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Sacred Correspondences
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Fortuna Minor: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

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Fortuna Minor: The Points, and What Flipping Them Gives

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.

Cross-Tradition Connections

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