Experiential archaeology and Western esotericism, or, why historians should pick up an astrolabe

Emilie Savage-Smith is, undoubtedly, a brilliant scholar and a pre-eminent historian of science. Her monograph¹ with Marion B. Smith on the enigmatic “divination tablet” (below) currently housed at the British Museum has been indispensable to me personally in my current research trajectories.

Thus her persistent claim² that geomantic dice (found in a variety of medieval, post-medieval, and ethnographic contexts) cannot be used to produce geomantic figures is confusing, if not shocking. In the monograph cited above, she connects these dice to other forms of divination closer related to the sortes texts of classical and late antiquity, which do in fact use dice.³

Unlike the claims made by Eglash in African Fractals⁴ which is undoubtedly a result of sloppy scholarship, I believe there is a simple and understandable explanation for Savage-Smith’s claim. In short, she is reading them vertically rather than horizontally. For someone who has never used these dice, or is unfamiliar with the practice of geomancy,⁵ it makes intuitive sense that these dice would be used to render a single figure — each composed of four separate cubes, closely matching the four rows of a single figure. When seen this way, what a die produces is indeed not a proper binary figure — as Savage-Smith puts it, “[n]one of the dice have faces with a single dot.”⁶ Indeed there are plenty of quasi- or pseudo-geomantic modes of divination that superficially resemble “true” geomancy, such as the Experimentarius of Bernardus Silvestris;⁷ thus it is not out of the realm of possibility that such dice were used in a similar system.

However, these dice are more clever than at first glance — they meant to be used in pairs, as ethnographically attested in India and Africa.⁸ When used in this manner, they produce — in a single throw — the four matres necessary for deriving an entire tableaux.

I trust that the Persian literature which Savage-Smith references does not make this clear, or perhaps describe another sort of divinatory dice. I am reminded of Pierre Hadot’s metaphor of anamorphosis. In Renaissance painting, there are occasionally hidden figures that can only be viewed properly from a certain angle — such as the baguette-shaped skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors (hence the Greek ἀναμόρφωσις, “transformation”.) For Hadot, this is a model of ancient philosophy: when the generic and formal structure of a text is known, things that seem otherwise out of place or opaque suddenly make intuitive sense.⁹

While the proper use of the geomantic dice probably could have been gleaned from ethnography, I personally learned to use these from contemporary occultists — not in an anthropological context, but as a scholar-practitioner. Experimental archaeology is usually concerned with empirical data collected in strictly controlled studies, whereas the “experiential aspect is sometimes considered to have limited value by those who engage in research-oriented experimental archaeology.”¹⁰ For Stull (ibid.) “[e]xperience-based experimental archaeology studies serve as the parallel to participant observation for archaeologists” — replication studies can provide a “way to develop competence or expertise in past social or cultural practices which are no longer extant”, with caveats of course. There is a large body of ritual, magical, and proto-scientific¹¹ literature that relatively completely prescribes practices as they were performed in ancient and medieval times. To my knowledge, there have been practically no scholarly studies which have undertaken these experimentia as a serious mode of inquiry for studying, say, magician-scribes in late antique Egypt, or the clerical necromancers of late medieval Europe. In fact, I am not sure that even a fifth of historians of science have endeavored to actually use an astrolabe, an abacus, or some other ancient calculating device. This, I think, is a shame.

Of course, there are a number of methodological and ethical issues that arise from such an approach. Many of these prescriptions entail dangerous or downright immoral actions — the lion-skinned girdle of the Solomonic tradition comes to mind, or the various blood-based rituals of the Picatrix. Furthermore, in East Asia, esoteric rituals need teacher-to-student transmission — when these lineages go extinct, they cannot be resurrected. I do not believe that this would have been the case for the Greek magical papyri or the various Renaissance grimoires, but it may set a bad precedence.

Footnotes

1. Reproduced in Savage-Smith, E., & Smith, M. B. (2021). Islamic geomancy and a thirteenth-century divinatory device: Another look. In Magic and divination in early Islam (pp. 211-276). Routledge. ↩︎
2. Such as in the aforementioned monograph, but also elsewhere, such as Savage-Smith, E. (1997). Geomancy in the Islamic World. Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. Helaine Selin, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 361-363. ↩︎
3. See for example the “Homer oracle” of PGM VII, translated in Betz, H. D. (Ed.). (1986). The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, Including the Demotic Spells, Volume 1: Texts (Vol. 1). University of Chicago Press. ↩︎
4. Fleeman Garcia, Trace (2025). Did African geomancy lead to computer science? Probably not. ↩︎
5. By “unfamiliar with the practice of geomancy”, I mean someone who has not spent significant time actually using it in their daily life — surely Savage-Smith is familiar with geomancy in a historical sense. ↩︎
6. Savage-Smith, E., & Maddison, F. (1997) Science, Tools, and Magic: Part One. Body and Spirit, Mapping the Universe, 156-157. Nour Foundation. ↩︎
7. Burnett, C. (1977). What is the Experimentarius of Bernardus Silvestris? A preliminary survey of the material. In Magic and Divination in the Middle Ages (pp. XVII-79). Routledge. ↩︎
8. van Binsbergen, W. M. (2012) The pre-and protohistory of mankala board-games and geomantic divination in transcontinental perspective. Papers In Intercultural Philosophy and Transcontinental Comparative Studies. Van Binsbergen makes a minor mistake as well, saying that a single throw of the dice produces one of the sixteen geomantic figures — in reality it produces four. ↩︎
9. Hadot, P. (2017). Philosophy as a Way of Life : Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Blackwell Publishing. ↩︎
10. Stull, S. D. (2017). Experimental Archaeology as Participant Observation: A Perspective from Medieval Food. EXARC Journal 2017:4. ↩︎
11. I hate that fucking word. ↩︎