Apparently the text proper of the _Experimentarius_ opens with the usual instructions of geomancies for the chance casting of points and drawing of lines. The number of points left over as a result of this procedure is used as a guide in finding the answer to the question which one has in mind. In a preliminary table are listed 28 subjects of inquiry such as life and death, marriage, imprisonment, enemies, gain. One turns to the topic in which one is interested and, according as the number of points obtained by chance is over or under seven, reckons forward or backward that many times from the number opposite his theme of inquiry, or, if exactly seven points were left over, takes the number of the theme of inquiry as he finds it. In one manuscript the new number thus obtained is that of the “Judge of the Fates” to whom one should next turn. There are 28 such judges, whose names are the Arabic designations for the 28 divisions of the circle of the zodiac or mansions of the moon, which spends a day in each of them.[301] A page is devoted to each judge, under whose name are twenty-eight lines containing as many responses to the twenty-eight subjects of inquiry. The inquirer selects a line corresponding to his number of points and the tables are so arranged that he thus always receives the answer which fits his inquiry. But most of the manuscripts, instead of at once referring the inquirer to his Judge as we have described, insert other preliminary tables in which he is first referred to a planet and then to a day of the moon. This unnecessarily indirect and complicated system is probably intended to mystify the reader and to emphasize further the supposedly astrological basis of the procedure, whereas it is in reality purely a matter of lot-casting. [Sidenote: Two versions of the 28 judges.] Now in most of the manuscripts which I have examined there are two versions of these twenty-eight pages of Judges of the Fates, worded differently, although the corresponding lines always seem to answer the same questions and apply to the same topics of inquiry as before. In the version which comes first, for example, the first line under the first Judge, _Almazene_ or the belly of Aries, is _Tuum indumentum durabit tempore longo_ while in the second version the same line reads, _Hoc ornamentum decus est et fama ferentum._[302]