Besides hot spring spas, Germany had another form of entertainment—illusionism.
Georgiana felt it should really have been called magic: stage performances by magicians who possessed no actual magic.
They had to use ingenuity to create illusions the audience would never have anticipated, things that seemed easy enough once exposed. This was how they made their living. If anyone revealed their secrets, everyone would know how to perform the illusions, and no one would pay for tickets to watch them anymore.
Georgiana truly had little interest in opera, but Paris offered more than one kind of entertainment. Circuses and illusionists took turns performing for her in the theater at the Burgundy Residence, making her dull life considerably more interesting.
Meanwhile, the findings regarding that altar had come in. The golden lines that looked so much like a magic circle were not a magic circle at all, but a directional marker known as a compass rose.
This pattern often appeared on maps and nautical charts to indicate directions, and was widely used in navigation, exploration, military affairs, and more. The earliest compasses used by mankind were magnetic and relied on the Earth's magnetic field. Medieval nautical charts had no lines of longitude or latitude, only straight directional lines radiating outward in ordered fashion from a central point. These were also called rhumb lines, and the various wind gods of ancient Greek legend were carefully depicted along them.
The Portuguese called the face of their compass "rosedosventor," meaning rose of the wind. Sailors used the Sun's position and compared it with the "rose of the wind" to determine their heading. Thus, rose lines originally referred to lines that guided direction.
The first person in history to clearly propose the theory of longitude and latitude was the ancient Greek Ptolemy. He was the first