Occult Book Review

I bought he above book for £1 at a book fair this afternoon (actually Lucy bought it, but that's not hugely important for the story).

Please excuse the dark photo, but I think it adds to the mysteriousness of the book. It's called Geomancy by Franz Hartmann, and was published in 1889. I liked it because it looks like a book out of Harry Potter or something, and could have magical powers, although I've yet to discover them.

It's actually a book about astrology. The title page alone is fantastic entertainment: The Principles of Astrological Geomancy; The Art of Divining by Punctuation, according to Cornelius Agrippa and others. I obviously took this to mean reading the future through the examination of apostrophes and the semi-colon. I am already proficient at this. I can predict just by seeing that someone has used the symbols ;-) that this person is a cunt.

And I think Cornelius Agrippa is a great name. To find out more about him, I did what people may well have done in 1889: I looked on wikipedia. His article tells us that he was a 16th century magician. Man, I'd love to have business cards printed with my profession listed as 'magician'. Anyway, he seems like an interesting fella.

What is interesting is that my Harry Potter instincts seem to be correct. If you can't be bothered to read the entry, it seems that on his deathbed he was said to have summoned demons. One, his familiar, was a black dog, which possibly gave rise to 'the Grim' discussed in the Prisoner of Azkaban.

[I know wikipedia is a dubious source, but we're talking about astrology and Harry Potter, so I think hard facts can be thrown out the window]

He is also mentioned by name in the first book, as one of the chocolate frog cards Ron is missing.

Further Potter links are found in the Hartmann Geomancy book. Of the sixteen 'geomantic symbols', one is Albus, listed as "White Head, wisdom, sagacity, clear thought". Pure Dumbledore. Another is Rubeus [Hagrid]: "Redhead, passion, vice, fiery temper".

This doesn't prove anything beyond the fact that Rowling knows stuff about astrology. But, still, it's pretty cool for a random find at book sale.

The title page of the book also promises "an appendix containing 2,048 answers to questions". I had my fingers crossed that this would just be of the form:

1) Yes
2) No
3) Maybe
4) What are you, high?
etc.

However, they seem to be in strange symbols and diagrams that I can't understand.

The book has also been annotated by a previous owner, with strange formulae and symbols. Which raises the most important question raised by this whole analysis:

Is there anyone who takes any of this bullshit seriously?

I mean, even people who believe in the whole 'talking snake, red guy with pitchfork' scene have dismissed this stuff as nonsense.

Oh well, it's still a cool and beautiful artifact. I'm going to keep it and try and give it an aura as something dark and magical for my kids to be afraid of in years to come.

Of course, my scepticism might come back to haunt me (literally). If I find a chapter in here called The Re-education of Paul Fung, I'll come back here and recant.

If the planets align themselves correctly, I might return soon with a banal anecdote, or tell you about something I saw on TV.

I'm no Hartmann or Agrippa. But I have forseen it.