Hello, my name is Stefan N. Corey. I'm a visiting fellow at the International Consortium for

Research in the Humanities, Fate, Freedom and Prognostication, Strategies for Coping with

the Future in East Asia and Europe at the Frederick Alexander University Erlangen, Nuremberg.

The object that I would like to introduce to you today is called a lo-pan in modern Chinese.

That's lo meaning net, ga, or retriculated, and pan meaning plate or dial. The lo-pan

or retriculated plate is popularly known as a feng shui, geomantic, or topomantic compass.

It is the primary tool used in the Chinese mantic art of feng shui, geomancy, or topomancy.

A 1951 article by Wang Zhengduo lists 27 different terms used for magnetic compasses in China

between the 12th and early 20th centuries. A few examples include luo jing pan, net war

plate, di luo, terrestrial snail wall or spiral shell, zi wu pan, north-south plate, pan zhan,

plate and needle, or luo jing, net mirror.

We don't have time today to delve deeply into geomancy, but since the lo-pan has been

the primary tool of Chinese geomancers for over a thousand years, a brief introduction

is in order. Joseph Needham and Wang Ling insightfully sum up the essence of geomancy in the following

passage from volume four of their monumental Science and Civilization in China.

Quote, the term geomancy has other meanings in other civilizations, but for the Chinese

it meant the art of adapting the residences of the living and the tombs of the dead so

as to cooperate and harmonize with the local currents of the cosmic breath.

Known as the science of winds and waters, or feng shui, it did not mean merely the winds

of everyday life, but rather the qi, or nu ma, of the earth circulating through the veins

and vessels of the earthly macrocosm. The waters too were not only the visible streams

and rivers, but also those passing to and fro out of sight, removing impurities, depositing

minerals and, like the qi, affecting for good or evil the houses and families of the living,

as also the descendants of those who lay in the tombs. The history of the magnetic compass

is only understandable in the context of this system of ideas, for this was the matrix in

which it was generated." Unquote.

I should also point out that there are two major schools of feng shui in China, the form

school and the compass school. Neither is formally recognized before the Tang dynasty,

yet earlier geomantic traditions exhibit different degrees of emphasis on land forms and directionality.

Michael John Patton's recent work Five Classics of Feng Shui convincingly outlines a general

circular pattern in the historical evolution of feng shui, from the observation of the

land's form and force in the Han and early medieval periods, to directionally based correlative

analysis during the Tang and Song, and back to land forms and their animating forces during

the Ming and Qing. Historically, the luopan has been emphasized to a greater degree in

the compass school, but most feng shui practitioners today use a combination of land forms and directionality

in their prognostications, and almost all of them use the feng shui compass.

Needham and Wong point out that the attractive power of the lodestone was known in both China

and the West from about the middle of the first millennium BCE. Its directive power,

however, was understood in China much earlier than elsewhere. They contend that, quote,

"...the original Chinese compass was probably the south-controlling spoon carefully carved

from lodestone and revolving on the smooth surface of the diviner's board. This original

form was certainly known and used in the first century CE and may go back as a secret of

court magicians to the second century BCE." Needham and Wong go on to argue that the south-pointing

lodestone spoon was superseded by the magnetized south-pointing iron fish or tadpole sometime

between the fourth and tenth centuries of the common era. They date the transference of

polarity from lodestone to needle for geomantic compasses to about the fifth century CE, pointing

out that the magnetized needle might not have been widely used for nautical compasses in

China before the tenth century. Even if this is true, navigational compasses are not attested

outside of China before the twelfth century, at least a century later than the detailed

descriptions found in early eleventh century Song dynasty texts. The Chinese Luopaner