To do Tetriamancy, you will need to have a way to generate four figures to start.
Let’s talk about various methods and tools that can be used.
The Ideal
Suppose you were to come upon some three-sided dice (they exist and can be purchased online at minimum). Each die has three sides: 1, 2, and 3.
Set your sights on one red, one blue, one yellow, and one green die.
To generate a figure, you would roll four dice at once.
Red represents the first number, yellow the second, blue the third, and green the fourth: fire, air, water, and earth.
The numbers would represent the following symbols:
| Number | State | Glyph |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Manifest |  |
| 2 | Liminal |  |
| 3 | Latent |  |
Let’s say you rolled a red 1, a yellow 2, a blue 3, and a green 1. That would give you the figure:
Record the figure. Repeat the process three more times and you will have generated four figures.
The Reality
Three-sided dice are uncommon. Unless you feel compelled to do so, you may not want to go out and buy a set of them.
That’s okay. There are other ways to generate figures.
You can use regular six-sided dice. This is what I use presently. The process is very similar:
| Number | State | Glyph |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Manifest | |
| 3–4 | Liminal | |
| 5–6 | Latent | |
Unlike Geomancy, where the figures reduce to binary options, Tetriamancy figures are ternary. This means that you will need three evenly-distributed possibilities to generate a figure.
You could have a red, white, and black ball of equal size in a bag (note: the colors are arbitrary, and so would be the state assignment). Draw one ball at a time, record the color, and return it to the bag. Repeat three more times to generate a figure.
You could tap a stick onto the sand a channeled number of times, and record the number of taps modulo 3. Repeat three more times to generate a figure.
You can use a random number generator to generate a series of numbers. So long as the numbers are or reduce to 1–3, this works too.
Anything that will give you three evenly-distributed possibilities can be used to generate a figure. The important part is that the process is random and not biased in any way.
Also, be consistent. If you decide you’d rather have 5–6 be Manifest, 3–4 be Liminal, and 1–2 be Latent, that’s fine. Just make sure you use the same assignment for all four figures.
Conclusion
There are many things I left out: where do you store your tools, how do you consecrate them, how do you keep them clean, how do you clear the space for generating figures, etc.
While these may be important to some, these practices are personal, and I do not want to prescribe anything but the absolute minimum.