a tradition, and a contested one in its details.

Via is one of the two extremes of the geomantic set. Every one of its four rows holds a single point, which makes it the lightest figure in the system at four points in total, and the only one whose rows are all alike apart from Populus.

Reading the four rows

The rows are read from the top down as Fire, Air, Water and Earth. In the common reading a single point marks that element as active in the figure and a double point marks it as passive. Authors differ on the wording, but not on which rows are single, so Via reads as all four elements active at once.

What flipping it produces

Turn every row of Via from single to double and you get Populus, its opposite in the set. The two figures are the poles between which the other fourteen sit, and no third figure has rows that are all alike. Sources use different terms for this operation, so the atlas describes the operation rather than adopting one author's vocabulary.

The attributions

This atlas records Via under the Moon, the sign Cancer and the element Water. Those attributions came to the figure from the astrological tradition rather than out of the point structure, and the handbooks do not agree with one another in every case. The point pattern can be checked by anyone who counts; the planetary and zodiacal assignments are a tradition with variants, and this atlas records the common set without claiming it is the only one.

The Latin name means the road or the way, and the figure has been read since the Latin handbooks as movement, travel and a situation that will not stay still.