In the Prenostica Pitagorice we are assured that we may rest easy as to the integrity of the Catholic Faith being observed, “for that does not happen of necessity which human caution forewarned, can avoid.” It answers any one of a list of thirty-six questions by means of a number obtained by chance between one and twelve. The inquirer is referred to one of 36 birds whose pictures are drawn in the margins with twelve lines of answers opposite each bird. Other schemes of divination found with the Experimentarius in some manuscripts differ from the foregoing only in the number of questions concerning which inquiry can be made, the number of Judges and the names given them, the number of lines under each Judge, and the number of intermediate directory tables that have to be consulted before the final Judge is reached. As Judges we meet the twelve sons of Jacob, the thirty-six decans or thirds of the twelve signs, and another astrological group of twenty made up of the twelve signs, seven planets, and the dragon.[314]
Experimental character of geomancy.
In one manuscript[315] the directions for consulting this last group of Judges are given under the heading, Documentum experimenti retrogradi, which like Bernard’s Experimentarius suggests the experimental character of the art of geomancy or the arts of divination in general. Later we shall hear Albertus Magnus in the Speculum astronomiae call treatises of aerimancy,[316] pyromancy, and hydromancy, as well as of geomancy “experimental books.”
Various other geomancies.
Geomancies are of frequent occurrence in libraries of medieval manuscripts.[317] Many are anonymous[318] but others bear the names of noted men of learning. The art must have had great currency among the Arabs,[319] for not only are treatises current in Latin under such names as Abdallah,[320] Albedatus,[321] Alcherius,[322] Alkindi,[323] and Alpharinus,[324] but almost every prominent translator of the time seems to have tried his hand at a geomancy. In the manuscripts we find geomancies attributed to Gerard of Cremona,[325] Plato of Tivoli,[326] Michael Scot,[327] Hugo Sanctelliensis,[328] William of Moerbeke,[329] William de Saliceto of Piacenza,[330] and Peter of Abano,[331] and even to their medical confrère and contemporary, Bernard Gordon, who is not usually classed as a translator.[332] Some of these, however, were translators from the Greek or the Hebrew rather than Arabic, and some of the geomantic treatises in the manuscripts claim an origin from India.[333] But a Robert or Roger Scriptoris who compiled a geomancy towards the close of the medieval period thinks first among his sources of “the Arabs of antiquity and the wise moderns, William of Moerbeke, Bartholomew of Parma, Gerard of Cremona, and many others.”[334] These other geomancies are not necessarily like the Experimentarius of Bernard Silvester[335] and we shall describe another sort when we come to speak of Bartholomew of Parma in a later chapter.
Interest of statesmen and clergy in the art.
In the fifteenth century such intellectual statesmen as Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, and Henry VII of England displayed an interest in geomancy, judging from a manuscript de luxe of Guido Bonatti’s work on astrology which was made for Henry VII and contains a picture of him, and also Plato’s translation of the geomancy of Alpharinus and geomantic “tables of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester.”[336] The interest of the clergy in this superstitious art is attested not only by the translation of such a person as William of Moerbeke, who was papal penitentiary and later archbishop of Corinth, but by a geomancy which we find in two fifteenth century manuscripts written by Martin, an abbot of Burgos, at the request of another abbot of Paris.[337] Treatises on geomancy continue to be found in the manuscripts as late as the eighteenth century, that of Gerard of Cremona especially.
[261] Clerval, Les Écoles de Chartres, Paris, 1895, pp. 158-63. The point was for a time contested by Ch. V. Langlois, “Maître Bernard,” in Bibl. de l’École des Chartes, LIV (1893) and by Hauréau. The two Bernards are still identified in EB, 11th edition, while Steinschneider (1905), p. 8, still identified Bernard of Chartres with the author of De mundi universitate.
[262] Dr. R. L. Poole, EHR (1920), p. 327, does not regard this as absolutely certain but agrees at p. 331 “that the evidence of place and time make it impossible to identify Bernard Silvester with Bernard of Chartres,” as he had done earlier in Illustrations of Medieval Thought (1884), pp. 113-26.
[263] B. Hauréau, Le Mathematicus de Bernard Silvestris, Paris, 1895, p. 11.