I Ching

That is the I Ching, the Book of Changes, and it is the oldest oracle I work with. It has been consulted in China for about three thousand years, and it still does the same job. It describes the shape of the moment you are standing in and how to stand in it well. I use it beside the tarot, and the two get on well.

What the book is

The I Ching is a set of sixty four figures called hexagrams. Each hexagram is six lines stacked one on top of the other, and every line is either solid or broken. A solid line is yang, the active, firm, moving side of things. A broken line is yin, the receptive, soft, yielding side. Six lines, each one of two kinds, gives you sixty four possible figures, and every one of them has a name and a character of its own. Peace, Waiting, The Well, Deliverance.

Each hexagram is really two smaller figures sitting one above the other. A figure of three lines is called a trigram, and there are eight of them: Heaven, Earth, Thunder, Water, Mountain, Wind, Fire and Lake. Put any one of the eight on top of any other and you have a hexagram. Know the eight and you can see any hexagram's picture before you read a word about it. Thunder over Water is a storm breaking over a river. Fire over Mountain is a campfire on a hillside, burning bright and moving on. The pictures are the book.

The moving line is what turns the book into an oracle. When you cast a hexagram, some of the lines may come up as changing lines, lines on the point of turning into their opposite. A moving line tells you where the situation is live, and when you change it over you get a second hexagram, the one the situation is heading toward. So a cast gives you a picture of now, the point in it that is shifting, and a picture of where it is going.

How I use it

I cast it with coins for a question. Yarrow stalks are the older way, but coins fit in a pocket and the answer is just as good. I write the question down before I throw, because a vague question gets a vague answer, and I keep every cast in a notebook with what came of it.

I read the picture first, the two trigrams and what they make together. Then the moving line, which is the part of the picture that is in motion. Then the second hexagram, which is the direction. Only after that do I open a translation and read the old text, and I read it in plain words, because the book was written for a royal court three thousand years ago and nobody at my kitchen table is leading an army.

In a full portrait I also look at a birth hexagram. I want to be straight with you about that. The I Ching was never a birth chart, and the methods for finding a hexagram from a birth date are modern inventions that disagree with each other. So I work the common methods, show you my working, and treat what comes out as a temperament to hold up against the rest of your chart. The Your Birth Hexagram page says all of this at length.

What the book will not do is tell your fortune. It describes weather. It tells you whether this is a moment for pushing forward or sitting still, for finishing or for not starting yet. What you do with that is yours.

How this section is laid out

The pages run in the order I would teach them.

Learning the I Ching is where to begin. It covers where the book came from, what a hexagram is, how an oracle answers a question, and how the I Ching sits beside the tarot and beside Chinese astrology.

How to Cast a Hexagram gives you the three coin method step by step, with one worked cast taken all the way through to its second hexagram, and a paragraph on the yarrow stalks for anyone curious.

The Eight Trigrams gives each of the eight its lines, its place in the family, its quality and its picture, and shows you how two of them make a hexagram.

Your Birth Hexagram tells you the truth about birth hexagrams and what I do with one.

The Hexagrams lists all sixty four in order with a few words each, and each hexagram has its own page: what the figure shows, what it says when it comes up for a question, who you are if you carry it as a birth hexagram, and what happens when a line moves. Use those pages the way you would use a good dictionary, after you have cast.

Where to start

Start with The Eight Trigrams. Learn the eight pictures until you can see them in a stack of six lines without counting. That is an evening's work and most of the skill.

Then find three coins, write down a real question, and cast. Look up what you get. Notice what fits and what does not, and write that down too. The book is learnt by consulting it, the same way a city is learnt by walking it.

You will be your own teacher. All I will do is help you remember what you already know.

If you would like your own chart read, my readings are here.

In this section