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26

A baton being passed from one hand to the next

Book of stories: what follows

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Book of Stories

A few posts ago, I tried to list all Yi’s ways of telling stories:

  • those little one-line vignettes
  • allusions to the culture’s big stories – both history and myth
  • the individual steps of the Sequence of Hexagrams (‘Here’s how you reach this place.’)
  • the huge narrative arcs of the Sequence – ‘you are here’ on the grand scale
  • multiple moving line readings that unfold one line at a time
  • the ‘nuclear story’ within each hexagram
  • the stories told through the connections between readings

So I’ve written about the vignettes and the mythical allusions, and now we come to individual steps through the Sequence.

Hexagram 26: Great Taming

Hexagrams 9 and 26 are ‘Small Taming’ and ‘Great Taming’ – the same activity on a different scale. That activity is xu, 畜: rearing livestock, and farming in general. (Stephen Field actually translates these two hexagrams as ‘Lesser Stock’ – mostly goats – and ‘Greater Stock’, namely the horses, cattle and pigs… Read more »Hexagram 26: Great Taming

Theme and variations

From its first appearance in the first words of the Yi, the creative flow through the four characters yuan heng li zhen is tangible. Its power is felt in the other five hexagrams with the whole, uninterrupted formula. But the natural cohesion of the four-word formula can also be felt… Read more »Theme and variations

Casting the Vessel – so…?

This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Casting the Vessel

… what does it mean for readings? That’s what an aggravatingly clear-sighted friend asked when I started enthusing at her about the beautiful ‘casting’ structure between hexagrams 3 and 50. And I suppose it’s not an unreasonable question… 😉 Maybe one day it’ll mean I routinely consider the matching hexagram… Read more »Casting the Vessel – so…?

Casting the Vessel

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Casting the Vessel

Warning: this post is pure, unadulterated gleeful Yeekery. I’ve been reading about how the ancient Chinese bronze vessels were made. Here’s a fascinating pdf on the subject (right click and choose ‘save as’ to download), with images of the finished vessels and also the moulds used in the casting, and… Read more »Casting the Vessel

Hexagram 26, intention and space

This post is such an agglomeration of things it’s not really title-able.  How about  ‘Complementary hexagrams, 26 and 45 in particular, and intention, and the usual brilliance of Jen Louden or What happens if you read everything with hexagram eyes’? No? Anyway… it starts – before that 61-to-29 reading persuaded… Read more »Hexagram 26, intention and space

Introducing James Warlock

Every time I mentioned some new aspect of the Festival of Change to a certain friend and mentoring client, she’d tell me I really needed to talk to James about that. Looking at his various websites, I could see what she meant – lots of breadth there, signs of a… Read more »Introducing James Warlock