Hilary Barrett, I Ching

As you can tell from the title of Freeman’s latest blog post – Chameleon Book Chronicles: A Truly Awful Book? – he’s feeling glum about low sales of his I Ching translation. Actually, we should all feel glum about low sales of his book, as it’s remarkably good one. I wrote about it once here, [...]

Mark McElroy, of tarottools.com, has kindly sent me the proofs of his upcoming book, I Ching for Beginners. And as beginners’ books go, it’s pretty good, with some useful, thought-provoking ways of approaching the hexagrams. I’ll review it later on its own merits – but first, I need to get this rant out of my system. Because Mark swells the growing numbers of ‘modernisers’ and ‘simplifiers’ who carefully remove all the oracle’s imagery.

The Original I Ching Oracle is Ritsema’s revised version of the Eranos Yijing, first published in 1994 with Stephen Karcher, as ‘I Ching, the Classic Chinese Oracle of Change, the First Complete Translation with Concordance.’ I owe a huge amount to that book: it first gave me license to absorb the words, internalise a reading, without being told what it meant or what to do. Without that initial freedom, I doubt I would ever have been drawn to the Yi at all. So I really have Ritsema and Karcher to thank for this website and my work.

I’ve finally bought myself a copy of Richard Kunst’s 1985 dissertation, The Original Yijing: a text, phonetic transcription, and indexes, with sample glosses, and I’ve been seizing every spare moment to read it. I wish I’d got it years ago! Anyone with a strong interest in the early Yi will find this utterly fascinating. Richard [...]

Good news! When I reviewed Jane Schorre and Carrin Dunne’s Yijing Wondering and Wandering in issues 71 and 72 of the newsletter, it was only available from Amazon in the USA and Canada. Now you can get it direct from Amazon UK without the extra postage costs and delivery time. If you have any interest [...]

Yijing Dao – ‘The Original I Ching Oracle’ by Rudolf Ritsema and Shantena Augusto Sabbadini Steve Marshall has reviewed the ‘new’ Yijing from Rudolf Ritsema, which is a revised version of the original Eranos I Ching, the Ritsema/Karcher with concordance. (To be published on April 30th, I think, so I expect someone sent Steve a [...]

Chameleon Book – a new translation of the Zhouyi by Freeman Crouch.

From the downloadable pdf sample (introduction, appendices, five hexagrams), this looks fresh, bright and intelligent. There are very useful suggestions for divination and imagining yourself into the imagery. (Eg ‘you are soil to be worked, you are a mare’ or ‘seeing the self as a kingdom’.)