Latin has always been held in high esteem in Western Europe, not least because it was the language that was used by the Roman Empire that dominated that whole quarter of the world, but also because it was held as the official language of business, trade, religion, and academia for a millennia well after the fall of the Romans.  To this day, Latin is still useful for translating many documents, official and informal, from centuries past when the vulgar Romance languages were too…well, vulgar to be used.  This is especially important for many occult works, grimoires, and other books which, to this day, have never been translated out of their original Latin.

This section of pages are my translations from Latin into English, and all of which pertain to divination in some way, hence Liber Divinationis, or “The Book of Divination”.  These are all texts that were published in Latin in a critical edition as given in Hermes Trismegistus, Astrologia et divinatoria (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medievalis 144C, Brepols: Turnhout, 2001).  I first found this book as a source for the Lectura Geomantiae, a late 15th century text giving a high-level summary of the art and practice of geomancy as taught by at least some geomancers in Western Europe, perhaps on the Iberian peninsula.  However, there are other sections in this overall book that discuss other topics in divination, which I’ve translated here.

• De Amicitia vel Inimicitia Planetarum (“On the Amity and Enmity of the Planets”).  This translation describes a simple form of mundane astrology based on the planetary rulers of particular parts of the world and how their motions through the signs ruled by other planets impact or affect those areas of the world.
• Liber De Accidentibus (“The Book of Accidents”).  This translation consists of a collection of astrological aphorisms and rules about particular astrological arrangements or phenomena and how they may be used in forecasting, as in mundane or horary astrology.
• Liber Runarum (“The Book of Runes”).  This translation describes a method of image magic, talismanic writing, or magical inscription using a variant of medieval runes ascribed to the signs of the Zodiac and the elements.

To view these texts, please use the navigation bar at the top of the site: Occult→ Liber Divinationis → (pagename).