Staying in harmony with the ‘earth spirits’

The ancient practice of geomancy led people to maintaining a beneficial existence in harmony with nature on a universal scale through a fusion, or orchestration, of various arts and sciences.

It’s present not only in the physical sense of a Jericho built in a seven-walled maze, or the design of a Renaissance ‘ideal city’, but in the synchronistic events of divination, too.

One of its attendant arts was that of dowsing and that, together with the subject of geomancy in general, led to my interest in the spiral form and pattern which has been present in nature and human culture from the earliest times.

For, as a symbol of the coiling ‘dragon currents’ of energies in the earth, the spiral is the natural emblem of geomancy, a word taken from the Greek, meaning literally ‘earth divination’.

In his seminal work Earth Magic, of 1976, Francis Hitching (1933–2018), the British writer, dowser, journalist and film-maker, wrote: ‘If the spiral is the most widespread prehistoric symbol, perhaps the most universal legend is that of the power of the serpent dragon.’

The oldest known divining (or dowsing) rod is the lituus, a straight branch or staff twisted into a spiral shape. Romulus was said to have used one in laying out the boundaries of Rome, traditionally around 750 BCE, and…