How to Cast a Hexagram

This page takes you through the three coin method from the first throw to the second hexagram, with one cast worked all the way out so you can see every step. There is a paragraph on the yarrow stalks near the end. I use coins.

Asking the question

Write the question down before you touch the coins. I mean that literally. A question held in your head drifts while you throw, and by the sixth line you are half answering a different one.

A good question is about you, about now, and asks how to stand in something. How should I approach the meeting on Thursday. What is the shape of this move to Melbourne. What am I not seeing in this friendship. The book is poor at yes or no, poor at dates, and poor at other people's business. Ask it what it is good at and it will surprise you with how direct it is.

Any three coins of the same kind will do. Decide which face is heads and which is tails and stay with it. The book does not care what you throw.

The counts

Throw all three coins together. Count heads as 3 and tails as 2, and add the three up. There are only four possible totals.

A total of 6, three tails, is old yin. Write it as a broken line and mark it as moving.

A total of 7, two tails and a head, is young yang. Write it as a solid line, still.

A total of 8, two heads and a tail, is young yin. Write it as a broken line, still.

A total of 9, three heads, is old yang. Write it as a solid line and mark it as moving.

Old means the line is at the end of its life and about to turn into its opposite. Young means it is settled and staying as it is. So every throw tells you two things at once: whether the line is solid or broken, and whether it is still or moving. I mark a moving line with a small cross beside it.

Building from the bottom

Six throws make a hexagram, and the first throw is the bottom line. This is the one thing beginners get wrong most often, because we read a page from the top and the book is built from the ground up, like a house. Line 1 is the bottom. Line 6 is the top. The first three throws make the lower trigram, the inner situation or the beginning of the matter, and the last three make the upper trigram, the outer situation or where it is heading.

Draw each line above the last as you go. When six lines are on the page, you have your hexagram.

A cast worked through

Here is one cast, start to finish.

Six throws come up 7, 8, 9, 7, 8, 8, counting from the first throw. So from the bottom the lines are yang, yin, yang, yang, yin, yin, and the third line, the 9, is moving.

Written as a figure from the bottom up, with 1 for a solid line and 0 for a broken one, that is 101100. The lower trigram is 101, which is Fire. The upper trigram is 100, which is Thunder. Thunder over Fire is Hexagram 55, Abundance. The picture is a storm with lightning in it, thunder and light at once, a moment when a great deal is happening and the sky is full.

Now the moving line. Line 3 is old yang, so it changes to yin. The figure becomes 100100. The lower trigram is now 100, Thunder, and the upper is still Thunder. Thunder over Thunder is Hexagram 51, The Arousing, the shock that wakes everything up.

So the reading is Abundance moving toward The Arousing. The moment is full and bright, and the part of it that is live, the third line, the top of the inner situation, is about to deliver a jolt. I would start by asking what in the fullness of this moment is about to shake.

Look both hexagrams up on their own pages. Hexagram 55, Abundance and Hexagram 51, The Arousing each have a page in The Hexagrams, and the pair of them read together is the answer.

Moving lines and the second hexagram

A moving line is the live point in the figure. When you change every moving line to its opposite, you get a second hexagram, and that second figure is the direction the situation is heading. The first hexagram is now. The second is where now is going.

Which line moves matters. The lower lines, 1 and 2, are the beginning of the matter. The middle lines, 3 and 4, are its heart, the point where the inner situation meets the outer one. The upper lines, 5 and 6, are its end, and line 6 in particular is the matter gone as far as it can go, and often a step too far.

No moving lines, or several

Sometimes every throw comes up 7 or 8 and nothing moves. Read the one hexagram as it stands. The situation is settled, there is no second figure, and the book is describing a state you are in and will be in for a while.

Sometimes three or four lines move at once. The tradition has rules of thumb for this, and different teachers favour different rules. My own practice is simple. I read the lowest moving line first, because the matter develops from the bottom up and the lowest moving line is where the shift begins. Then I read the whole figure as a picture, with all its moving lines, and I let the second hexagram carry the rest. A cast with many moving lines is a situation with a lot in motion, and that is already most of the answer.

The yarrow stalks

The older way uses fifty dried yarrow stalks. One is set aside and never used. The remaining forty nine are divided in two at random, counted through in fours, and the remainders set aside, and that whole process is repeated three times to produce one line. Six lines take the better part of half an hour. The odds are also different from the coins: a moving yin line is rarer with the stalks than a moving yang line, where with three coins the two come up equally often. Some people prefer the stalks for that slowness, because the question settles while the hands are busy. I use coins.

Keep a notebook

Write down the date, the question, the six throws, both hexagrams and the moving lines. Leave a space under it. Come back in a month and write what happened.

That space is where you learn the book. A hexagram you have looked up once is a chapter. A hexagram you have cast four times for four different questions, and watched play out four times, is yours. After a year of this you will open the notebook and find that the I Ching has been teaching you to read your own life, which is what it was always for.

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

Related pages
Tarot Spreads · How to Cast the Runes