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I like this particular star, because — when oriented to the page — it consists of two overlapping and off-kilter eight-pointed stars. These could represent the Stabile and Mobile dichotomy. Except because not all four Water signs, say, belong to the Stabile group, there's no easy way to represent their orientation to that polarity... unless there's a Celtic/Islamic style knotwork system that can join them across groupings. Worth thinking on.
So, here's a layout for a possible geomantic mandala, using an Islamic-ish knotwork star to reflect the signs round and about the mandala. I haven't compared this against elements or zodiac yet, but there may be something workable here.
A colleague came to me with a plan to talk about a debate about World War II in her class — American isolationists vs. interventionists. We talked about her plans, and did some revision of these plans with diagrams and maps and Brainstorming!
Her class has 23 kids in it. We decided that we were going to have Roosevelt deliver a policy speech, and then have two teams under him — one would propose the specific lend-lease legislation; a group of opponents would try to undercut it. The opposition would then propose their own legislation and Roosevelt's team would try to undercut THAT. But then we were left with too many kids sitting on the sidelines. We tried to resolve it by imagining teams on the sidelines producing graphic design materials and propaganda that would support or undercut both sides — or that would serve as "voices from the extremes" which would help make clear what a dangerous time this was in American history.
Some of our planning revolved around having a "graphic design" team produce a newspaper that had all the technical data that each side would need in its newspaper — and to tie those newspaper designs to William Randolph Hurst and other newspaper demagogues of the 1920s and 1930s and 1940s.
A colleague came to me with a plan to talk about a debate about World War II in her class — American isolationists vs. interventionists. We talked about her plans, and did some revision of these plans with diagrams and maps and Brainstorming!
Her class has 23 kids in it. We decided that we were going to have Roosevelt deliver a policy speech, and then have two teams under him — one would propose the specific lend-lease legislation; a group of opponents would try to undercut it. The opposition would then propose their own legislation and Roosevelt's team would try to undercut THAT. But then we were left with too many kids sitting on the sidelines. We tried to resolve it by imagining teams on the sidelines producing graphic design materials and propaganda that would support or undercut both sides — or that would serve as "voices from the extremes" which would help make clear what a dangerous time this was in American history.
These two shapes strike me as the most appropriate for a geomantic mandala. There's still work to be done, sorting out //where// and //how// data is recorded and projected to the observer/meditator. But at least the matter of organizing by stability or element could be settled in the composition of the list.
Or, a pair of eight-pointed stars can be overlapped, resulting in more elegant kite-shapes with more depth. Here, the underlying tension would have to be between the Mobile and Stabile signs.
I'm not particularly happy with any of the layouts or lists of the geomantic figures I've found so far. Accordingly, I'm going to have to try out a whole lot of versions of the list to find one that looks good in two overlapping eight pointed stars. And that likely means filling in a lot of photocopied sheets.
Sheets something like this one.
You'll be able to play along when the scanner at school is fixed again. And school is over for summer.
One possibility is to unite the four kites of each Element by an "unbroken thread" running through the star — a thread at genuine variance with the underlying structure of the star itself in terms of geometric construction.
Here, red and blue lines show those "unbroken thread" possibilities for this design.