Reviews

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… Read more »Richard Kunst’s Yijing dissertation