An excerpt from the beginning of the INTRODUCTION.
It is amazing how often it is said that The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy is spurious. This is repeated by one 'authority' after another, obviously without any reference to the text itself. For this volume is not so much a single book as a collection of six treatises on various aspects of practical magic and divination. A glance at the table of contents will confirm that only the first two treatises actually claim to be by Henry Cornelius Agrippa.
Agrippa (1486—1535) was in many ways an all round Renaissance man, being a writer, soldier, and physician. However, his main claim to an important place in the history of the thought of the period is as a magician, and this is by no means a belittlement of his other attainments for as Agrippa himself says:
'Some that are perverse .... may take the name of Magick in the worse sense and, though scarce having seen the title, cry out that I teach forbidden Arts, sow the seed of Heresies, offend pious ears, and scandalize excellent wits; that I am a sorcerer, and superstitious and divellish, who indeed am a Magician: to whom I answer, that a Magician doth not, amongst learned men signify a sorcerer, or one that is superstitious or divellish; but a wise man, a priest, a prophet'
Turning to the contents of this volume let us examine each treatise in turn:
I. Of Geomancy — Henry Cornelius Agrippa
Probably it is this treatise which is mentioned by Agrippa in 1526 when he sent to Metz for his work on geomancy. Again Agrippa refers to a work on geomancy in his De Incertitudine (Cap 13) where after listing earlier geomancies by Haly, Gerard of Cremona, Bartholomew of Parma, and Tundinus, he says of his own geomantic treatise "I too have written a geomancy quite different from the rest but no less superstitious and fallacious or if you wish I will even say 'mendacious'" Agrippa was nothing if not frank about his own work!
Geomancy was from the 12th to the 17th Century one of the major forms of divination in Europe, taking second place to astrology but precedence over the tarot. The first part of this book is concerned with the mechanics of geomantic divination, the second part with their application' in an astrological context, and the third, and by far the bulkiest part, is concerned with the meanings of each of the sixteen geomantic figures in each of the 12 Houses of heaven.
This text on geomancy is extremely interesting in that it provides much of the material for later derivative works on the subject. Interestingly, it expands greatly Agrippa 's remarks on the subject in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy.
The actual practice of geomancy is set out in a rather compressed form. For example the table on page 6 is not very clear, and the diagram on the following page suffers severely from the deficiencies of the printer's art. So as to preserve the facsimile quality of the text these have not been altered. Reconstructions of these, together with complete instructions for geomantic practice appear in the present writer's The Oracle of Geomancy, Warner Destiny, New York, 1977, and a history of the subject in Divinatory Geomancy....
