Something is coming and I do not know what it is, but I can hear the power, and I need to consult the spirit.

I put together a local public works project, a monthly floating bridge erected to unite the two sides of the village on market day then removed so that the materials can be used by their owners elsewhere. Barrels from the ale, boards from beds, rope from the farm, and anything that can be lashed onto the bridge to steady it. My own small boat is in it, as are the boats of many of my friends and family. The project is growing in popularity, and much rumbling is afoot.

Nothing pleases everyone, and even if my bridge is a good enough solution to a problem, it is facing the inevitable opposition, and soon even its commonest beneficiaries will turn against it — and me — in favor of some impossible greatness that will cost a lot of us warmer winters, fatter horses, and a sense of good cheer for having done something ourselves and not just been decided for by fools. Rich fools. Or just the usual jockeying for position in the face of scarcity and honor, for the world is a scabrous thing.

To top it off, I am a woman in a man’s world, albeit well-connected in this work.

The hour is upon us. Saturn, for architecture.

What will Zazel reveal?

Coniunctio. The merging of many forces.

Avis reditus. The homing pigeon is back.

Splendid.

NOTES:

My principal work of geomancy has been John Michael Greer’s The Art and Practice of Geomancy: Divination, Magic, and Earth Wisdom of the Renaissance, Weiser Books, 2009. I mostly use the shield chart which results in a single geomantic figure called The Judge, as recommended by ConjureMan Ali, an Arabic-American hoodoo worker who studied this art from a Middle Eastern practitioner and is a famous devotee of Jake Stratton-Kent, whom I also woo. Though he has not written a book about this Arabic stuff but about Mexican stuff, and I respect that, while wishing for something of greater novelty and more about expert Middle Eastern geomancy, and in English. Now there’s a bridge project for you. Who knows? He is in and out of favor with the Court. But his idea of focusing on the Judge has caused me to focus on the Judge and practice the art as possible under extreme stress. So, if it is not as pretty as LIKE, it is at least something. And John Michael Greer did talk about making these ARKS on the back of grocery receipts.

Dion Fortune — probably in her book on psychic attack — relates an incident wherein the demons got into a geomantic divination practiced without the customary tray of wet sand and CAUSED a big smelly sulphur phenomenon that stank up the house but probably resulted in a very nice pile of necromantic geomancy. I have similarly experienced a sulphuric smell, and speculate that BELETH’s “stinking breath” is probably chemical in nature. I do not have the science to work it out, but I suspect that the DENIZENS OF STEM know all about it. So be aware of why we like to work this thing in KLINGONS as well.