Divination Systems

This section covers the methods by which a question is posed to something beyond the questioner and an answer is read from a structured set of signs: geomancy and its sixteen figures, ogham, the tarot spread, the Lenormand and ordinary playing-card packs, the Maya day count, the enneagram as a typology, and the interpretation of dreams.

What these methods share is not a claim about how they work but a common shape: a fixed vocabulary of symbols, a procedure for selecting some of them by a means the practitioner does not fully control, and an interpretive tradition for reading the result.

The systems differ in what supplies the element outside the questioner's control (the fall of cards, the marks of geomancy, the images of a dream, a birth date), and in how tightly the interpretation is codified. Some, like geomancy and the I Ching, are highly formal; others, like dream reading, rest on looser traditions of association.

The atlas describes each method's structure, history and interpretive conventions without endorsing or dismissing the claim that it yields knowledge. Several of the symbol sets used in divination, the tarot, the hexagrams, are also treated as symbol systems in their own right under Tarot, Runes & Number.