┌─╷─┐ ╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub ╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes └─╵─┘
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Theory matters. Theory is as important as practice; practice is not more important than theory, theory is not more important than practice. Yes, without theory, you can get by on practice alone, but without theory, you cannot expand upon or understand practice; without theory, practice becomes dead and hollow; you're limited in what you can do to merely what's passed onto you (not necessarily trustworthy) or what you stumble across based on dumb luck. However, with theory, you can cultivate, develop, and grow practice into something beautiful.
"Oh, but we don't need principles, so long as we have tradition!" Your tradition will wither, become hollow superstition, and be forgotten if you can't keep it alive. You keep it alive through the principles that underlie it to keep it vibrant, fresh, growing, and understood. Tradition is literally "that which is handed down"; if you're unconvinced that what you're handed down has worth (and you should always question and check to see that it does), then you're not going to hand it down to anyone else. You have to literally understand it—to stand under it—to support it. Without understanding the principles and theory behind practice, you end up with rules to memorize by rote; you can't develop them, invent new ones, or extrapolate further on them, but you instead end up limited by what survives, without any means of recovery or innovation. This is how traditions die. However, just like how you have to provide both the services within a building as well as the infrastructure that holds it all together, this is how tradition survives and thrives: because the "hows" as well as the "whys" are known and developed.
Sure, you might be able to get by on practice alone—for now. But with each succeeding generation, there's less and less to practice, until there's just a jumbled, corrupted, half-forgotten mess, before it eventually gets shelved for the last time and left to rot for good. Sure, theory and principles alone don't get you anywhere; you can't eat on theories alone without actually working them. Theory without practice is idle vanity of the mind. But theory is what keeps practice alive and allows practice to thrive. Forget theory at your own peril.
The above rant was brought to you based on someone in a Facebook geomancy group I admin, where they kept recommending a particular technique over and over but could give no justification for why it works or why we should use it, just that he read it in a book one time and it works for him. Okay, sure—but when asked for "why are you using these particular houses together?", he wouldn't (and couldn't) offer any explanation and says that "it doesn't matter, just use it". Mind you, geomancy is a divinatory art where logic and reason and theory is as important as actual practice. This sort of practice isn't (wholly) about intuition, but about technique and rigor. If you're offering a one-size-fits-all rule that can be used in any chart, then it should be a matter of method and reason, not a matter of intuition and inspiration. However, if you can't back it up with logic or any kind if justification, then it's not appealing or trustworthy. It's like the worst of astrology in that case; you can't just point to some random assortment of things you add and subtract to make a new lot, or some asteroid or cosmic location, and say "it answers everything!" without justifying it at least a little bit, even to yourself. And, like, while I have this sort of experience common with a particular sort of culture of geomancers, any old tradition will have hardliners who are so embarrassed about their own lack of knowledge that they cover it up with appeals to divinity or authority or sweeping it under the rug with the broom of cliché mysticism. But this is how traditions die; it's already happened with geomancy in Europe once, and I don't want to see it happen again.
Besides, with divination and intuition generally, like…intuition and technique go hand-in-hand; you're either a true prophet on the one hand or a TV meteorologist on the other. Neither? You're using both intuition and technique. We should admit both, learn both, and value both. But when someone goes "logic has no place here!"—bitch unbridled, then why do you call it a "system" instead of a jumbled mishmash of whatever strikes your whimsy and fancy that moment? Coherency follows from sticking to a logic. There doesn't have to be just one such system at play, but there's got to be at least one. Even the revelations of God and the gods follow the rules they set for the worlds they reveal their mysteries in; otherwise, it's just a once-off whoopsie that can't be replicated.
On top of that? There is no one—truly, no one—who can't benefit from rigor and training. You're naturally gifted/talented/blessed? Awesome! Train yourself with rigor. You're starting from scratch? Awesome! Ditto. Relying just on divine inspiration without rigor is coasting and laziness. Besides, if what you do can't be replicable but is just all in the moment, how can you teach that? How can you instill that in a future generation? Without knowing the principles and methods behind what you're doing, your "tradition" dies without ever being handed down at all. Hell, even if you simply had to come up with a set of rules to satisfy such a thing, say so! That's fine! Inventions can work as well as anything ancient! But try to justify why they work, too, with some sort of reason or correspondence or something that gives it external meaning instead of a once-off rite that's just…there.