"This work centres on the eight trigrams of the I Ching focusing on its orgins, history, yin and yang and the Han cosmology. It goes on to deal more specifically with the circular arrangements of the trigrams, their dating, structure and internal logic. Finally, the wider applications of the trigrams, their importance, their uses and the intricacies of Taoist magic are explored."

For those who haven't heard of Steve Moore, here's a little intro:

>Stephen James Moore was born at 2:00pm on June 11th, 1949, in a house on Shooters Hill in South London, where he lived all of his life, and died on or around the 16th of March, 2014, still in that house on the hill. In between, he produced a huge body of work, of a very high standard, most of it written in that same house. He was a hugely private man, but his life and mine intersected over the past few years, and I got to learn a lot about him in that brief time.
>
>But, actually, I was aware of Steve Moore’s work long before that. I had only ever been a desultory reader, at best, of 2000 AD/Judge Dredd/Warrior (Comics), where he wrote a multitude of short sharp tales, but it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Warrior*, where he was a vital component both in front of and behind the curtain, changed my life. However, I had probably been reading his uncredited work in British comics for years before that, all unknown....*

(read the brief biography here as well as his interviews)

>Moore has long been linked to Alan Moore, who has known him "since he [Alan] was fourteen" referring to him as "a friend... fellow comic writer [and] a fellow occultist". The two have so often been linked together that Alan joked that Steve would have 'no relation' engraved on his tombstone. > >Moore was an editor of Bob Rickard's long-running UK-based "Journal of the Unexplained" Fortean Times. In later years, he also edited that publication's more academic sister-publication Fortean Studies. He is listed as a 'specialist contributor' to the Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained, which also notes that he compiled the Fortean Times' General Index, and several derivative books. He was a freelance writer on diverse topics, and said he "lives in London [where he] interests himself mainly in ancient and oriental subjects". > >Moore was also a dedicated student and practitioner of the Yijing and consulted it every morning, without fail, from 1969 onwards, recording the results in his 'I Ching diary'. In 1988, he published "The Trigrams of Han: Inner Structures of the I Ching". This scholarly work led Moore to be inducted into the Royal Asiatic Society as a Fellow. > >From 1995 until its final issue in 2002, Moore edited The Oracle, The Journal of Yijing Studies. > >He was a co-author of I Ching: An Annotated Bibliography, published in 2002.

Over on Steve Marshall's website, Steve has a very brief write-up of Steve's book "The Trigrams of Han: Inner Structures of the I Ching". Steve's book is very very good. This is what Steve has to say about it:

>This is a hard book to take in at one sitting as it is so densely packed with information. Explores the philosophical and cosmological implications of the circular diagrams of the trigrams by picking up a kind of historical litter trail and using it to
develop connections and generate observations. An excellent compendium of personal researches. Out-of-print and difficult to find. Published by The Aquarian Press, 1989. [Ed's note – Steve Moore died in March 2014. His book is now available here in PDF.]

Thanks Steve!

Though i was brought up around the Yi, growing up in England and having to play "catch-up" with my own heritage, i had spent many years as a skeptic regarding the validity of the narrative of the Yi as drilled into us Cantonese folk from a young age. Coming across the Modernist Scholars in the last five years has really propelled my own reconnection with the Yi and my own cultural heritage with new found hope and a proper entry point into the true history of that forgotten realm of wizards, shamans, magicks, cosmology and the Yi.

The many books attributed to the Modernist approach to the Yi (the Jing part can stay far away from the Yi part...if you know what i mean), such as Richard Rutt's "Zhou Yi", Ed Shaugnessy's "Early Development of the Zhou Changes", Steve Marshall's "Mandate of Heaven" and Steve Moore's "Trigrams of Han" as well as the many excellent scholarly contributions on this new way of discovering the truth of the old/Yi has been a great gift.

I wish i was someone who can just be content in stopping myself at "what works" and be done with it...but as the dude once said...I GOTZ TO KNOW!!!

Nowdays the YiJing has lost it's hypnotic possession on my Cantonese mind, dropping all the cultural fallacies, myths and stories created around the Yi and it's history (whether as a means to reconcile what was once lost or for another ulterior motive pertaining to establashing a new (world/China/Dynastic) order and preventing the knowledge of the past to intrude on this delicate task conducted by the Qin Shi Huang the nutcase). It appears to me what it perhaps has always been...

...a human work of long trial and error by those with an acute affinity to the fabric of reality (aka Diviners and Shamans of Antiquity), who hoped to make sense of this world via a highly curated work of universal mnemonics that attempt uncover the hidden secrets of existence.

At first needed no language nor text to keep their Divination Arts alive by use of oral lineages; with a magnum opus of folk sayings, divinatory records and historical events, these guys rediscovered a system via Cosmic-Scale Mathematics (Lo Shu and He Tu) that was could be reworked into a new Divination system that moved away from the age old practice of crack-making with the oracle bones and tortoise shells. With the advent of the written Chinese language and bridging the gap between abstract and logic, condensing the age old divination practices first into 5 lined pentagrams, then 6 lined hexagrams, appending/keying such huge collections of folklore and historical occurrences into 5/6 line glyphs as a means to stimulate the connection between Diviner and their world and also as a means to keep the history of the ages intact, albeit in a very convoluted, curated way.

So what Yi was attributed to Fuxi, King Wen/Wu, Confucius was all a lie. This brings me great peace knowing that i have not been lead astray, through history or those who control the narrative behind (Chinese) history.

The line texts being the oldest part of the bronze age text really makes sense...

The Hexagrams being created before trigrams and their associations were established, linking it back to the Luo Shu and He Tu, is a breathe of fresh air!

That perhaps the origins of Trigrams came about at the same time yin-yang and Wu Xing observations were being developed really puts things into perspective.

And if it is true that the Hexagram Judgements (alongside the Hexagram tags/names) were of the last to be created and, traversing further along this line of thought, if say nine times out of ten we have no idea what the line texts originally meant, what they alluded to, and worse yet their original meaning has been utterly lost due to the philosophical works of the State-Controlled Scholars/Philosophers of the time, then the Yi of the Zhou's original usage has been lost to us and that we will never be able to satisfyingly use the Yi as taught by tradition as a tool for divining the occurances of the external world.

What's left of the Yi of the Zhou (and the Confucianited Yi) has become a book of self help, excelling at uncovering the workings of one's psyche and the many hidden layers of emotional, psychological and perhaps physical trauma. For Divination it only distorts the act and in truly asking oneself...just how accurate am i in using this "mode" when inquiring into the accuracy of external circumstances...i can now understand why none of the Yi masters in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China use the Yijing approach (that is consulting the book by rote and finding meaning in Judgements and line texts and forcefully creating meanings that attempt to fit the external circumstance of the subject/client) for their primary method of accurately Divining external circumstances in the last 700 years.

The times demand a book of wisdom and so the Yi has been forced into one. But hidden beneath is a wealth of hidden knowledge that bridges the gap between man and the world.

"Discard what is useless and keep what is useful."

No Judgements, no line text, no line phrasing, no pontifications, no interpretations, no confusion, only appreciation of the many different Yi's.

Firstly here's Steve Marshall's excellent "Mandate of Heaven" book for free in PDF on his most peruse-worthy website.

Here's a review by via IChing with Clarity:

>Tradition says King Wen and his family wrote the Zhouyi. Those rediscovering the roots of the Yi have tended to leave this tradition out of the equation altogether, as if their work superseded it. Meanwhile traditionalists have ‘kept the faith’ and not taken too much notice of historical discoveries about the text. S.J. Marshall’s book bridges the divide. It is a compilation of original research and thought, discovering historical references ‘hidden in plain view’ within the text itself.

>In fact, Wen and his son, King Wu, are historical characters as well as legendary ones: Wu did overthrow the Shang dynasty in about 1000BC, at the time when the Zhouyi was being composed. Marshall’s essays interweave the story of this conquest with the almost equally exciting story of how he discovered references to it in the Zhouyi. (Practically my only criticism of this book is in that ‘almost’. I didn’t feel I needed to know the precise wording of the message he left on an internet bulletin board when researching eclipses.)

>Most of the essays are based on the lines and judgements of specific hexagrams. Most of the book is taken up with a discussion of Hexagram 55, Abundance: the name of the hexagram, Feng, is the name of a garrison city, and Marshall maintains that it is the record of an actual eclipse that was visible there on June 20th 1070BC. This, he feels, was the omen that transferred the mandate of heaven from the Shang to the Zhou, and he offers new ideas and translations for every line of the hexagram. (While in fact the omen this hexagram describes seem to be sunspots, not an eclipse at all – see Pankenier’s unflattering review of the book – this doesn’t alter the fact that the hexagram shares its name with the city and its themes reflect what happened there.)

>These are remarkable discoveries in themselves, but there is much more to the book, including thoughts on Hexagrams 18 (divining the source of an illness), 1 (calling the rain dragon) – and 43, 44, 53, 7, 4… The highlight for me, though, was his account of the original meaning of the title itself, Yi, as the sun breaking out from behind clouds.

>Marshall’s imagination and enthusiasm, as much as his scrupulous researches, challenge conventional thought on the I Ching from both sides of the history/tradition divide. It is a vivid, direct stimulus for anyone interested in working with the I Ching. This research has transformed my understanding of several hexagrams and influenced many subsequent translations, including mine, Karcher’s Total I Ching and Freeman Crouch’s Chameleon Book.

Extra Resources:

- 'The Mandate of Heaven' and the value of history in the Zhouyi

Hi r/iching, I've been studying I Ching for a few years. I ended up building this terminal app that has replaced my coin tossing sessions. I have been using it for a few months, and it speaks true. Hence, I feel I'm ready to share it with you.

The Terminal

A terminal app sounds maximally technical, but it's quite the opposite of a modern app: no accounts, no notifications, and no internet. Your casts live in a file on your own machine. For me, the terminal choice goes perfectly with the spirit of the Tao.

Keeping the magic

The magic of the 易 lies in the ritualistic container of casting. Therefore, it is the part I spent most my time on. Most recently, I built the manual coin toss I'm showing in the video. I'm continuously striving to provide the optimal feeling for this process, as limiting as the terminal may be.

Grounded in the moment

The randomness comes from your machine's entropy pool: thermal noise, hardware timing, the same kind of unpredictability that physical coins borrowed from the environment, immediate to the moment. This is paramount - without it I wouldn't even be attempting building this. I spent a few months validating whether this can carry my I-chingistic projection before sharing with anyone else. It did.

In my experience, this has produced uncanny synchronicities as if I cast physical coins.

Misc

The dictionary provides readings of changing lines, and derived hexagrams which I think are underrated. It comes with commentaries in 大象傳 / 彖傳 alongside English translations, and Wilhelm-inspired notes for easy reading. No AI overlay. It also has settings for glyph font, animations.

If you are interested, it is open source:

https://github.com/pro-vi/iching

Against the rule

I have to admit I just saw the sub rule after writing and posting this. However, I think my intention is different from those that the rule is trying to forbid. There is no monetary incentive. No LLM involved. I more so hope this can become a discussion on how an ultimate I Ching experience can be on a machine, and less like I'm trying to promote something.

Therefore, ideas are welcome. And I wish this post gets to live. I'm hoping to keep building this into one of, if not the best digital I Ching tool out there.

I did this to pass the time, and I thought that maybe someone else might be interested in looking at it. I tried to see whether there is rhyme or reason in the King Wen sequence based on the structure of the paired hexagrams. Though some patterns or semblances thereof did form, the result was quite inconclusive.

Edit: It seems I missed a marking for 3 yin & yang lines in the 59/60 pair. Sorry!

Hello friends!

This is a reading from April 23rd that I decided to reflect and write on today. It started as a I Ching reading then I decided to pull some tarot cards as well for the 2nd half. For my reference book I used Huang’s the Complete I Ching.

The main inquiry was “what happens when I focus my attention on my self and my work?”

The primary gua, using a coin method, was 25 - Wu Wang - Without Falsehood. I see that as a reminder for operating with integrity and honesty, my renewed focus on my own work enables it to be a vehicle for success. Be in the natural state of an individual. Allow my business to be an authentic reflection of me and my values.

I have been very community focused the last few years, putting energy out into the world. I’ve been mindfully wanting to shift that back inwards, towards myself and my own business, to see what may grow from that.

So for the second gua I decided to look at the transformed gua, the 6th line was moving Yang and so 25 turned into 17 - Sui - Following. According with, moving with delight, forward with joy. To lead, learn to be led. How can one influence others to follow? Accompanying amiably, sublimely prosperous and smooth.

(((An aside. Funny I had previously pulled a 25 - Wu Wang in another reading from April 17th, in the 3rd pic. (The intention was “Be in balance with the Tao”). Very auspicious to see 25 pop up again so soon in another reading! The number 17 popping up in the new reading as a gua made me laugh. I’m curious what others interpret from drawing the same initial gua in different readings on different days)))

Back to the main reading! At this point in the reading with 25 having popped up again, I decided to pivot and pull some tarot cards, which is my main practice. I’ve been branching out to I Ching and wanted to see what came from combing them.

First card pulled was VII - The Chariot - representing individual drive and ambition, force of will, reaching goals through self-discipline and focused determination. I am reminded that I am in control of my surrounding, reigning in opposing forces to decide my direction.

The second card pulled was the Ace of Swords - mental strength and courage, independent mind, strategic thinking. Intellectual enthusiasm, a new mental conquest to work on my dharma. Cutting through cloudy thoughts of doubt, ambiguity, and seeing things clearly. I can use strong, honest, clear communication to attain my goals and grow my business.

All in all, a wonderful reading that resonated through me, both Yi and the tarot read me like a book and captured where I was in time and place. I feel supported and guided, more so now reflecting on the reading a couple weeks later.

I’m so grateful to have these tools to use in my practice, they truly connect me to the Tao and my higher powers. Thank you for reading! I’m making efforts to share my practice more and how I interpret these divinations, integrating them into daily life through practical action.