emmanuelg

As I do, you probably remember the ‘Paper Fortune Teller’ from your childhood:

If you don’t remember, it is a bit of origami that we used to fold together sometimes. We used our crayons to color each quarter of the top a different color. Usually it was Red, Yellow, Blue and Green. You would write numbers on the inside of the device and a fortune under each number. “What is your favorite color?” you would ask your friend. Then you would make one cycle of the device while spelling out the name of the color. G-R-E-E-N would be 5 cycles. With the inside open, your friend chooses a number. You flatten the device, pull up the tab, and read the fortune. In my Fifth Grade class, the usual girls’ fortunes included things like, “You love Billy,” while the boys’ fortunes ran along the lines of “You stink!”

Here's a link to a WikiHow on how to make a Paper Fortune Teller;

https://www.wikihow.com/Fold-a-Fortune-Teller

Here is the flattened view of the Paper Fortune Teller (PFT) No tabs have been raised to view the Fortune:

I have been staring at House Charts a lot lately. For some reason, the House Chart reminded me of the PFT’s of my youth. I made several of them. Look what happens when you fold back the points of the fortune area:

Yep. You are looking at a House Chart! What the heck man? Now that I think about it, there are a number of similarities between the PFT and Geomancy; The four colors of the lines of Geomancy – Red/Fire Yellow/Air Blue/Water, Green/Earth – are the four starting colors of the PFT. You get a fortune with the PFT by generating a series of random numbers-- That ought to sound familiar to Geomancers! So it occurs to me to wonder whether, at some time in the past, the PFT was used to generate the Four Mothers of a Geomantic Reading. It might be possible to write your geomantic reading onto the House Chart of a modified PFT and somehow use it for additional readings. I tried working a PFT with its corners folded back, just for the look and feel of the thing: