Background

In Lesson 7 of The Nascent Magician course, we learned about geomancy, a kind of earth divination. The geomantic figures have various astrological (and other) correspondences and generating the figures when doing a reading can be done in many different ways (including poking holes in the ground!). Another way is to use dice. Sometimes the dice are attached together on a rod so that you can rotate them to form a figure. These are occasionally for sale but are very expensive.

Lind suggested making dice ourselves, but without a drill press, making the required holes for the rod would be difficult. Without the rod, it wasn’t clear to me how to tell which order the dice should be read being thrown. Then Kevin Trent Boswell pointed out that geomancy uses a Fire, Earth, Air, Water sequence, so the obvious thing to do would be to paint the dice red, black, yellow, and blue so they could be read in that order from top to bottom.

As an example, the dice roll pictured here would be read as Fortuna Major

Materials

For this project, I chose 3/4 inch wooden blocks and an unfinished wooden box, available from Michaels or Amazon. I used the following Liquitex products for the dice:

• BASICS Cadmium Red Deep Hue,
• BASICS Ivory Black,
• BASICS Cobalt Blue Hue,
• BASICS Titanium White,
• HEAVY BODY Cadmium Yellow Medium (the BASICS yellow hue is thin and somewhat transparent), and
• Professional High Gloss Varnish (for the top coat).

Liquitex has some color charts available to help select colors.

Caveats

The dice need to have one dot painted on 3 sides and two dots painted on the other 3 sides. Notice that each pair of dots can be perpendicular to all the other pairs, so while you can randomly select a side, you need to orient it correctly so they look nice when viewed from the side. I found a piece of metal with holes in it and used it to draw the dots with a sharpie. Then I carefully painted a dot over the sharpie ink.

The clasp and hinges on the box should be removed before painting.

Storage Box

Geomancy is a form of divination associated with elemental Earth, so the next step is to paint the storage box with the colors of Malkuth: citrine, olive, black, and russet. We can’t buy three of these colors, so we have to mix them. That means you have one shot at getting each section of the box painted correctly — make sure your masking tape is straight and tight.

There are several color models used for pigment. As early as 1725, the RYB model was used for printing. In this model red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors. From these, you can get the secondary colors: red and blue make violet, blue and yellow make green, and yellow and red make orange. The colors of Malkuth are tertiary colors, which are created from mixing pairs of secondary colors.

I again used Liquitex for the secondary colors:

• BASICS Light Green Permanent,
• BASICS Prism Violet, and
• HEAVY BODY Cadmium Orange (which is heavier than the orange found in the BASICS line).

The colors were mixed as follows:

• citrine (top) is a mixture of green and orange
• olive (right) is a mixture of green and violet
• russet (left) is a mixture of violet and orange

Conclusion

The dice fit nicely inside the box. The varnish will make the two halves stick together, so all of the pieces need to dry separately for a week or so before being stored.