Matthew Melvin-Koushki
Geomancy in the Islamic World
When Francis Bacon (d. 1626) valorized artificial divination over natural as an essen-
tial component of his scientific method, he was referring in particular to the Arabic
art of geomancy, third in popularity only to astrology and oneiromancy throughout
the early modern Western (Islamo-Judeo-Christian) world. Indeed, due to its early
incorporation of astrological correspondences, it was often considered a form of
“terrestrial astrology” requiring much less astronomical expertise while remaining
richly informative. As a complex divinatory science based on a binary code, geomancy
stands precise cognate to the ancient Chinese I Ching, but commanded in its prime
a far greater territorial spread. It was – and in many cases still is – regularly prac-
ticed as a single tradition from Fez, Paris and Timbuktu to Kashgar, Kabul and Delhi,
and calved simpler versions throughout sub-Saharan Africa (ifa, gara and sikidy) and
thence the western hemisphere that remain very much in use.
The Latin term geomantia imprecisely translates the Arabic ʻilm al-raml, the
“science of sand”; like other Arabic terms for the art (khaṭṭ al-raml, ḍarb, ṭarq), this
refers to its original procedure of drawing 16 random series of lines in the sand or dirt
to generate the first four tetragrams of a geomantic reading. (Confusingly, in modern
English usage geomancy can also refer to the Chinese art of feng shui, though this is
a misnomer; as a system of divining the subtle currents of the earth for the purposes
of building or burying, it is more accurately termed “topomancy.”) As with I Ching
trigrams, the four lines of a geomantic figure (shakl) are generated by the odd (fard)
or even (zawj) result of each line, creating a binary code represented as either one dot
(nuqṭa) or two dots respectively – hence the science’s alternative name of ʻilm al-nuqṭa
or ʻilm al-niqāṭ, whence its close association with lettrism (ʻilm al-ḥurūf), coeval Arabic
twin to Hebrew kabbalah. This binary code is then deployed according to set proce-
dures to capture the flux patterns of the four elemental energies (fire, air, water, earth)
as a means to divine past, present and future events, and indeed the status of every
thing or being in the sublunar realm. Emilie Savage-Smith (1993) summarizes the geo-
mantic method as follows:
The divination is accomplished by forming and then interpreting a design, called a geomantic
tableau, consisting of 16 positions, each of which is occupied by a geomantic figure. The figures
occupying the first four positions are determined by marking 16 horizontal lines of dots on a
piece of paper or a dust board. Each row of dots is examined to determine if it is odd or even
and is then represented by one or two dots accordingly. Each figure is then formed of a vertical
column of four marks, each of which is either one or two dots. The first four figures, generated by
lines made while the questioner concentrates upon the question, are placed side by side in a row
from right to left. From these four figures the remaining twelve positions in the tableau are pro-
duced according to set procedures. Various interpretative methods are advocated by geomancers
for reading the tableau, often depending upon the nature of the question asked.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110499773-053
Matthew Melvin-Koushki 789
Fig. 36: A typical geomantic tableau (Shams al-Dīn Khafrī, Risāla dar Raml, Princeton, University
Library MS New Series 1177/2, fol. 24b). Photo credits: Matthew Melvin-Koushki.
From right to left, the first four figures in the top row are termed Mothers (ummahāt),
which are combined to produce the second four in the same row, termed Daughters
(banāt); the four figures the Mothers and Daughters produce in the next row are termed
Nieces (ḥafīdāt, mutawallidāt); and the Nieces are combined to produce the zawāʾid in
the rows below: first, the Right and Left Witnesses (shāhidayn), which in turn produce
the Judge (mīzān) in the 15th position at the bottom of the geomantic tableau or shield
chart (takht). In the 16th and final position, usually drawn below and to the right of
the Judge or otherwise bracketed off, is the Result of the Result, or Reconciler (ʻāqibat
al-ʻāqiba), produced by the combination of the first Mother and the Judge.
The number of possible combinations of figures in a geomantic tableau is 164, or
65,536 in all. Each of the 16 geomantic figures acquired a full suite of specific elemen-
tal, astrological, calendrical, numerical, lettrist, humoral, physiognomical and other
correspondences; the first 12 houses of the geomantic chart were likewise mapped
onto the 12 planetary houses, and occasionally constructed in the form of a horo-
scope. Detailed information can thus be derived from the figures and their relation-
ships about virtually any aspect of human experience, whether physical, mental or
spiritual, whether past, present or future.
In the Islamicate world, where the science originated, geomancy was typically
associated in the first place with the prophets Idrīs (Enoch or Hermes) and Daniel
and the Indian sage Ṭumṭum (Dindimus), not to mention a number of other standard
occultist authorities, especially ʻAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (d. 661) and Jaʻfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765),
the first and sixth Shiʻi Imams respectively; prooftexts from the Quran and Hadith were
also frequently adduced. Intellectual genealogies of geomancy in Arabic and Persian
works on the subject thus presuppose a pre-Islamic Near Eastern or Indian origin, as
well as an early North African Berber connection; the otherwise unknown Abū ʻAbd
Allāh Muḥammad al-Zanātī (fl. before 1232), presumably of the Berber Zanāta tribe,
is acclaimed as its first major Arabic exponent. Later Christian authors too associate
the science with various venerable prophets of antiquity, including Hermes and even
Seth.
790 Repertoire of Written Sources and Artefacts
While geomancy fell out of mainstream use in Enlightenment Europe, it expe-
rienced no such decline in the “un-Enlightened” Islamicate world, and particularly
its vast Persianate subset, where occultist traditions enjoyed smoother continuity
and wider practice. Along with astrologers and lettrists, geomancers were in high
demand at imperial and regional courts during the early modern period, especially
the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal; in particular, geomancy was often combined with
astrology and lettrism for military-strategic purposes. And well into the modern
period we find vigorous testimony that the science was still considered a scholarly
staple from the Maghreb to India. In nineteenth-century Samarqand and Bukhara,
for instance, surviving miscellany notebooks kept by judges and physicians suggest
that they often employed geomantic readings to help them decide court cases or diag-
nose patients. Geomancy’s popularity remains unabated in Iran today, though fre-
quent abuse by fraudsters has made its practice into something of a social problem;
as a result, rammālī, “geomancing,” often tantamount to “hocus-pocus” in popular
usage, is now legally punishable by a fine and up to seven years’ imprisonment. Yet
Persian and Arabic manuals on the science have continued to be published, even by
preeminent religious scholars like ʻAllāma Ṭabāṭabāʾī (d. 1981) – an index of the great
depth to which its prestige was ingrained in Islamicate learned culture over the past
millennium, the many colonialist ruptures of that culture all notwithstanding.
As with many Arabic sciences, especially of the occult variety, geomancy like-
wise boomed in popularity among the humanists of the European Renaissance as an
obvious technological application of the prisca sapientia; the manuals of (pseudo-)
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (d. 1535), Christophe de Cattan (fl. 1558) and Robert Fludd
(d. 1637) represent the high water mark. But here too the Arabic-to-Latin transmission
was very partial, and early modern Latinate geomancy remained largely pinned to
those texts that happened to be done into Latin, inexpertly, during the translation
movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, beginning with Hugo of Santalla
inputs via Hebrew. (fl. 1145), with a few later inputs. Given such a piecemeal reception, various technical
(Unsurprisingly, the applications and procedures of Arabic geomancy became so garbled in Latin as to be
healthy Judeo-Arabic
and Hebrew geoman- unusable, and most of those that became standard in the Islamicate world remained
tic tradition itself re- unknown to the Latin Christianate. Byzantine scholars, by contrast, showed interest
mained more closely
in contemporary developments in the science (under transliterations like rabolion and
tied to Arabic devel-
opments from its in- ramplion) through the sixteenth century; some even translated directly from Persian
ception, as shown al- treatises. But the later Russian Orthodox reception was even more abbreviated and
ready by geomantic
anxious as to possible heterodoxy.
fragments in the Cai-
ro Geniza [↗ Saar, Most notably, Arabo-Persian geomancy in its mature form is predicated on the
Divination in the deployment of cycles (sg. dāʾira), or specific orders of the 16 figures (sg. taskīn), to
Cairo Genizah].)
reveal with precision such categories of data as the following: numbers, letters, days,
months, years, astral bodies and divisions, body parts, physical and facial charac-
teristics, minerals, precious stones, plants and plant products, animals and animal
products, birds, fruits, tastes, colors, places, directions, regions, topographies,
genders, social classes, nations, weapons, diseases, etc. These cycles are successively
Matthew Melvin-Koushki 791
deployed until the desired information is obtained. In Latin and Latinate vernaculars,
however, one of the few geomantic cycles to survive transmission, that of the letter
(ḥarf), for telling the names of people, places and things, is both tied to the order of the
Arabic alphabet and too corrupt to be of use to the modern geomancer, according to
recent testimony. That said, Renaissance Latinate geomancy, however truncated, sur-
vived through at least the eighteenth century, and was revived – albeit in even more
truncated form – by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn around the turn of the
twentieth. Recent English geomantic manuals, especially that of John Michael Greer,
suggest a renewed popularity in Anglo-American culture today. And again, the various
derivative, similarly simplified forms of African geomancy are even more prevalent in
both the Old World and the New.
To understand the importance of geomancy to the history of Western science,
however, we must turn to the early modern Persianate realm, where it reached its apex
of sophistication and complexity through eager imperial patronage. Epistemologically,
Persian geomancy came to occupy the midpoint between astrology and alchemy. The
conceptual and sociopolitical association of the science of the sand with the science
of the stars is exemplified by the fact that the professional designation munajjim,
court astronomer-astrologer, in some cases became synonymous with rammāl, court
geomancer, so frequently was mastery of both sciences combined in the same indi-
vidual. By the same token, in Persian encyclopedias of the sciences, though not in
Arabic or Latin ones, geomancy was classified as a mathematical science, together
with astrology, from the twelfth century onward, when the eminent philosopher-the-
ologian Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210) introduced it to a persophone readership. This
epistemic seachange, in turn, heralded its great interest to early modern Iranian phi-
losophers and astronomers, from Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī (d. 1274) to Shams al-Dīn Khafrī
(d. 1535), as a scientific means of corroborating Neopythagorean-Neoplatonic emana-
tionist cosmology. Even the Timurid sultan-scientist Ulugh Beg (r. 1409–1449) himself,
founder of the Samarqand Observatory, was partial to this terrestrial astrology. But
geomancy was just as frequently classed as a physiological science (ʻilm-i ṭabāyiʻ), and
hence a natural correlate to both alchemy and medicine: for all surviving Arabic and
Persian manuals stress the status of the 16 figures as maps of the four elements and
four qualities (and by extension the four humors) in their perpetual reconfigurations –
whence geomancy’s claim over all beings and events in the sublunar, physical realm.
As adepts of a simultaneously terrestial and celestial science, moreover, Muslim geo-
mancers developed various forms of geomantic magic to further put their starry-earthy
art to scientific-imperial use. Given such wide and sustained prestige, surviving copies
of Arabic and Persian geomantic manuals outstrip Latinate ones by at least an order of
magnitude: over a thousand geomantic manuscripts are preserved in Iran alone, while
mere dozens remain in the libraries of Western Europe and North America.
Geomancy, in sum, developed from obscure origins to become a mature and
mainstream mathematical-natural occult science of wide appeal throughout the early
modern Western world, with reverberations to the present. Predicated on a Neopy-
792 Repertoire of Written Sources and Artefacts
thagorean-Neoplatonic system and animated by the twin principles of correspondence
and secondary causation, geomancy was of particular interest to thinkers and rulers
throughout the Persianate world during the thirteenth to seventeenth-century impe-
rial moment most especially. Its great philosophical-scientific virtue lay in its ability
to empirically support the cosmology of its scholarly practitioners; its professional
virtue lay in its status as magnet for royal patronage. For Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman
and other elites, the science became part and parcel of the performance of sainthood
and sacral kingship because it promises granular, prophetic-grade insight into and
thus power over history. That is to say, such sciences of divination, as the very term
connotes, were crucial to the quest for divinization pursued by many Turko-Mongol
Perso-Islamic sovereigns and other messianic claimants in the run-up to the Islamic
millennium (1592) – hence the unprecedented and unparalleled sophistication of
sixteenth-century Persian geomantic manuals, dimly reflected in their contempo-
rary Latin, French and English cognates. Thus did the Iranian émigré Hidāyat Allāh
Munajjim Shīrāzī (fl. 1593) write his manual – the most comprehensive ever produced
in the Western tradition – to celebrate the Mughal emperor Akbar’s (r. 1556–1605)
accession as millennial sovereign; thus did Abū l-Fażl ʻAllāmī (d. 1602), chief archi-
tect of the new Mughal imperial culture, require that all students and state officials
be versed in the science.
Despite its deficient reception in Western Europe, and the destruction of much of
its scholarly prestige throughout the Islamicate world under the brunt of Enlightened
colonialism, geomancy – embraced by Bacon and a host of his Muslim, Jewish, Chris-
tian and African peers – remains essential to any history of Western science worth the
name: for it pursues, in the most literal and direct way possible, the reading of the
earth itself as a mathematical Book.
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