Populus

Geomancy is one of the clearest cases of a divinatory technique with a traceable route of transmission, and the route runs through the Islamic world.

Ilm al-raml

The Arabic name is ilm al-raml, the science of the sand, or khatt al-raml, the line of the sand, referring to the marks made in earth from which the figures are generated.

It was established in the Islamic world by around the ninth to tenth centuries and became a widely practised art with its own substantial literature. Its practitioners generally attributed its origin to Idris, identified with the biblical Enoch and with Hermes, or to the prophet Daniel, the standard move for giving a technique prophetic authority.

Its actual origins are not settled. A North African or sub-Saharan African source has been argued for, and the technique has close relatives in West African divination.

The evidence

The system was not marginal. Emilie Savage-Smith and Marion Smith's study is built around a brass geomantic instrument made by Muhammad ibn Khutlukh al-Mawsili and dated to 1241-42, a precision-engineered device with sliding dials for generating and reading the figures.

Nobody manufactures a brass calculating instrument for a fringe amusement. This was an established professional practice with a technical apparatus.

Into Latin

The transmission occurred in the twelfth century, in the same movement of translation from Arabic into Latin that carried astronomy, algebra, medicine and Aristotle into Europe, largely through Spain.

Hugh of Santalla, working in the Ebro valley in the first half of the twelfth century, produced the Ars Geomantiae, among the earliest Latin treatments. Other translations followed, and the art acquired the Latin figure names still in use.

Therese Charmasson's study of the Latin manuscript tradition is the standard scholarly account of what happened next: geomancy became a substantial medieval European practice with its own manuscript families, its own disputes about technique, and its own defenders and critics within the universities.

Why Populus

Because this figure (all four rows doubled, wholly passive, the crowd), is the one that most clearly shows the system's character. It is not a picture of anything. It is a position in a sixteen-value code, and the reading assigned to it descends through Arabic and then Latin sources that can be named and dated.

Populus is the heaviest figure in the geomantic set. All four of its rows hold a double point, giving eight points in total, twice the count of Via at the other extreme.

Reading the four rows

The rows are read from the top down as Fire, Air, Water and Earth. In the common reading a double point marks that element as passive in the figure, so Populus reads as all four elements passive together. Handbooks describe the result as a figure with no motion of its own, which is why it is so often glossed as the crowd, the gathering, or a situation that will do whatever is done to it.

What flipping it produces

Turn every row of Populus from double to single and you get Via. The two are the only figures in the sixteen whose rows are uniform, and they mark the ends of the range that the other fourteen fall between.

The attributions

This atlas records Populus under the Moon, the sign Cancer and the element Water, the same set Via carries. That the two opposite figures share a planet is one of the places where the astrological layer sits awkwardly on the point structure: the assignments were laid over the figures by later authors and were not derived from the rows. The handbooks differ on several figures, and this atlas records the common set rather than treating it as settled.

The Latin name means the people. Read in a chart, Populus is usually taken as a matter that depends on others rather than on the querent.