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Geomancy · Figure 11 of 16

Puella, the Girl: Venus well placed

Puella, the Girl, is the geomantic figure with single points at the head, body and feet and a double neck. The 1655 Of Geomancy makes it Venus well placed, and the tradition reads it as grace, charm and peace, pleasant rather than strong.

The figure Puella drawn large: Fire at the head, one point; Air at the neck, two points; Water at the body, one point; Earth at the feet, one point. Below, the sixteen figures small in a row, the 11th marked. Puella · the Girl Fire, the head one Air, the neck two Water, the body one Earth, the feet one
Puella, figure 11 of 16: its points head to feet, with the element and part of each line. Below, the sixteen in our order, the eight that can be Judge first.

Facts

Number
Figure 11 of 16; after the eight that can be Judge
Points, head to feet
1 · 2 · 1 · 1: one point in the Fire, Water and Earth lines
Total
5 points, odd, so never the Judge
Planet (1655)
Venus well placed
Sign (Gerard's scheme)
Libra, in the Astronomical Geomancy attributed to Gerard of Cremona (1655 English)
Cattan's English (1591)
“wench”
Agrippa's glosses (1651)
“A Girle”, “Beautifull”
Turned over
Upside down: Puer. Every point swapped: Rubeus

Meaning

Puella is Venus in good condition: grace, pleasantness, attraction and peace. Cattan's translator renders it "wench", and Agrippa's table of 1651 glosses it "A Girle" and "Beautifull". Hartmann's verdict marks its limit: "pleasant but not very fortunate". The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's handbook makes it good in all questions, especially those about women. In our own words, it favours love, friendship, the arts and anything that needs charm rather than force, and is weak where hard work or endurance is needed.

In the shield

Puella has five points, so it can never be Judge. Its quality is disputed: read as head against feet, Cattan's rule makes it "meane", neither entering nor going out, while the modern table calls it entering. Its head line is single, so the Way of the Point can pass through it. Turned upside down it becomes Puer, the Boy, and the pair are the tradition's girl and boy; with every point swapped it becomes Rubeus. Its partner under Venus is Amissio. In the sample casting on the Geomancy page it is the First Mother, so it stands in the 1st house.

Chaucer's Mars, Fludd's swap, and the sign

In The Knight's Tale Chaucer sets two figures of stars over the statue of Mars, "That oon Puella, that other Rubeus". Rubeus is a figure of Mars in every handbook; Puella is Venus's in all but one. Cattan, Agrippa, the 1655 text, Hartmann and the Golden Dawn give Puella to Venus; Fludd alone, in 1624, gives it to Mars and Puer to Venus, which may be a printer's swap. Its sign is the rare one every scheme agrees on: Libra, a sign of Venus.

Correspondences

Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.

Planet
Venus in Cattan, Agrippa, the 1655 text, Hartmann and Crowley; Mars in Fludd (1624) disputed
Direct or retrograde (Cattan, p. 54)
Venus direct sourced
Sign, Gerard's scheme (ours)
Libra sourced
Sign, other schemes
Libra in all of them: Agrippa (1651), Cattan's table (p. 56), his “Gerard Cremon” (p. 63) and the Golden Dawn (1909) sourced
Quality (Cattan's rule)
“meane” (common) if the head line is weighed against the feet; entering in the modern table disputed
Lines
Single, active: Fire (head), Water (body) and Earth (feet); double, passive: Air (neck) sourced
In Chaucer
Over the statue of Mars with Rubeus (The Knight's Tale, lines 2043 to 2045 in Skeat) sourced
Our keywords
Harmony, charm, receptiveness our construction

How the schools read it

Cattan (1591)
Calls it “wench”; “meane” (common) if the head line is weighed against the feet; entering in the modern table.
Agrippa (1651)
Glosses it “A Girle”, “Beautifull”.
*Of Geomancy* (1655)
Venus fortunate (Venus well placed).
Hartmann (1889)
“Puella, Girl, pretty face, is pleasant but not very fortunate.”
The Golden Dawn (Crowley, 1909)
“Good in all demands, especially those relating to women”
Modern practice (Greer, as reported)
Calls it stable, giving a direction even to a figure the old rule calls “meane”.
EsoTerrier
Harmony, charm, receptiveness (our one-line reading in the chart).

Claims about it

  • Puella is a figure a person is born under, worked out from a name and a birth date.

    false

    What the record shows: No source makes a geomantic figure from birth data; every casting is for a question. Our own app did this until October 2026, and the method was retired.

  • Puella has one zodiac sign.

    disputed

    What the record shows: Every scheme we read gives it Libra, a rare agreement; elsewhere at least six schemes disagree, so we still say whose sign we show.

  • Puella has an element of its own.

    disputed

    What the record shows: The sources give the figures at least six different sets of elements. We show only the four line elements, never an element for the whole figure.

Elsewhere on EsoTerrier

Sources

Primary texts (7)
  1. Christopher Cattan, The Geomancie of Maister Christopher Cattan Gentleman, translated by Francis Sparry. London: John Wolfe, 1591 (French original, Paris, 1558). wellcomecollection.org/works/gk8r8xpn
  2. Of Geomancy (attributed to Agrippa) and Astronomical Geomancy (attributed to Gerard of Cremona), in Henry Cornelius Agrippa his Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, translated by Robert Turner. London, 1655. github.com/textcreationpartnership/A26563
  3. Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, translated by J. F. London, 1651; Book II, chapter 48. github.com/textcreationpartnership/A26565
  4. Franz Hartmann, The Principles of Astrological Geomancy. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1889. archive.org/details/b24884145
  5. [Aleister Crowley], “A Handbook of Geomancy”, The Equinox I(2), 1909, pp. 137 to 161. keepsilence.org/the-equinox/1.2/a-handbook-of-geomancy_low.pdf
  6. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight's Tale (about 1387), lines 2041 to 2045 in Walter W. Skeat's edition, The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, vol. 4, 1894. gutenberg.org/ebooks/22120
  7. Robert Fludd, De naturae simia, second edition. Frankfurt, 1624; De geomantia II.1, pp. 724 to 725. archive.org/details/bub_gb_zINwyYhcsp8C
Studies and other sources (3)
  1. Sam Block, The Digital Ambler, posts on the shield, the Way of the Point, perfection, the elements and the signs, 2012 to 2020. digitalambler.com/2020/05/08/how-to-construct-the-shield-chart-of-geomancy
  2. John Michael Greer, The Art and Practice of Geomancy. San Francisco: Weiser, 2009. Facts only, known through reports.
  3. John North, Chaucer's Universe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.
Our own research (2)
  1. EsoTerrier, geomancy research and validation, 11 to 14 October 2026.
  2. EsoTerrier calculation engine, the geomancy service, its texts and documentation.
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By EsoTerrier. Written with AI assistance from our research and checked against its sources; last revised 19 October 2026. How we write these pages.

First published ; last revised . Corrections: support@esoterrier.com.