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Honouring the magical traditions of our ancestors can re-enchant the land
‘Magic is a dynamic reordering of present realities to create new situations’. Nigel Pennick in Magic in the Landscape: Earth Mysteries and Geomancy (Destiny Books, US $16.99 / UK £12.99, May 2020)
It was a visit to the ‘serpent church’ at Kilpeck, in the English county of Herefordshire, that sparked my enduring interest in earth mysteries and geomancy.
Geomancy, the word being taken from the Greek and meaning literally ‘earth divination’, deals with the integration of humans and their undertakings with their natural surroundings, and is practised in two distinct forms, divinatory and telluric.
Divinatory geomancy is the art of achieving special insight by studying the relationships between patterns made in the earth, or in or by other medium, the diviner allowing his or her intuition, or ‘earth spirits’, to guide the marker. A dictionary definition describes geomancy as ‘divination from a figure given by a handful of earth thrown down, or from figures given by dots made at random’, and this was the form in which it originated in Africa and the Middle East.
