Geomancy in the Islamic World

EMILIE SAVAGE-SMITH
The term geomancy comes from the Latin geomantia, first used in Spain in the twelfth
century as a translation of the Arabic ilm al-raml ( , the science of sand), the
most common name for this type of divination. The practice is to be distinguished from
a totally unrelated Chinese form of prognostication based on land forms, unfortunately
also called geomancy in English. The origin of this distinctly Islamic art is a matter of
speculation, but it appears to have been a well established practice in North Africa,
Egypt, and Syria by the twelfth century.
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 12 positions in the tableau are
produced according to set procedures. Various interpretative methods are advocated by
geomancers for reading the tableau, often depending upon the nature of the question
asked. The course and seriousness of an illness, the outcome of pregnancy, the location
of lost or buried objects, and the fate of a distant relative are among the most popular
questions addressed to a geomancer.
The acknowledged master of geomancy was Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Uthman
al-Zanat, who lived before AD 1230. Virtually nothing is known of his life, though
his name suggests that he was from the North African Berber tribe of Zanata that
was known for practicing other forms of fortune telling, particularly scapulomancy
(divination by inspection of shoulder blades). One of the great codifiers of geomancy
was Abdallah ibn Mah.fuf who lived, probably in Syria or Egypt, before AD 1265 and
whose treatise is preserved today in several Arabic manuscript copies. Brief discussions of geomancy are included in a Persian encyclopedia composed at the end of the
twelfth century by the celebrated theologian Fakr al-Dn al-Raz and in short Persian
tracts by the mathematician, philosopher, and founder of the observatory at Maragha
in northwest Iran, Nas.r al-Dn al-T.u s (d. AD 1275).
The majority of existing treatises on the subject are from the fourteenth century and
later, with numerous ones still being written in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In view of the relatively few written sources on the topic before the fourteenth century,
an intricate metal geomantic tablet, now in the collections of the British Museum, is of
considerable importance. It was made in AD 1241 1242 (H. 639) by the metalworker
Muh.ammad ibn Khutlukh al-Maws.il, who also made an incense burner in Damascus
about AD 1230 1240. This unique device is of a brass alloy inlaid with gold and silver,
with a front plate carrying 20 dials and four sliding ares and a back plate engraved with
inscriptions, both plates held in a rectangular frame which has a triangular suspensory
device on top similar to that commonly found on astrolabes. No writings before or after
its construction mention such a mechanical contrivance for establishing a geomantic

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reading, and there is no other known geomantic device from any culture remotely
similar to it. It is evident that the designer of this elaborate device was well-versed in
the geomantic literature of his day.
In Iran the term raml is applied to two types of divination. One type, frequently
described by travelers, employed the throwing of brass dice that were strung together
in groups of four. Although these dice are commonly referred to as geomantic dice,
they are not marked so as to produce a geomantic figure, and thus the divination using
such dice is a form of lot casting or sortilege different from true geomancy. Raml is also
used in Iran for the traditional form of geomancy, and in modern Persian writings the art
often attains an astounding degree of complexity, with successive tableaux generated
from previous ones. A large number of lithographed Persian texts were published in
India in the nineteenth century.
From the twelfth century until the seventeenth century, geomancy, in a slightly
altered form, was very popular in Europe, where only astrology seems to have outranked
it in popularity. The Spanish translator Hugh of Santalla working at Tarazona in Aragon
appears to have been the first to prepare a Latin paraphrase of an Arabic treatise on the
subject, with his slightly younger contemporary working in Toledo, Gerard of Cremona
(d. AD 1187), translating another Arabic tract. After the seventeenth century, interest
in geomancy faded abruptly in the West, and today it remains relatively unknown there.
There are many non-Western areas where geomancy and derivative methods of
divination are still practiced. Geomancy in sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar, which
employs simplified but clearly derivative versions of classical Islamic geomancy, has
been the subject of several anthropological studies. The mathematical structure of the
practice has also received some scholarly attention. In nearly all Islamic lands geomancy
and related methods of divination are still practiced, in forms varying from the simple
casting of a favorable or unfavorable geomantic figure to the complex interpretation of
tableaux employing a large number of procedures.

References
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Etudes
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Champion, 1980.
Fahd, Toufic. La divination arabe: tudes religieuses, sociologiques et folkloriques sur
le milieu natif de lIslam. Leiden: Brill, 1966.

Jaulin, Robert. La Gomancie: analyse formelle. (Ecole

Pratique des Hautes Etudes,
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Pedrazzi, Maino. Le Figure della Geomanzie: Un Gruppo Finito Abeliano. Physis 14.2
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Peek, Philip M. ed. African Divination Systems Ways of Knowing. Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1991.

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Savage-Smith, Emilie. Geomancy. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic
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