Thread by @edwardW2

Oddly specific house significations in geomancy
Taken from the transcribed version of Cattan by @thisisorval
cattan-transcribe-1591.herokuapp.com/transcriptions…

1st hse:
"this house containeth the questions which may be propounded and made of the head, and of every things therein contained; as the braine, memorie, understanding, reason, intelligence, eyes, eye-browes, nose, teeth, mouth, ears, and visages;"
books.google.com/books?id=Et7mS…

2nd house: "Which of the two gamblers have won or shall win the silver" [...] "Whether the friend put in trust, be secret or not"
(You can also see why the transcription was necessary )

3rd house:
"the questions which may be propounded of a Scholar studying in the University, or in any other place.
"If that the ill fortune shall turn to any good issue at any time."
"How the man of the Church does from whom you would hear news."

4th house:
"Whether the father be dead or shall die quickly.
"If the child be right-fathered or a bastard.
"Whether the father or the son will die first.
cattan-transcribe-1591.herokuapp.com/transcriptions…

5th house:
"Whether it be good to take new cloths, and whether the person be well appareled."
"Whether the book which one would read contains things good or bad.

6th house:
"2; if it be good to visit a sick person"
"9: Also over all things [de]stroyed and broken, false witnesses, and bawdes, Sorcerers and Enchanters
"10: Also over fear and fright, shame, poverty and lack, smoke and darkness

7th:
"7: If the maid be a virgin or not, and whether she have any lover, and if she have, then how stands the ami[ty] between them.
"17: As touching the members of man, this house containeth the demands which may be made upon the buttocks and arse"

7th hse: cont'd
11: "If the companion appointed to you be a good man or a bawd."
(Judging by the entries, another 7th house query is,"If a man will lie with his leman", i.e. "will I get to have sex with this woman" books.google.com/books?id=Et7mS… -- which is occasionally useful )

(N.B. Greer, in his Geomancy, states that questions about sex are 5th house topics)

8th house:
"1[...] If [the querent] shall live long or die quickly.
2- Also to know whether he shall die within a day, month, or year.
3- If a person shall die a good death or else be slain.
5- If a man be slain, who killed him'

8th house cont'
"17. [...] questions which may be made upon the experience of Nigromancy, invocation of spirits, inchantments, and other devilish acts.
18. As touching the parts of man's body, [...] the privy and secret members of man and women"

9th
"3: upon the garments and vestures of a priest, preacher, scholar and his study, the school, and the companions and books.
"4: Whether he that goeth to be made priest shall have orders or not.
"8: Whether a person be a fool or wise,[...]

10th:
"9: If he which desireth to be Pope shall be chosen thereunto [...] .
"10: Whether he that ye thinke for shall be driven out of the Kinges Court, or whether he shall be welcome and loved

11th:
"8: Whether the Pope shall be good."

12th:
" 7; Whether the prisoner shall part out of prison, and when.
"8: Whether he shall be racked [i.e. tortured], if he say truth."
"15: Whether a person shall be banished from his Country, or otherwise.

***
As to how these astonishingly specific questions could be answered, well, the process was surprisingly simple. The person performing the divination simply generated the chart, and looked up the figure in the relevant house...

in the entry, and they would have a more-or-less ready answer. So, for example, if I wanted to figure out the contents of a letter/book I have yet to read, Cattan tells us we must look at the 5th house

Suppose I cast the chart, and found the figure in the 5th house to be Puella. Cattan tells us that "The Books speak of kissing, colling, dancing, and singing", and broadly the same things if it was a letter

But suppose, if the 5th house was occupied with Carcer instead, then the books would be about
" woman with child, of imprisonment, or to sow the earth, or of things melancholy. "

***
The whole of Cattan's book 2 is actually structured like that: Each chapter is dedicated to one of the 12 houses. At the start of the chapter there is a list of the questions that can be answered by looking at the figure in the house...

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to interpretations of each of the 16 possible geomantic figures which could occupy that house. Each entry is structured such as to respond to each of the questions stated at the start in turn, as you can see below:

The advantage with this method, is certauntly that it becomes easy to use. However, the disadvantage is that such methods are highly inflexible, and indeed, contributed much to the impression that geomancy was a simplistic form of divination that could only answer...

yes or no questions-- for example, it would tell you whether you would get to meet your lover, but not tell you when or where would the meeting be, or indeed, how pleasurable the meeting would be for the two of you.

The thing is, geomancy could answer such questions, albeit using more advanced techniques, reading the chart holistically. Cattan himself treated of these techniques in his third book on geomancy-- but perhaps unsurprisingly, few until recently actually bothered with them...

Cattan's book of geomancy also gives a set of "judgment tables"-- Short answers to questions a set of 10 topics by looking at the last 3 figures of a geomantic chart:

The list of questions in this set is an elegant illustration of what weighed most heavily on the minds of Cattan's readers:
Life
Goods
Worship
Possession
A wife
Woman with child
Sickness
Prison
Journey
Thing Lost

Near the end of the third book we find a section on the "properties of all the figures" eg with figures attained in the geomantic chart portend life, which portend death etc.

In any case, Cattan himself admits this rather thorough listing was to make the book accessible"
" to the end that whosoever would (by way of recreation) learn this science, that he be ignorant of nothing which concerneth the perfect knowledge hereof...

so that if you do understand these tables, you may also understand the first, second, and third book of this work." cattan-transcribe-1591.herokuapp.com/transcriptions…

In any case, it is interesting to notice how frank Cattan (and those who copied him) are about sex work; in another digested table of figure interpretations, sevreral entries say that a figure in a certain position is "Good for whores"