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mothers, as a transformation of Taoist cyclical schemes of the transmutation of
the five elements, and relying67 on the Silk Road or the Indian Ocean trade to
67
Not unreasonably; cf. Needham, J., with Wing Ling, 1961, Science and civilization in China, vol.
1. Introductory orientations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; first edition 1954, which
Wim van Binsbergen: The astrological origin of geomancy (1996)  p. 28
take all to the West. One week later, I would give all this up for an exploration
of the extent to which the Egyptian world-view, dwelling on the sacred soil as
fertilised by the sacred river, with in the background the perennial struggle
between riverside Osiris and desert-based Set, as well as the alternation between
favourable and unfavourable days in the calendar, could account for the
geomantic repertoire, either directly in the form of ancient Egyptian religion, or,
even more attractive, the latter as it was filtered through Hellenistic, Alexandria-
based magic, mystery cults, Hermetism etc. Only a few days later to realise that
the dichotomy between even and odd, male and female numbers was already
Pythagorean, and that Pythagoras himself (although alleged to have been
unfavourably disposed towards divination and beans) reputedly exhorted his
followers to swear by the tetraktus,
"
" "
" " "
" " " "
the holy foursome whose four lines of dots constitute a likely prototype for
geomancy if ever there was one...! Or should I explore, for an explanation of the
foursomes so prominent in geomancy, the doctrine of the four elements which
Empedocles, Pythagoras near-contemporary, introduced in Western thought but
whose antecedents ramify far away from Graecia Magna (Graecised Southern
Italy) into Ancient Egyptian, African and East Asian cosmologies? Or was the
foursome, after all, primarily an expression of the  from a geomantic
perspective so aptly named  tetragrammaton, , with a fundamental
dichotomy at least hinted at by the division between the Urim and the Tummim
as mysterious oracular instruments, or the Jachin and the Boaz (the two pillars
flanking the entrance to the temple), so that the origin of geomancy might
primarily be sought in early medieval Jewish circles?... Did not the puzzling
discussion, in the Babylonian Talmud,68 of the odd and even number of cups of
wine (with emphasis on four) to be taken or avoided, suggest as much? Was
such a suggestion not reinforced by the Jewish connotations of the Maroccan
Zan

ta tribe?
discusses in detail the interaction between China and the West in the course of human history; also cf.
Needham, J., with Wing Ling, 1956, Science and civilization in China, vol. 2. History of scientific
thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for an excellent introduction to the Chinese
trigrams and their role in the Taoist worldview.
68
Goldschmidt, L., ed., 1906-1935, Die Babylonische Talmud, Leipzig/Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag;
the reference is: Pesahim, X, i, Fol. 108a ff.
Wim van Binsbergen: The astrological origin of geomancy (1996)  p. 29
Or should my main attention rather follow hints from Ancient Coptic magic,
as to the magical significance of the act (reminiscent of that of the slaying
pharaoh  for three millennia a dominant iconographic theme in Ancient Egypt)
of hitting the ground with a stick, so central as a random generator (the number
of indentures made in one stroke is assessed in terms of even or uneven, and this
yields one of the horizontal lines for the geomantic figure) in many attested
forms of Islamic geomancy? For if earth is the opposite of heaven, then
geomancy is divination not by the stars but by the earth, while the earth is the
typical place where magicians, by hitting the very ground with a stick or a wand
(e.g. Exodus 7: 8-12 on Aaron s rod, and Exodus 17 on water from the rock),
assert their autonomous right to divine status and power, and by implication
their kinship with Satan, as in the following Coptic formula for love magic (first
millennium CE):
 ...Shurin, Shuran, Shutaban, Shutaben, Ibonese, Sharsaben,... Satan the devil, who beat
with his staff upon the earth saying:   I am a god also  ... 69
Here the magician is speaking, in all likelihood, not only to the earth but also on
behalf of the earth, thus asserting the latter s powers as the Great Mother, which
despite repeated attempts in many later religions was never completely deprived
of its divine nature and never completely subjugated to ethereal gods who
literally represent the more advanced levels of sublimation.
Having started to think about the earth as a fundamental symbol the
emphasis on the number four, in geomancy, perhaps no more than a celebration
of the earth (after which it got its name, both in Greek and  although more
specifically limited to sand  in Arabic), and must we not situate the Islamic [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]