The words and the magic

The Yi is an oracle; it speaks. (The word ‘oracle’ has its roots in the Latin orare, to speak, and oraculum, the name of the priest/ess who gave voice to the god.) Other oracles people use now, like tarot, have interpreters to speak their meanings, but Yi is unique: it has its own words and speaks in its own voice.

I think this is why we experience Yi as a person. We – humans and oracle alike – communicate in both body language, pictures and words. Our inner life, too, is woven from physical existence, mental imagery, and inner monologue. If you can think and hold a conversation, you can talk with Yi.

What should I do? Retreat.

How to move on? Release.

I once had a reading – I forget the question I asked – answered with Hexagram 5, Waiting, changing to Hexagram 20, Seeing. ‘Wait,’ said Yi, ‘and See’ – as clearly as any human interlocutor.

And more than one person has recorded their first experience with the Yijing – peppering it with questions, asking the same one again to test if they would get the same answer – and suddenly finding themselves in the middle of a real conversation as the words of Hexagram 4 leap off the page at them:

“It is not I who seek the young fool;
The young fool seeks me.
At the first oracle I inform him.
If he asks two or three times, it is importunity.
If he importunes, I give him no information.”

(Wilhelm/Baynes translation)

Of course we know that Hexagram 4 doesn’t always, only mean you’re asking the oracle too many questions, but…

The Yi’s words are what makes it so approachable; they’re how we first form a relationship with it. This is especially true for absolute beginners – I’ve found the oracle will often speak most directly and clearly to a complete novice, and then call for a bit more thought as you grow in experience.

For an experienced user, the words become important as a focal point, something that keeps you from getting lost in the depths of the reading. The nuclear story says this and the complement says that and the baoti trigrams say something else… and interpretation starts disappearing up its own analysis, with the whole thing looking more like a puzzle to solve than a reading. All this stuff is here to help deepen our understanding of the answer. And what’s the answer? What it says.

An example from a podcast episode – I asked about quitting a volunteer role and received Hexagram 32 line 3 –

‘Not lasting in your character,
Maybe accepting a shameful gift.
Constancy: shame’

And that was me cut down to size, by what Yi said.

In case it isn’t already obvious, this isn’t to say that the text is ‘better than’ the structure, or to be used instead of it. No-one ever suggested that. You do occasionally find people suggesting that the structure’s more important than the text, and you can do readings without the text. And you can receive something of value from the Yi without its text, just as you can receive something with no awareness of the structure, because the universe is alive and communicative – though I’m not sure that either counts as a Yijing reading.

But really, any kind of ‘text vs structure’ argument about the Yi is a straw man, a windmill to tilt at – poppycock, piffle, twaddle, nonsense of the first order. It makes about as much sense as saying that ‘body language is important, so we shouldn’t talk’ or ‘words are important, so we should only communicate by text message.’ And post-pandemic, we all know that being physically present matters. The hexagrams are the oracle’s physical presence. (And if this makes no sense to you, I strongly recommend using three coins, pencil and paper for your next reading.)

Reading the words alone reduces the Yi to a needlessly complicated kind of bibliomancy, making it strangely two-dimensional and disembodied – the ‘communication by text message only’ approach. It’s also how people get caught on single phrases of translation or – worse – commentary, which can be misleading, and how they get confused by apparent ‘contradictions’ within readings: it’s usually the reading’s structure that creates its ‘if… then…‘ logic.

You might think looking at structure without the original text – the ‘communication by interpretive dance only’ approach… – would just be analytical and dry, which it can be. Yet it can also be oddly vague and subjective, lacking the power the words have to compel you to see things differently. I don’t think I could be made to feel ashamed of myself, as I was by that 32.3 reading I mentioned – or seen and comforted, or shocked, or reassured, or disconcerted, or any of the myriad changes readings have created in me over the years – by a structural analysis of trigram relationships.

So yes… different shades of twaddle. The magic of Yi, the reason we’re all still talking with it now, lies in the ways its words and structures weave and work together.

There is no reading that isn’t an example of this – and it’s something I try to point to on this blog as much as I can, for instance in this series about hidden gems, or this one about two-line changes, or this dive into the ditch of Hexagram 4.

Still… imagine for a moment you’d asked for advice and received Hexagram 59, Dispersing, with the third line changing:

‘Dispersing your self
Without regrets.’

‘Disperse your self’ – what a thought! And look at the trigram picture: line 3 is the upper surface of the inner trigram kan, the stream, where it’s touched by the upper trigram xun, wind – where the water, the inner emotional flow, begins to evaporate into open air.

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