Master Feiyu scolded his pupil, Qiang, for consulting the I Ching by tossing coins instead of using the meditative yarrow stalks.
Mortified, Qiang, who’d been deriving great benefit from the oracle, set about manipulating the sticks. He asked if he’d been wrong in using coins. He got Hexagram 7, The Army. Not understanding the answer, he abandoned the divination.
Later he asked again, but tossed his coins instead. Again he got Hexagram 7, which he still didn’t understand. What Qiang did understand was that there was nothing wrong in his choice of method, but plenty in his choice of master.
The I Ching (usually translated as Classic of Changes) is primarily known to the West as an oracular book in which people look up answers to their questions after casting a Hexagram. In reality, the I Ching (or Yi Jing, following the newer transliteration) permeates traditional Chinese culture much more thoroughly and its symbols are found in many methods of divination. Here are the most common ones (the list is not meant to be exclusive and it is limited by my ignorance, no doubt).
Zhou Yi (Reading Commentaries)
Zhou Yi means ‘the changes of the Zhou [dynasty]’ and refers to the oracular text we and Legge, Wilhelm, Jung, Philip K. Dick, Aleister Crowley, Ursula Le Guin etc. knew. This is what we usually mean when we cast an I Ching reading in the West (and also in much of the Eastern world).
We flip coins or manipulate yarrow stalks or pick up small handfuls of rice, depending on the method, in order to obtain a symbol made up of six lines that may change or remain stable (solid). The changing lines are then flipped to their opposite (yin to yang and yang to yin) and a new Hexagram is derived, so that we can interpret the initial Hexagram as the beginning of a matter and the final Hexagram as the likely conclusion or result.
We then look up the Hexagram(s) we got, as well as the text pertaining to any changing line, and we patch together an interpretation. This method of consulting the I Ching, which is traditionally called Zhou Yi, is very old and seems to have been the preferred method of interpretation of the Confucian or Neoconfucian school, the semi-official school of the intellectual bureaucracy of Imperial China.
And this school is exactly the one that the Western missionaries came into contact with first and foremost when they arrived in China and started studying Chinese culture. Although compared to other methods of Hexagram interpretation it may seem the most straightforward, it is complicated by the arcane and hermetic nature of the text, which is notoriously difficult even in Chinese, let alone to translate.
Yet I must say that, in my experimentations with the I Ching, the text method has revealed a subtle, beautiful simplicity. Often the answer is very clear and elegant, just clouded by one’s preconceptions.
Mei Hua Yi Shu (Plum Blossom Numerology Method)
Far wackier, but also far more interesting than the text and commentaries method, Plum Blossom Divination seems to have been devised by a Medieval scholar, Shao Yung. This method does not consist in looking up interpretations in an old book (and this probably accounts for the fact that it has fallen out of favor among most Neoconfucians). Instead, it applies certain rules of interpretation to the Trigrams.
The Eight Trigrams are the building blocks of the sixty-four Hexagrams of the I Ching text. They are also found in Feng Shui, traditional medicine and other forms of divination (e.g., Qi Men Dun Jia or Da Liu Ren) as well as in Chinese alchemy, philosophy and magic. They are, in a word, among the most important symbols in traditional Chinese culture. Everything can be categorized under one of the Trigrams.
Plum Blossom Numerology is essentially a form of Trigram divination that interprets the meanings of the eight Trigrams rather than considering the Hexagrams as a whole with their own commentaries. In Plum Blossom, we usually get a Hexagram made up of two Trigrams and we look at how the Trigrams interact based on certain fixed rules such as the five phases theory. In this method of divination we usually accept only Hexagrams with one mandatory changing line (and no more than that), so that the Trigram without the changing line represents the subject, and the one that does change is the object.
What is most interesting about Mei Hua Yi Shu is how we derive the Trigrams. This is done by way of augury. For instance, if you hear a short metallic sound and want to know if this has a particular meaning or announces a particular event, you search your mind for the Trigram that symbolizes short metallic sounds (this would be Qian). To derive the second Trigram, as well as the changing line, you generally take the time of day into account, similarly to horary astrology.
In essence, Plum Blossom allows one to interpret the world around them based on the signals the world sends them in that moment. It is both a very simple method and a very complicated one, because it requires a certain disposition and flexibility of mind that most people only achieve through much training.
Wen Wang Gua
This is, as far as I know, the most complex way of interpreting Hexagrams. To cover it would require much more than a short section in a short article. Wen Wang Gua (usually translated as King Wen’s Oracle) is a form of Chinese horary astrology that applies many of the rules of Chinese metaphysics (Chinese astrology, the Five phases, the Six Animals, etc.) to the interpretations of a Hexagram (usually cast using coins).
It is a favorite among fortune-tellers, and if we were to apply the (faulty) distinction between divination and fortune-telling that is en vogue in the West, we would say that the Zhou Yi, i.e., the commentaries, are divination, while Wen Wang Gua is fortune-telling. This because Wen Wang Gua can often predict situations very specifically, even down to the day or month something will happen.
In reality, the more I delve into Wen Wang Gua, the more I realize that it is as philosophically deep as it is captivating and accurate from a divinatory standpoint. The Hexagram one casts symbolizes the spatial, earth-related aspect of a matter, while the application of astrological rules to said Hexagram allows one to see the connection of the earthly element to the celestial element.
This is the form of I Ching divination I am devoting most of my study, and I will in time present my (very faulty and very partial) understanding of it, not because I consider myself the most qualified, but because I hope to awaken some interest for it in more people who may be more gifted than me and can comprehend its mysteries.
I’m currently still doing readings in exchange for recommendations for when I decide to start offering readings from this site. After a short reading with a querent we began chatting about the process of divination, and he asked me if fantasy is required to interpret the cards. I thought this was a really great question. I’m taking fantasy as a synonym with imagination, that is, the ability to conjure up images in one’s mind.
First off, we need to distinguish fantasy/imagination from (true) intuition. True intuition is relatively rare and it does not originate from the limited structure of the personality. It is, for all intents and purposes, otherworldly. Before being appropriated by boss babes on TikTok, intuition was rightfully considered a gift of the gods. It is hard to obtain and even harder to train, although the practice of divination, as it leads to the divine, does allow for the development of intuition.
Fantasy or imagination is mostly the product of neurons bouncing together, and it is at least in good part under our control (though whether imagination is also merely a personal power is up for debate. Many occultists think it isn’t, and I agree.)
Imagination plays a large role in modern magic, and, it could be argued, in the magic of all times (though with different implications and within different frameworks), but I’ll leave this discussion for another time. The point is that imagination is one among the many legitimate sources of understanding that we have at our disposal, including in the occult world.
Ordinarily, if someone asked me what’s the one thing that is required in order to become a diviner, I would answer that they need to understand the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of what is essentially a divine language.
Yet, in philosophy of language, and even more in philosophy of science, there is a concept called underdetermination. In its most frequent use, the principle of underdetermination states that, given a number of facts, there exist more than one theory that can explain those facts and account for them. How we then choose the most appropriate theory has sparked a debate that largely goes on to this day between scientists, philosophers, psychologists and anthropologists.
Something similar happens with divination: given a spread of cards, or a chart, it is often the case that more than one explanation might appear plausible at first. True, the more cards we string together, the fewer the possible interpretations are, just as a single word out of context might mean many things, but the more words there are, the more we understand the sentence.
But take a sentence like “we saw her duck“. Was she avoiding a bullet or does she live on a farm? This is a form of underdetermination, because the possible mental images evoked by the sentence cannot be reduced to the sentence itself.
Probably if we had a perfect understanding of the language of divination we would get unambiguous results, but we don’t. We must therefore use logic and context to weed out the less likely predictions, yet even so we might be left with more than one possible image of the future in mind. The word image here is key.
Can we predict a future we cannot imagine? That is, can we predict a future (or reveal a past) that we cannot put in the form of a picture or series of pictures? If one asks me: would you be able to understand a sentence you’ve never heard before? The answer is: if I know the language, yes. We hear sentences we’ve never heard before everyday and we rarely have problems. But going back to “we saw her duck”, if I didn’t know that duck can also be a verb, I would interpret the sentence univocally, as I wouldn’t be able to create a mental image corresponding to the interpretation of “duck” as verb instead of noun.
In real world languages the ambiguity is often removed by clear context. But in divination context is not always clear, meaning it is harder to exclude possible interpretations, and we need to be capable of creating mental images of all the most likely interpretations of an oracle before choosing which one is the most likely.
We need to be able to extrapolate the many possible meanings a spread can have before submitting them to inquiry. The ability to construct mental images or scenes from the divination tool we are using is consequently incredibly important. In other words, yes, imagination is key in divination.
But the imagination I am talking about is not the unbridled imagination that so many mistake for intuition, and which usually leads either to error or to unverifiable predictions. Imagination is the ability to create possible images derived from our (limited) understanding of the medium we are using, so that we can then see which one is more likely to be accurate by finding testimonies in the spread or by asking the querent.
Like all other occult arts, divination therefore requires the cooperation of both sides of the brain (to which we may add the importance of bodily grounding, but that’s a matter for another post).
