The Astrology Podcast
Transcript of Episode 459, titled:
The I Ching and Astrology
With Chris Brennan and Benebell Wen
Episode originally released on August 22, 2024
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Note: This is a transcript of a spoken word podcast. If possible, we encourage you to listen to the audio or video version, since they include inflections that may not translate well when written out. Our transcripts are created by human transcribers, and the text may contain errors and differences from the spoken audio. If you find any errors then please send them to us by email: theastrologypodcast@gmail.com
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Transcribed by Teresa “Peri” Lardo
Transcription released September 26, 2024
Copyright © 2024 TheAstrologyPodcast.com
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CHRIS BRENNAN: Hey, my name is Chris Brennan, and you’re listening to The Astrology Podcast. Joining me today is Benebell Wen, and we’re gonna be talking about the I Ching, which is a system of divination. So hey, thanks for joining me today.
BENEBELL WEN: Thank you, Chris. Nice to have this chance to talk to you.
CB: Yeah. I’m a big fan of your work in different forms of divination, including tarot, the I Ching, and all these different systems, and I appreciate the approach that you bring to it, which is both scholarly but also has like, a mystical tend to it in terms of the topic of divination. And you just published this book last year on the I Ching, which is this huge book where you bring sort of the same comprehensiveness that I know you’ve brought to tarot to that area. So yeah, so I wanted to talk about that today and also talk about some connections in terms of astrology and what we can learn from the I Ching that might be applicable as a system of divination that’s also applicable to astrology. I had previously done a similar episode with T. Susan Chang about tarot and astrology and some of the crossovers or some of the things that we could learn from both, so I thought it would be interesting to do a similar discussion with you today regarding this.
BW: And that’s a topic I’m very interested in, so I’m glad to have the opportunity to talk about this.
CB: Awesome. So let’s start with square one. What is the I Ching?
BW: What is the I Ching? I, lately, have been thinking of it as ancient Chinese generative AI, because it really is pretty much a computing system if you think about it. You start with the zeros and ones, a binary system of yin and yang, and then through programming code it’s thought of, even in ancient times, as some form of software that is generating things happening in the hardware. So for example, DNA has the same structure of the binary and it has the same structure of the hexagrams in the I Ching. And so you have this idea of DNA being the software that operates the hardware – hardware being the body – and in the same exact way, the I Ching, the 64 hexagrams that has very similar concepts to the codons of DNA, is the software that operates the physical universe. And so it’s 64 hexagrams that follow a sequential coding of yin and yang lines and how they change within the six tiers, and that in some way is believed to correspond to various aspects of the universe, both what you see in the sky and in terms of seasonal changes. So spacetime is governed by these 64 hexagrams. And if you can find a nonlinear way to access these 64 hexagrams, then you can almost divine or see things that seem to transcend spacetime.
CB: Okay, got it. So at its very core at a fundamental level, it’s breaking everything up into zero and one or into yin and yang or masculine and feminine or other binaries in the universe as a fundamental principle?
BW: That’s how I see it, for sure.
CB: Okay. And then from that, it can be divided into other numbers and eventually gets to 64 as sort of like, a basis for everything and a basis for describing all change that happens in the universe.
BW: If you pair the yin and yang lines into pairs, you get a four, so it becomes a quadrant, like a quadratic system, and a lot of times, people see the four as corresponding to the two equinoxes, two solstices, this idea of seeing the sky as a quadrant and then everything else kind of falls within that quadrant into either a square or a circle. So yes, it’s absolutely that. And then the two form threes, and then the trinities, if you do permutation, there’s eight of them. There’s eight combinations of the yin and yang lines into trinities. And then if you stack that, eight by eight is 64. So in terms of why it’s 64, it’s absolutely mathematics based. And in fact, it’s calculus based.
CB: I found this one stock photo, and you can tell me if this is accurate, but this kind of seems to describe part of what you’re talking about here, right, in terms of breaking it up from binaries into fours and then into eights?
BW: Yep, absolutely.
CB: Okay, brilliant. So and then eventually it gets to 64. So what are the 64 – so ultimately you end up with a system of 64 images or like, ideograms or how would you describe the hexagrams themselves?
BW: There’s 64 images or codes. So it’s a string of yin or yang combinations, and then you combine it into a grouping of six. And then kind of like HTML in a lot of ways. And then that six later on was attributed to idiograms in terms of words. So King Wen – if you believe in mythology, and if it’s not mythology, we don’t know who named it, right? But somebody named these 64 hexagrams with ideograms, and those ideograms also have meanings. And then we believe that the Duke of Zhou who was King Wen’s son then wrote line text to correspond with each of the lines of the – so there’s six lines, so I think it’s 384 or 381 total lines that he wrote line text for. And then so it depends on how you want to approach to I Ching. Do you wanna look at the six ideograms and scry into it for meaning – and that you would use astrology – or do you want to look at the line text and almost in a sense use it as a form of drawing lots plus bibliomancy?
CB: Got it. Okay. So you – and in terms of the history and origins, you alluded to the origins are kind of mysterious, but it dates back to some period at least around 1000 BCE in terms of —
BW: 1046 BCE, yeah.
CB: — 1046, and that was with a legendary king who is said to have first gotten together the 64 hexagrams.
BW: Yeah. King Wen was imprisoned by the then incumbent King Zhou of the Shang dynasty. And while imprisoned, he used yarrow stalks which were like, basically hay that was on the prison cells or so goes the mythology, and used that to divine using Fuxi, which is the eight trigrams of Fuxi. He stacked that with the trigram system that he developed himself, and then to that using a Lo Shu Magic Square he believed that eight by eight equals 64. And then he used that to predict the fall of the Shang dynasty and the rise of the Zhou dynasty. So a lot of times, they attribute the I Ching with the concept of the mandate of heaven. So when you use the I Ching, it’s about understanding the mandate of heaven; what is the destiny preordained to you by heaven?
CB: Got it. And the eight initial trigrams, those are connected with the elements, right?
BW: Right. So Fuxi came up with that, and one, I think it’s pretty well accepted, is the idea that either Fuxi as a legendary figure or as a metaphor for our ancient forebears, they studied the movement of the stars, they studied the movement of the changing seasons. And so yin, of course, is coldness; yang lines are hotness. And so there’s a combination of cold versus hot and that they use that describe natural elements – for example, lake, mountain, earth, water, what’s not – and also in terms of what they saw in the sky was happening in the sky. And so what’s happening in the sky was the HaTu and Lo Shu magic squares, which is a way of observing movements of the Big Dipper and the Milky Way. And so those two combined, one set of trigrams representing the sky and one set of trigrams representing the earth together is how they move together is how we understand the movements of the universe.
CB: Okay. And are these eight accurate in terms of the elements associated with them?
BW: Yes.
CB: Okay. So the core elements in this system are heaven, water, mountain, thunder, wind, fire, earth, and lake?
BW: That’s correct.
CB: Got it. Okay. So those are eight like, fundamental principles, and then those get multiplied by eight.
BW: Right. And I think of this as a periodic table because these represent things that you’re seeing or observing in the physical world, whereas the – you know how a lot of times you hear the five in Chinese metaphysics and alchemy being described as elements. So I think of in terms of when you look at Western esotericism and even how you frame elements – the four fire, water, air, and earth – in Western astrology, I think of that more as like you said elements – something that corresponds directly with a physical state or a physical condition. And so that I think of more as corresponding with the eight trigrams. It’s very similar in terms of the elemental dignities that you would use. So you would think about element dignities with the eight trigrams. Whereas the wuxing, they’re representing changes. Like, how do the eight trigrams change into each other? How does heaven become earth? How does earth become lake? How does lake become mountain? And so on, that is defined by the wuxing, the five changing phases.
CB: Right, because and ultimately the hexagram is two of these elemental trigrams stacked on top of one another, so it’s like heaven and earth or wind and fire, for example, so that it’s showing some sort of or implying some element of motion when you’re putting those elemental properties together.
BW: Right. So you know how the periodic table, you have the elements. So you know, heaven is one element, and then let’s say it’s earth over heaven. So the one it’s changing into is earth, for example. So earth would be related to the wuxing earth, and then heaven is related to metal. So the theory behind that is that the driving force of metal paired with the driving force of earth creates this specific hexagram of earth over heaven. And so those – yeah, it is kind of the idea of periodic table that you’re looking at the elements and how they combine, that alchemy, and also the idea of a chi or forces that’s underlying the physical elements that is driving how the elements combine. So you have to look at both at the same time.
CB: Got it. Okay. And for those listening to the audio version, basically, a hexagram is six lines, essentially; it’s six lines, and the line is either broken or unbroken.
BW: That’s correct.
CB: Okay. So in terms of that and going back to the history, so early on around 1000 BCE in China, the concept of the 64 hexagrams is developed. But then there’s a successive stage of adding some interpretations and commentaries to it over the next several hundred years, right?
BW: Yeah, so the 10 wings are what we pretty much use to interpret what these otherwise pretty esoteric, nondescript broken lines and solid line combinations how you interpret that, how you scry into that. What is the sort of consensus reality for what each of these hexagrams means? The 10 wings was appended to the 64 hexagrams, and in terms of mythology, we attribute it to Confucious and say that Confucious wrote it. But more likely it was probably over centuries of time, various Confucious scholars must have added their input to the commentaries, and at some point – probably the Han dynasty – that’s when you really start to see a standardization, and said, “Okay, this is the received text; this is the dominant.” So that’s probably realistically more likely what happened. But yeah, you do have the 10 wings, and we use that to say, “Oh, this is how you use the yarrow stalk to do the divination, and this what heaven means, this is what lake means, this is what this hexagram means,” and that comes from how we consult the 10 wings.
CB: Got it. And you wrote that the system was canonized in 136 BCE, which meant that it was – the I Ching as a book and a compilation of what it had become became standardized, but also became part of a series of like, five texts which were considered like, core classics, right?
BW: Five books, yeah, the five classics. So Confucious at the time felt like his society was very corrupt, and he wanted to go back to good old days of the ancients, and so he believed the good old days of the ancients one of the ways that you could really reflect and understand the virtues of our ancients who had more integrity and virtue than we did at his time was the I Ching. I can’t remember off the top of my – like, Book of Documents, Books of Songs, and et cetera, but basically it also coincides with the idea of the five subjects that you have to study as a scholar. You know, one is rhetoric, one is politics, one is history, and then I Ching – divination – is among those five standardized topics that a scholar must learn in order to pass the imperial exams.
CB: Interesting; okay. Right, and you said at one point in Chinese history in general that writing a sort of like, commentary on the I Ching became almost like a literary exercise that many intellectuals would engage in at certain points in their career.
BW: Absolutely. And there were like, whole out scholarly wars. You had, you know, you had different scholars that would fight each other about how best to interpret the I Ching or what it meant. And of course, you had one school of thought rise, and then another school of thought would have to rival and counter that and say they were absolutely wrong. So you had these really robust discourse around the I Ching, which is why I think it’s so interesting, because you do get so many different voices.
The one thing that I often see lost in the translation to the west is that you have this one dominant voice, likely from the Qing dynasty, and that’s the last dynasty of China. That sort of became sort of crystallized in the west, and that is the only way that we kind of see how the I Ching should be interpreted, and we forget that there’s actually a real diversity of how to interpret and how to approach the I Ching. And it’s really really hard to, you know, say that there’s a one true way.
CB: And when was that dynasty that established the main accepted text?
BW: Oh, I don’t think they accepted it; I think it’s more – my belief is Wilhelm spoke to one practitioner, and then that practitioner had a very specific school of thought that was likely popularized during the Qing dynasty, which was —
CB: Okay.
BW: — when he was in China. And then he took that methodology, that system of thought, that approach, that interpretation, translated it first in German then later on to English, and then that became canonized in the west, and that sort of is the way that we interpret I Ching today in the west. Because everyone always goes back to just the Wilhelm, whereas that is only one of multiple myriad ways to interpret the I Ching. In terms of when it was canonized, hard to say. I think scholars will point it to the Han dynasty; that’s 200 BCE – 200 AD roughly ballpark, around then is when I think, because it was the golden age of China. They really started to think about all of these different schools of thought and say, well, this is a very – there’s so many decentralized schools of thought; let’s start standardizing things. And so that’s when you see the standardization of a lot of different methodologies. And so that’s probably when you get the received text of the I Ching, but if you speak to practitioners and occultists and mystics, they will of course say it was received by King Wen and by virtue of the mandate of heaven, the one true version from 1046 BCE was preserved down the line to us today, because that was the destined version to be received.
CB: Right. We have a similar tension in the astrological tradition with early texts that were supposedly part of a revealed tradition to revealed like, Hermetic scholars and that it was a source of like, revelation, as opposed to a tension of debates about to what extent it was developed empirically or scientifically or through observation and things like that.
BW: Absolutely. So if you speak to somebody who’s more of an empiricist, then there really is no verifiable proof that the received version remained preserved from the Zhou dynasty all the way to now. But we do have a lot of documentation that at the very least it preserved in tandem, this “received” version, was preserved from the Han dynasty.
CB: It’s interesting that you mention the Han dynasty, because I had heard – I don’t know a lot about Chinese astrology, but one of the things that I had learned at one point was that it seems like a lot of their astrology was developed around that period or that there was some very important turning points and developments in astrology during the Han dynasty. And I always thought that was interesting just because from what I know historically, the Han dynasty roughly coincides also with the Hellenistic period, which is when western astrology really came together into the system that we know today. So I thought it was cool that if there were major developments in terms of astrology taking place independently in like, two different parts of the world around let’s say like, 200 BCE or so.
BW: Yeah. I don’t know if there’s any connection between Hellenistic astrological developments and then the developments of indigenous Chinese astrology during the Han dynasty. But it is interesting how similar they are. But then I also remember hearing that Taoism developed around the same time as Stoicism, and often people make that – they draw that connection, how the two philosophies have a lot in common. Again, I don’t know if there was ever any actual crossing of wires or if it’s just something really interesting that we’ll never be able to explain. But during the Han dynasty, you had Sima Qian and some of the – certain writers who were really interested in astronomy and astrology. And then also, was it the development of astronomy or the development of astrology is also kind of interesting, because I think we thought of astrology as a science. So the way you think of astronomy today is how during the Han dynasty they thought of what we now would consider astrology. Like, it was just taken as well, obviously what’s happening in the skies has to do with statecraft, it has to do with the rise and fall of kingdoms, obviously, right? And so it was kind of sort of taken for granted.
But at the time, that was when you started seeing, for example, texts in the Taoism canon that talk about 12 houses. And then they have a whole listing of different types of stars that will cycle through these 12 houses and how to interpret them. And so you start seeing texts like that during the Han dynasty.
CB: Interesting. Yeah. Okay, yeah, so there was also a connection with astrology being connected partially with mundane astrology but there being an official governmental connection with it so that it was state-supported in some way. And that was something that I was really interested in recently, because I was doing a lot of research on comets. But in the west, the tradition of documenting comets is not as good, and it turns out it was documented much better in China for many, many centuries. They had extensive historical records and documentations of what would happen with a comet and what would happen on earth, whereas in the west, it seemed like because of some of Aristotle’s what turned out to be false theories about what comets are and that they were just atmospheric phenomenon that may have led western people astray in terms of not documenting them as well as they could have for many centuries.
BW: Yeah. I don’t know a whole lot about that besides the lay understanding of comets from an astrological perspective as somebody interested in mysticism would understand. But to what I do know, yeah, absolutely. I think we do know from history that over all of the dynasties, there was always a court astrologer, a court astronomer, and also when you look at every single one of the biggest names, when you look at all the great alchemists and all the great scholars, they were all court officials. To be a court official, you had to be appointed by the imperial palace. And so these court officials, appointed into political positions, into aristocracy and bureaucracy by the imperial palace, almost all of them were alchemists and astronomers. And so in that sense, I would say it was state-sponsored. And also a lot of the times, the ability to write these books and do the study was, of course, funded by the state.
CB: Right, that makes sense. So in terms of that and in terms of the I Ching, does astrology show up in the I Ching, or what connections or parallels might we draw between the I Ching and the indigenous astrology of China?
BW: So Jing Fang was – 78 BCE – he was the one who reconciled. Because he was an astronomer, astrologer, again, depending on how you want to interpret that. But he was an astronomer/astrologer, he was also a mathematician, he was a musician, and that comes into play in a lot of ways, and he was an I Ching scholar. And so he is credited, at least, for synthesizing all of these different schools into one, and he was the one who said, absolutely, everything that’s – the movement of the stars are captured in the system of the I Ching. But he also didn’t say it as if it was a novel discovery of his; he was – when you read the texts that were written by Jing Fang, he really speaks of it as if he’s echoing something that is established and presumed by anybody of his day. So it probably pre-dated his time; he never thought of it as him coming up with the idea. But if you look at the hexagrams themselves, it’s well-established, and I don’t know how far back it goes, but most practitioners understand certain hexagrams correspond with certain time periods. For example, the seasons. So you are going to have hexagram one, which is all of the yang lines, that is going to be the summer solstice. Hexagram two, that’s all of the yin lines; that’s going to be the winter solstice. And then the half-half where it’s three-three, you know, the balance of the three yin lines versus the yang, that’s the autumn equinox and the spring equinox, and they flip between those two. And then once you set those quadrants, which I think of similar to the way you do the quadrants for the point of Aries, Libra, you know, Cancer, and Capricorn – the idea in eastern astrology is very similar. And then once you set the quadrants and you look at everything else around it. So to that extent, absolutely. The movement of the Sun and the Moon, which correspond with the seasons, is absolutely documented in the I Ching. And then this belief that the lines themselves represent the rise and fall of light and dark, which coincide with the rise and fall of light and dark, warm and cool when it comes to these seasons.
CB: Got it. Okay. So there’s elemental and like, seasonal elements that are kind of built into it, which then takes us back to some basic like, universal principles that astrology shares in common.
BW: I think they’re hand in hand, though, so I think the way I’ve always conceptualized it is the seasons are astrology. Because there’s this idea of when you look at the 10 heavenly stems and the 12 earthly branches, those represent seasons. They represent a different season. The 24 solar terms with the original 24 seasons of the Chinese calendar coincided with what was happening in the sky. So they would observe the Big Dipper. And for example, the Lo Shu magic square, which is the foundation of the I Ching and the eight trigrams, there’s this idea of well, where was Mercury? Where is Mercury during different times of the year? Where is Venus during different times of the year? And they noticed that it kind of remains the same in a way, like it kind of cycles. And so with cycles, they believe, in coincidence with whether it was hot or cold, whether it was snowing or whether it was raining, and so that’s where they got the idea of the seasons. So to me, astrology and seasons go together.
CB: Yeah, for sure, and that goes back very far and even, you know, Stonehenge is set up in order to track the solstices and equinoxes. So there’s some shared thing in like, many different areas of that being core, and that’s what at the center of the tropical zodiac is that relating things back to the equinoxes and the solstices and the seasons.
BW: Yeah. I think so.
CB: Yeah. Okay. Brilliant. So as a system of divination, this originated – it was probably not the first system of divination that was used in China, and there were probably other systems of divination as well, right?
BW: You mean the I Ching?
CB: Yeah.
BW: I think people say the I Ching is the oldest system of divination in China.
CB: Okay.
BW: And it is thought of as the oldest system. During the Zhou dynasty, there were certain texts during the Zhou dynasty that talked about the I Ching in tandem with [speaking Chinese] and Guicang, two other forms of divination that are now lost to us, and we don’t know what those are. Guicang – return of the hidden – is from, if we believe Sui dynasty texts, which is much, much later in time – 600 AD – it claims that Guicang, this form of divination that was in lockstep with the I Ching during the Zhou dynasty, was again a form of 64 hexagrams. And so it was this idea of 64 hexagrams, but a different order and a totally different system from the I Ching 64 hexagrams that we know and have received today. And there’s another one, the [speaking Chinese], which we just totally know nothing about. There’s a lot of theories and it’s great for conspiracy theorists, but technically we don’t know what that form of divination is. But those three are the oldest if the texts from the Zhou dynasty can be believed, but the only one we have more complete records of today is the I Ching.
CB: Got it. Okay. So that’s the oldest, potentially, and also the most widespread today, I would assume, right?
BW: When you say “most widespread today” in 2024, that’s interesting, because I think mainland China went through a lot of interesting political events that I think now make it so that the I Ching is not as well known and might arguably be obscure within mainland China. But in Hong Kong and Taiwan, especially among fortune tellers, and even as you go into southeast Asia into the Chinese diasporas in southeast Asia, then absolutely I Ching is one of the most popular forms of divination among, you know, fortune tellers and people who are interested in eastern occultism. But if you’re like, boots on the ground, like, real world, if you are actually in China and you walk around and ask everyday people in Beijing or Shanghai, “What do you know about the I Ching?” Probably not a lot.
CB: Okay. Interesting. Are there other forms of divination that are used, or is it that divination itself has become frowned upon to some extent?
BW: I know in southern China, which the Fujian and the Canton regions, which has retained a lot of the same cultures that you’ll find in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, they have a very vibrant occult scene, as I would like to say. I think if you’re there what I found to be the most popular forms of divination was spirit mediums who channel, and it’s almost like automatic writing, where there’s a whole ritual, whole ceremony, that they need to do, a whole pomp and circumstance where they change or alter their state of consciousness. And either being possessed by a particular god or goddess then channel the answers from the god or goddess in response to whatever question has been presented to that spirit medium. So from what I actually witnessed with my two eyes, that seems to be the most popular form. All forms of astrology – Zi Wei Dou Shu, Purple Astrology, Ba-Zi, Four Pillars of Destiny, those forms of astrology are also really, really popular and a lot more popular as a divination system, because there’s many ways to approach Four Pillars and Purple Star Astrology, but used from the perspective of divination is probably a lot more popular than the I Ching.
CB: Got it. And you said that there’s three main systems of Chinese astrology, right?
BW: I think so. That’s what I would say. One is lunar mansions, and I’m happy to talk about that. Ba-Zi, Four Pillars of Destiny, and then Purple Star Astrology – though “star” should probably be plural – Purple Stars Astrology. So those are the three that you’re gonna see the most of today.
CB: Got it. Okay. So the first one is based on the lunar mansions, the 28 days of the lunar path.
BW: Yeah. So if you look at the sky, the Moon sort of kind of moves and changes into a different position in a cycle of 28 days. And on the 28th day, it kind of goes back to the original position it was on day one, and so from that, they chart basically kind of like whole signs in a way of conceptualizing it. So they see, okay, the Moon moves like this during 28 days – boom, plug in a 28 house cycle or square in the sky. And it’s sort of just set there as a form of framework that artificially is imposed onto the sky. But it’s not artificial because it’s based on the Moon, but the reason I say “artificial” is because then you look at where the five – you know, when we say the five planets, that’s Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn – where are they located within these 28, along with all of the other constellations? And that’s also where essential dignities come into play. And then you use that to do a chart reading.
CB: Got it, okay. So it’s similar to like, the nakshatras of Indian astrology that’s 27 or 28 mansions of the Moon.
BW: That’s probably where it came from. I mean, I think that where we got 28 Chinese lunar mansion astrology probably came from India and Vedic astrology. I don’t know if that’s true, but it just seems like the natural course of how the migration of that idea must have happened.
CB: Sure. Yeah, I mean, I know in like, Tibet, for example, that their astrology seems like a mixture of like, Indian astrology and Chinese astrology to form this interesting thing. And so in looking at the history of astrology, any time you put two astrologers in the same room together they always start talking and their systems kind of like, rub off on each other eventually. So it’s always interesting to look at some of those different transmissions.
BW: Yeah, I think so.
CB: Okay. So that’s the lunar mansions. And then what’s the Four Pillars of Destiny?
BW: That one dates back to the Zhou dynasty, 1046 – well, maybe not 1046 BCE. 1046 BCE is the start of the Zhou dynasty, and then it goes for like, a really crazy long time. It’s like, one of the oldest, like, the longest enduring dynasties of Chinese history. But during that period, that’s where this idea of Ba-Zi, Four Pillars astrology, came from. But the idea itself of having 10 heavenly stems and 12 earthly branches predates that and is in the Shang dynasty before 1046 BCE. So the ancient Chinese calendar had 10 days, and the days that you’re observing – so the week is 10 days. And the 10 days of the week, one week is marked by the degree movements of the Sun in the sky, so it’s based on the solar path. And if you think about every week as 10 days, that’s a decan rule – that’s like, a decanate. So there’s this idea of 36 weeks. So that’s where the idea of 10 days in a week, and then 36 weeks in a calendar year came from in terms of ancient Chinese calendar systems. And then the 12 earthly branches correspond with what we – like, roughly 12 zodiac signs. This idea of the 12 in time. So the two paired together creates a system of 68, because if you pair the 10 and 12 and keep on creating the permutations, the total is 60, and so that becomes a cycle of 60 years in that calendar system. That’s called a lunar-solar astrology system. And that is the basis of the Four Pillars. And you use that, you sort of superimpose – you look at the 60 pairings on the Ascendant hour level. You look at it on the day level, the month level, and the year level, and insert that combination of what the pairings of the heavenly stem and the earthly branches in your, you know, day, month, year, and hour – that together is a form of reading and tells you something about your destiny.
CB: Got it. So is this the system that has the more well known association of a different animal totem with each year?
BW: Yes. Yeah, so the 12 earthly branches correspond with the 12 zodiac signs, which we use as the animals. And that’s where the calendar year comes from. And then also the 12 animals also correspond with the Ascendant hour, because there’s 12 Ascendant hours – two hours in each Ascendant hour. So that Ascendant is also used with the zodiac signs.
CB: Got it. Okay. And sometimes people will ask me, and I don’t know the answer to this, but because it’s one animal associated with each year and it’s like a 12-year cycle, sometimes western astrologers immediately jump to thinking of the planet Jupiter that has a 12-year orbital period and wondering if there’s a connection there, but I don’t know if it’s actually connected with that or if that’s just a coincidence.
BW: It is. So [speaking Chinese] is this idea of the orbital period of Jupiter – 12. Again, you know how you look at the Sun – when does it go back and return to that original position? When does the Moon go back and return to the original position? And then like, sort of subdividing equally those little mansions or houses or degrees or arcs that they create is significant in some way, and so absolutely the 12 zodiac signs, the 12 earthly branches is based on the orbital period of Jupiter.
CB: Got it. Okay. That’s really cool. And then finally, the third approach that you mentioned is Purple Stars Astrology?
BW: Yeah. So that one, there’s a lot of different systems under Purple Star Astrology. Zi Wei Dou Shu – so Zi Wei, just Purple Star or Purple Stars, is this idea of a set of stars in the sky or constellations that are the most important. So that’s the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco, maybe a couple of others; I’m not as familiar with Zi Wei Dou Shu. But there’s this idea of there’s a grouping of stars that are super important in terms of determining your destiny or whatnot. And then how you interpret that, there’s different systems that have arose around that. One is using a quadrant system, kind of like using the horoscope house – a horoscope of nine, and the nine sectors correspond with the Lo Shu magic square. And there’s another one that has a system of 12, so there’s two different types there. Either you use sort of a horoscope wheel or square of nine or a horoscope wheel/square of 12, and then you see where those constellations fall into the houses that you created, and that would be Purple Star Astrology.
CB: Got it. Okay. This might be connected with – I did a previous episode with Jeffrey Kotyk that was titled “The Transmission of Horoscopic Astrology to China and Japan” where he had done a PhD talking about some of the interchanges in terms of natal astrology between China and the west via like, Persian intermediaries, and that might be where some of that system is like, connected perhaps.
BW: I think so. There are a lot of theories and beliefs, especially among scholars, that there’s a lot of interchange happening probably through the Silk Road between Babylonian culture, Babylonian thought, and then what happened during the Shang and Zhou dynasties, the earliest dynasties of China that had the more sort of civilizations that really arose and started developing and inventing things coincides with the civilizations in Babylonia at the time. So there’s a lot of people talking about how there might be some crossover. When I was doing research on the I Ching, I think during the 18th and 19th centuries in the west, there was a popular belief that the I Ching in China actually came from Babylon. And so they were saying – if you look at Assyrian, they said, oh look, this looks exactly like Chinese writing, therefore, you know, the I Ching came from Assyria. So that was a popular belief in the west during the 18th and 19th centuries.
CB: Got it. But it’s not taken as seriously today since obviously that’s not, yeah, it’s not a one-to-one correspondence.
BW: Right. I mean, what’s interesting is you have the great flood. In the Chinese mythology, you have this great flood that wiped out the first iteration of human civilization and then human civilization had to rebuild itself after this great flood. And there’s sort of the pre-flood and the post-flood, and all this mythology happened around that, even the idea of Fuxi’s the eight trigrams happened after the great flood when human civilization had to rebuild itself, and that was one of the things that was invented or gifted and received by humanity from the great Fuxi. And so I think when you start having Christian missionaries coming into China, they see that and go, oh, that must be the biblical great flood, and so you see a lot of these ideas of where you’re trying to make one-to-one correspondences.
CB: Got it. Okay. So bringing things back to parallels in terms of astrology and the I Ching, one of the most fundamental ones that’s an easy comparison is just between the I Ching and like, horary astrology, which is probably the type of astrology today that’s the most clearly connected to or is usually viewed as a form of divination because you’re casting an astrological chart for the moment of a question, and you’re expecting that the alignment of the planets will tell you both the nature of the question as well as the answer to the question. And with the I Ching, you’re following something similar where you’re going under the assumption that the seemingly random toss of the coins or how you come up with the number system that it has a meaningful outcome for some reason due to some property of the universe that allows for that essentially, right?
BW: There’s a lot of different theories for how the I Ching works and which type of divination method you use. So the oldest divination method is yarrow stalk. Now, yarrow stalk has been used among Wu shamans for forms of divination and forms of ritual work for as long as since the Shang dynasty; that has been documented. So whether or not for in terms of before the I Ching or divination, yarrow stalk was considered a ritual tool. Like, it was part of what shamans would use in order for them to connect or communicate with heaven. So how they used it is lost in time; we don’t know. But then that same idea of using yarrow stalks in some form of a ritualistic method to connect heaven, earth, and humanity sort of was integrated and inherited by the I Ching. When you look at the yarrow stalk divination method, there’s this idea of having to put something down for heaven, put something down for earth, and then you as the practitioner connect heaven and earth, and then by doing some kind of a methodology, handling something, it’s almost like acupuncture. You’re having a nonlinear control over spacetime to then create this output. And so with that in mind, is that the same as horary astrology in the west?
CB: I mean, it does – when you said that being an intermediary between heaven and earth, it made me think of how Mercury is associated with astrology in ancient astrology, and Mercury is always the role of like, the translator and that you’re translating something of the sky and that it’s speaking to you and you’re relating that somehow to earthly concerns. So I don’t know like, broadly speaking maybe there’s a similarity, but I guess the main connection was just the notion of posing a question and having a question and a specific intent to get an answer to something and assuming a random allotment of something can give you an answer that’s not meaningless but quite the opposite, that it’s actually meaningful, whatever the chance allotment is. So there’s this element of chance, but also this element of almost like a sentience to the universe, that it speaks or talks to you for some reason.
BW: Yeah. I think the idea of the element of chance having meaning was more of an idea from the Han dynasty and afterward, and that was also when you see coinciding with the popularity of the coin toss method. So the coin toss method I think it does bank on this idea of randomness having meaning behind the randomness and whether or not it’s because it’s driven by the divine or whatnot, but yes, there’s this idea of randomness being the driving force. That I think is more in line with how I would perceive horary astrology, whereas in terms of yarrow stalk divination, it’s almost more like being able to enter a different state of consciousness that becomes part of the tao on a sort of, you know, software level. And so you leave your physical world to enter some sort of, you know, like, matrix, or some sort of on the binary code level. And on the binary code level, you’re actually navigating the software of the physical universe, and by navigating the software, the zeros and ones, you can pull information, bring it back to the physical world, and then interpret that in the physical world. So that’s how I would perceive yarrow stalk divination with the I Ching.
CB: So this actually connects back to like, a central thesis of your book and actually part of the subtitle, which is part of the extended title is Restoring the I Ching to its Shamanic Origin. So that element of the early origin of the I Ching and shamanism is really important to you, right?
BW: Yeah. And I think a lot of historians, especially in recent times, have talked about that as well. The shamanistic historical traditions of China is one of three of the most important aspects of the Chinese civilization today, the other one being the clan system, the idea of families and agricultural communities formed based on the clan system, family names. So that idea of family is as important in shamanistic historical traditions is as important as the idea of tribalism.
CB: What is shamanism in that context or how do you define it or how would you explain it in terms of what role it played in early Chinese culture?
BW: Yeah, if we wanna use sort of the word we use – Wu – right? And then how you translate wu is just a huge point of contention. I think because of the way today we use the loan word, shaman, the way the loan word of shaman is used today in popular understanding, it comes closest to what we thought of when we use the word “wu.” The idea of “wu” is somebody who was born with the gift of leaving the physical consciousness that we are all more comfortable being in and being able to be in a different state of consciousness. Today we might call that an altered state of consciousness you’re able to channel in some way. So they have the ability to leave here and go into some other world, some astral world or spirit realm, to be able to navigate that world and bring back messages that the seeing world is unable to see. And so that idea – what one title can capture that idea.
CB: That’s brilliant. That connects it sort of back to the notion of revelation or the revealed origins of something, because you’re talking about different traditions in the world of a person that’s capable of doing that, of transcending the physical realm or whatever the current reality is and going somewhere else for a time where they find some information and they bring it back to the human realm.
BW: That’s correct. That wouldn’t be able to be known using human intelligence, so that’s sort of the premise, right? It’s presumed that you’re able to know something that based on human intelligence, human logic, empirical ways of knowing you wouldn’t be able to arrive at.
CB: Got it. Okay. So the role of the shaman or of that figure was much more important in early Chinese society in some way?
BW: It was extremely important. For all of the Shang dynasty and the Zhou dynasty, we have all these records of how – it was more mundane records in terms of naming how many different departments of wu there were and the different roles, different types of wu were, and I make the connection to saying “wu” is like saying you’re a lawyer. Right? But lawyers – that’s a very generalist term. They are gonna specialize in particular forms of law. And so wu is a very general term, and then underneath wu, some wu will specialize in divination. Some wu will specialize in healing and other wu will specialize in forms of – they were actually investigators. So they find lost objects. And so there’s all these different forms of wu underneath that sort of generalist title, and that was a very important part of the imperial palace’s, you know, court advisors.
CB: Got it. Okay. So in some ways it’s like a broad title of like, an educated intellectual who’s able to do a wide variety of different things.
BW: Yes, especially since once you get into the Han dynasty, what we used to see as the importance of the role of the wu became the importance of the role of the scholar. And so there’s that one-to-one connection where if you think about who was so important to sort of the advancement of society before the Zhou dynasty and previous, that was the wu. And then when you get into the Han dynasty and you start seeing these ideas, philosophical schools of thought forming, who was the most important that was equivalent? It was the scholar.
CB: That’s really interesting, because that makes me think of how – that literacy is like a core component of that, because like for example, the Mesopotamian tradition, the ability to write down your observation of the skies and like, what happened when a certain star appeared and what happened on earth, and then to create a textual tradition that passes down that knowledge not just orally but also as a written tradition became very important. And so some of the early scholars were called like, the writers, I think, of the Enuma Anu Enlil, the astrological text that was passed down by generations, but that they’re actually referred to as like, scholars of that textual tradition. So maybe that’s touching on something similar here in terms of literacy and writing and passing down written traditions to some extent becoming part of that as well.
BW: I would think it’s very, very similar, because when you look at the tradition of writing in China, oracle bone scripts – our first records, our first documentation of oracle bone scripts and the reason for writing things down was divination. So oracle bone was an early form of divination – oh wait, I’m so stupid! Oracle bones predate I Ching! I’m so sorry. So yes, before the I Ching, the earliest form of divination was oracle bone, which you take ox bone and different big pieces of bone, and then you light it over fire, and then it cracks. And then once it cracks, you read the formations of the cracks. So that is the earliest form, but like, we really don’t know anything about it today. So if you were to do it today, you ask me how do you read oracle bones – I don’t think anybody today can, you know, rationally say they know how they did it back in the Shang dynasty. But yes! Sorry, I have to correct myself; technically, oracle bone is the earliest form of divination.
CB: Got it, okay, yeah. That’s like in the Mesopotamian tradition they had liver divination like, very early on, which involves sacrificially killing an animal and then reading the liver that was supposed to indicate different things about the future. But then astrology eventually comes along, but astrology is much more complicated. It’s like a complex tradition of having to observe things and note what happened and eventually building up a textual tradition for that so that it’s something that clearly developed later after a period of time rather than earlier, so maybe we have something similar here where it’s like there were earlier forms of divination, but then the I Ching eventually is developed as this more complex system in some ways.
BW: Absolutely. And I think what you just brought up is really interesting, because when I’m reading about the biographies of the most famous and most well known in Chinese history, the astronomers and astrologers and whatnot, almost all of them are also mathematicians. And it’s almost like, the two are almost inseparable, so you always see if they’re a well known mathematician, they’re into astrology, astronomy. If they’re a well known astronomer or astrologer, they are mathematicians. And so it’s just really interesting to see that. It’s almost like, at least then, it was a prerequisite. You probably needed to be pretty good at math to do astronomy and astrology at the time.
CB: Totally, yeah. And that’s the same in the west where you’ve got people like Claudius Ptolemy or you’ve got Johannes Kepler or other people that had that dual role of astronomer or mathematician or astrologer. But that was a core component early on because of the interchangeability between those realms of scientific learning.
BW: Yeah, I think so.
CB: Cool. All right. So yeah, mathematicians. I’m trying to think of where else to go with that. Literacy, divination, shamanism. I’m trying to think if there’s anything – oh yeah, one point that I wanted to make is just that’s one thing I’m always fascinated by is it seems like almost every culture around the world has developed some form of divination at some time. Like, it seems like it’s not just something that’s unique to one culture or unique to one place, but it seems like everywhere around the world there’s some form of divination that gets developed in different cultures so that it does seem like it’s something that individual humans observe over time as like, something that exists as some sort of property of nature or something that does happen and that one can discover somehow, whether through empirical observations or whether through revealed wisdom of some sort, but that somehow it seems to like, come forth into humanity at different points.
BW: I think so. And I wonder where the nexus is between two things that sort of bring about, arises divination. So the first is the observation of nature. I think when you observe whether it’s the heavens or the earth around you, even in terms of, you know, geomancy – at some point, you start noticing patterns, and then you ascribe meaning to the patterns that you see in terms of cycles. That, and then this idea of wanting to know something that you can’t know just yet. And today, it’s Googling; it’s AI; it’s computing systems. And I think that there’s this innate curiosity in humanity to know the unknowable is what triggered innovation into the computer world and the digital world. And so I think sort of before that, the way that we did that was forms of divination, because I see a lot of – in terms of how the trajectory of how they invented, if you will, the I Ching, it looks very similar to how sort of the rational process of how to build one idea on top of the other to create computing systems. The idea of building one on top of the other, these units, until you create something very complex, and that complex thing is able to in a nonlinear way generate ideas. I wonder if there is that sort of correlation of wanting to create computers, using that term, right? And also this idea of seeing the world around you and saying, well, I can use the world around me, impose it in some way, superimpose it with this idea of computers, and create a system to know the unknowable. And how humans bridge the two ideas together – that’s divination, right.
CB: That’s a great point. And one of the points you made there that’s really important is that even though it’s complex from our vantage point looking, you know, now that we have centuries and centuries of received tradition or even milenia of received tradition, it probably started out somewhere very basic with just very simple observations. And one of those sometimes was omens. That sometimes something will happen in nature that will send you a sign or an omen of a future event, and in the Mesopotamian tradition I think this may have been eclipses, because there was some records of like, three eclipses taking place at the death of three kings in quick succession that may have actually been like, an historical event that could have sparked like, this sudden interest in astrology and in recording those omens so they could be interpreted in the future. Or you know, in other traditions, even at the basis of the I Ching is just a basic binary thing of, you know, black or white, or yes or no, or that just establishing a fundamental principle of the universe. But that basic thing eventually gets more complex, but only slowly. Actually, that was the other part in the Chinese tradition was from what I understand, they refer to comets as broom stars so that that may have been like, one of the things astronomically in the Chinese tradition just like eclipses in the Mesopotamian tradition of noticing sometimes a comet would show up and then like, a dynasty would fall or a king would die or something like that, so that you eventually start paying attention to that and wanting to write it down.
BW: That’s really interesting. So one of the things I wanted to do is and – right? Like, so comets was traditionally believed to be bad omens and, right? And that last part is it’s a bad omen for the incumbent, but it’s the rise – it’s a great omen – for the challenger. Because the idea of the comet was it predicts the downfall of the then incumbent, you know, king or dynasty or whatnot. But if one falls, somebody must rise, so in that way it’s actually a positive omen if you are the challenger of the system or you’re leading a revolt. So if you’re leading the revolt or you’re trying to change the system, then comets were historically, if you look at the documents, technically a very positive omen. But if you are the one in charge or the one that’s holding the power, then yeah, it’s probably bad news.
CB: Right. That makes a lot of sense. There’s like a phrase for that. It’s like, “The king is dead; all hail the king” or something like that to welcome the new king. So maybe though omenology, maybe divination, on some level that some versions of it start with that early premise that for some reason sometimes events and nature that show up that are anomalous, that there’s an anomaly in nature that’s sending a sign. It’s not causing it necessarily, although maybe there were debates about whether it was causing it, but there’s at least it’s sending some sort of sign that something important is happening or is about to happen here on earth or in the near future. So it also brings up the idea that there’s some predictive element to it as well, that sometimes nature sends omens or signs of future events, and then that leads into a basic human motivation for divination, which is just wanting to know the future.
BW: The skeptic in me has always wondered about that. What causes what, right? So because if you think about being in the ancient times, right, so if you saw a comet – if you regularly watch the skies, a comet is actually a really unique thing. And if you think about, you know, the stars, they sort of stay put. They’re zen, right; they kind of, you know, move in a very orderly, predictable way. And then out of nowhere you have a comet or an eclipse – that’s extremely scary. What the heck could that mean? But then there’s always been this idea that the king or the emperor was linked to heaven in some way. So if bad things are happening, it’s heaven telling us that our king is bad. And so someone will say, “What causes what?” Could it be that we observe something that looks really scary, and we’re like, oh, the reason this scary thing happened is because our king sucks. So now it’s time to take him down. And then it becomes, right, so the cause and effect is reversed, and then over time – again, this is just me speculating as a skeptic – over time then these particular astrological phenomena become sort of omens for certain things because we kind of caused it to be omens for certain things. That’s sort of my hypothesis.
CB: Well, I will push back and say – because I got really interested in doing – like a year ago when those eclipses happened in October and everything started going crazy, I wanted to do like, an episode which was just like, what are the top 10 historical events that coincided with eclipses? So I went back and I searched, and I couldn’t find many articles on that, so I started to do it myself and do the research. And I kept finding these events where an eclipse would happen, and it would indicate like, the, you know, death of a king or the change of a dynasty or something like that. But it wasn’t – sometimes these changes were happening and people weren’t aware of it at all. They weren’t aware of the astrology or anything like that. But it was just naturally happening. So I think it is something that actually exists out there, which is still surprising, especially from a skeptical mindset, because we would assume that humans themselves are just doing it; they’re acting it out based on superstition. But for some reason, astrology and the movement of the planets – especially major events like eclipses – sometimes does happen and does coincide with things even if we’re not aware of it at all.
BW: That’s one of the claims. There was an eclipse or – so some people say it was an eclipse; some people say it was the sighting of a comet, depending on who you believe, during the fall of the Shang dynasty and the rise of the Zhou dynasty which coincided with the I Ching. So there’s that idea of – again, there’s that concept of those particular events coinciding. So yeah, I mean, that’s always been sort of, this idea of them predicting something, but – not to push back, but more to say like, I really don’t know the answer. Like, I feel like this is the struggle I constantly have myself as somebody who’s interested in these subjects but wanting to always maintain being grounded, right?
CB: Right.
BW: So if I say, I’m going to go and look at the last 1,000 years of global history and mark every time an eclipse happened and what happened during that time in global history, I’m gonna find very, very significant events, and if I stop there, I’ll be like, “Wow.” You know? I conclude, ergo, eclipses are significant because they coincide with downfalls, because that’s what I’m looking for. But if I say something like, I don’t know, Venus retrograde, and I start looking for – well, that happens too frequently, but something that doesn’t happen as frequently. Like, some other astronomical event that doesn’t happen too frequently, and then I chart back in history, it’s almost like I’m looking for something. I’m looking for the needle in the haystack. And then I’m going to find it. But then I also, because I am a diviner, I also think, well, maybe there is some greater, like, connection to everything, and it does – something as above, you know, so below. Something above does influence what happens, you know, below; something external, you know, influences the internal. And so I struggle with that. I don’t know what the answer is. But I do find, like, there can be bias, and that’s a truth. And then that sort of creates a consensus reality, and then this whole system and tradition idea is formed based on a consensus reality that was created based on bias. But at the same time, true, there is something perhaps divine about how things, how events, you know, unfold on earth. So both – I can believe in both, and how I reconcile the two I think is something I struggle with.
CB: Yeah, I think it’s really important to maintain a healthy skepticism and also – because that helps you to combat against something that can sometimes happen when people get into forms of divination or astrology is that that function of like, looking for signs can malfunction and you can overdo it and start seeing importance in everything or signs in everything, even if it’s not that deep in some instances or something like that. So it can go haywire, go too far. But yeah, I mean, I would encourage you to do that historical research because even in what little I did in the past century, me and my friend Nick Dagan Best in our eclipses episodes, we found that every death of an English king in the past century had taken place within a week of an eclipse, even ones like, you know, Princess Diana died like a week after an eclipse that obviously wasn’t, you know, planned by anybody. It was just a freak accident to have somebody to die in a car accident, and yet it still happened. When you start doing that and seeing how often it does happen in history and how consistent it is, you start to realize that there’s something going on there that’s not purely humans projecting on the sky, but that there’s some property in nature, I think, that’s exhibiting something that’s important to investigate.
BW: This is one of the most fascinating topics, and I think I can go around and round myself just in terms of, you know, just even like, sort of, you know, countering my own arguments. So have you heard that theory, have you heard the idea, like, you know how certain gods, goddesses, demons or whatnot of specific cultures are real because the collective society has, as a thought form, generated them into reality? So there’s an idea if the whole society or a whole culture believe in one particular deity or spirit entity, they can actually – so that spirit entity actually becomes real because the collective sort of generated thought empowered that thought form, that deity, or that spirit into reality, and therefore it’s real for that region. It’s real for those people. So that’s one theory, that one idea, of why we have these spirit realms and how they become real. It’s actually humans as a collective believing in the same thing together and the power of collective thought can sort of almost create sort of blips or create new code in the software in a way. And so that’s one belief system. So then if, taking that assumption as true, if that’s true, can it be applied that theory to other premises where you do have, you know, this idea of people collectively believe, for example, eclipses are bad omens? And then it actually, it sort of becomes a chicken and egg, where at some point eclipses do cause bad things to happen or certain types of inauspicious things to happen because of some form of thought that has created that reality based on a collective, you know, focus on that one idea.
So I mean, there’s just so many theories that we can, you know, play and kick around in our minds on why certain things happen. I think that’s one of my most, like, the topic that I’m most interested in. Why does divination work? Why does astrology seem to work? Why do certain astronomical events seem to coincide with particular patterns of events in human history? Like, it’s hard to say for sure why, but I think trying to, you know, think of theories is really fun.
CB: Sure. For sure, yeah, especially when it gets to very complex systems of divination, like how some of those come together and why they’re effective or not effective in some instances. Like, what makes one effective, let’s say, or one not effective in terms of just – individual practitioners I think have different systems that speak to them more for some reason, and why that is or why one resonates with one or another doesn’t. But I think a lot of these, it seems like they do – if you break them down, go back to some basic properties where they’re trying to get to something core about the nature of the cosmos and how it works. And one of the things that’s interesting to me about the I Ching is how it’s breaking it down into numbers and number symbolism and also basic concepts of polarities or binaries, and that there is something, like, fundamental about that that it’s tied or that it’s actually getting to the core of about our reality and about our perception of reality that is probably like, the code that’s underlying everything in some ways, like you said.
BW: That was one of Jing Fang’s theories. So Jing Fang is well known for his ideas when it comes to the I Ching and how to interpret the I Ching and his schools of thought that sprung around the I Ching. But he was also, like I said, a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, and he was also a musician. He invented musical instruments. And it’s really interesting how he did that, because it kind of goes into his mystical ideas. But he talked a lot about how numbers – so he believed that the universe, the sky, astronomy, and astrology, that at the core of that was numerology or numbers in same way. That mathematics was what drove the way the universe was created, that drove the movements of the planets and the constellations. So he believed that; that was the theory that he propagated. And all of that in some way corresponds with the I Ching, because he saw the I Ching as sort of the synthesis of numerology or numbers, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, all of these things are brought together in an integrative way in the I Ching. And so the I Ching in some way was able to tap into what’s happening in astrology and astronomy. It was able to tap into numbers, and it was a form of computing system. And in fact, calculus is the mathematics of change. And we think about how calculus is built, it’s very similar to the ideas that you find in the I Ching and the way calculus is sort of the birth computing systems. So all this kind of – Jing Fang was the first to really start thinking of all of it as coalescing into one, and so that’s one of the things that I really love about the I Ching is that it does bring all of these ideas together. That it is math, but it’s also divination; it’s something mystical, but at the same time it’s also descriptive of the movement of the stars, the movement of the seasons.
CB: Yeah, and it’s very familiar to us today because we have, like, physicists and other people that do things like that where they try to figure out what is the core structure of the cosmos and sometimes trying to take it down to first principles in order to understand, you know, how everything works or how a fundamental principle like gravity works, or that everything can be reduced down to matter or to light or other basic principles like that. You have similar motivations with some of these ancient figures like the one you’re talking about from the first century BCE where they are polymaths. They’re people who, you know, excel in many different fields, but they’re seeing something about the principle of reality that’s connecting these different fields together, and they’re attempting to create a grand unified system in the same way that many modern scientists over the past century have been trying to look for what is the grand unified system that can tie different sciences together in different ways.
BW: So many of the mystics, both, you know, in the eastern and western traditions, were polymaths, and I wonder if it’s because – so you sort of separately have great amounts of knowledge in various subjects. And then because you have various – you have high, intense, or deep knowledge in many subjects, you’re probably also very intelligent and good at coalescing and synchronizing information and data. And you start to see patterns. I think that’s why they are mystics, because they see patterns in things that probably from a logical standpoint shouldn’t have any patterns. And so I think it’s really interesting to note how so many mystics historically were also polymaths.
CB: Yeah, that’s a great point, and noticing patterns and correlations and sometimes having the discernment between, you know, what is a genuine correlation or genuine pattern that’s showing you something versus what is one that’s not. And that’s kind of like, the dividing line between, I don’t know, like, somebody who’s a polymath and is like, a brilliant scientist that discovers some new property of the universe versus somebody who’s, you know, crazy or a conspiracy theorist or something by whatever metric you measure those things.
BW: I think so on some level, but I also don’t always dismiss crazy, because I think sometimes there is – I mean, they’re seeing reality in a way that we’re not seeing reality. And I always wonder why and how. Like, what is it about their brain wiring that has them seeing something that the rest of us can’t see, and is there some wisdom to it? Is there something I can learn from that? Not crazy, you know, because I don’t like to use – but yeah, something from their very unique perspective that I can see a wisdom. Because when you really reduce down what we call “crazy,” a lot of times there’s some core truth to it. It’s far from the crazy – like, they’re not communicating what they are perceiving that well, but they’re perceiving something and they just don’t have the vocabulary to communicate what they’re seeing.
CB: Sure. And I —
BW: Genius and crazy are very, very, like – it’s very fine line.
CB: For sure, yeah. And I couldn’t think of a better term than crazy just because that’s like, the colloquial term these days. But there’s also certainly, in its extreme manifestation, there can be like, mental illness in some instances, like, is a thing where somebody is so disconnected from reality that sometimes they’re seeing things that are not there that can sometimes lead them to do things that are not good. And I guess that’s the most extreme, like, version of that when I say “crazy,” I guess, that I was using a shorthand for that.
BW: That’s true. I think mental illness, neurodivergence, it’s definitely a spectrum. And I think the reason a lot of occultists risk dangerously falling into the wrong side of that, you know, into the spectrum where the neurodivergence becomes some form of insanity or where mental illness and occult – like, there’s just something there that I think when your mind is able to traverse between different states of consciousness, and you don’t do it in a way that’s grounded and wise and you have your own guard rails in place, I think that can run amok very quickly. So you do you see, like, interestingly that connection there between forms of mental illness or the spectrum of neurodivergence and occult practice.
CB: Sure. Yeah. So that actually is a nice transition into one point that I wanted to talk about, which is that the I Ching is tied in with different indigenous forms of Chinese philosophy in very interesting ways, which makes it unique as a form of divination because there’s sometimes, like, a moral component to some of the delineations and some of the things that you read in the text that’s influenced by different philosophies or at least some of the commentaries are influenced by different philosophies, right?
BW: Yeah. So Taoism for sure, I think because [speaking Chinese], the 10 wings, and then that became determinative and authoritative in terms of how we interpret the line text that the legendary Duke of Zhou wrote. Because of that, I do think we get a lot of Confucianist influence into how we today interpret the I Ching line text as well. If you look at the actual line text, more often than not it doesn’t have a whole lot of I’ll call it virtue signaling. Like, it’s not very – like, it’s either good, bad, or it’s something like “the poplar is rotten,” or you know, “the horns of the ox are caught in the fence.” Like, there’s no sort of arguable way to ascribe virtue to it. When you start getting into how – okay, so what are the – what’s the commentaries on, okay, “the horn gets stuck in the fence” – what does that mean? And then that’s where you start to see a lot of the conversation on virtue and Confucian ethics as well. So yes, Taoism and Confucianism are very much intertwined in how we interpret the I Ching today. But if you want to sort of go back to just sort of the bare bones line text that nobody can really agree on what they mean, I don’t see a whole lot of conversations on virtue in that.
CB: Got it. So it’s more the commentary tradition that developed subsequent to it, which is still old. It’s like, 2,000 years old at this point. But nonetheless is not necessarily part of the core of what originally developed around the 64 hexagrams.
BW: I mean, I guess it depends on who you ask, right? So I think because they talk about the mandate of heaven and the whole idea of how the I Ching came to be was the mandate of heaven switch, meaning the authority to reign and rule over the people. There’s always this idea, you know, for better or for worse, that whoever rules is the most virtuous. So obviously you have the right to rule; you have the right to be king because you’re the most virtuous. And so in that way, I guess we’ve always imputed virtue in some way, sort of, you know, subconsciously or in a secondarily indirect way to divination. So I think – I don’t know that you can separate conversations on virtue and ethics from divination. The two kind of go hand in hand. But also people can make the credible argument that they have nothing to do with each other. So it depends on what school of thought you come from.
CB: I think you wrote at one point in the book that there was an interesting change between, like, one of the school of thought and their commentary from when that philosophical approach was more dominant would say one thing, but then one of the other commentaries later would have a much different interpretation that was influenced by their religious views.
BW: Yeah, absolutely. And even what to place emphasis on. So looking at the, you know, the lines, the yin and yang lines, and interpreting it based on the values of the yin and yang lines and sort of the conceptual symbolic correspondences of the five changing phases in the eight trigrams – do you focus on that? And that is the, you know, determinative way to interpret an I Ching reading. Or do you focus on the line text and the words, or is the words the most important way to interpret an I Ching reading? And there’s different schools of thought on that. You can’t say one is right and the other is wrong; it’s just different philosophies and approaches to the I Ching.
CB: Got it. Okay. Would you mind if we looked at a hexagram from your book just to like, ground this discussion in —
BW: Sure.
CB: — one of them? Do you have like, a particular hexagram that comes to mind or that you think of or should we do it randomly?
BW: Let’s do it randomly! Even more fun.
CB: Okay.
BW: Alexa, office light on! Sorry about that.
CB: No problem. All right, so you’ve got your book. All right. Do you want to open it or do you want me to?
BW: You do it, how’s that?
CB: All right. So I’m gonna open it to a page in the book, and it opened to hexagram 35.
BW: Thirty —
CB: Page 571.
BW: Ooh. Queen Mother Goddess. Oh, advancement! Study, growth. A period of forward movement. Okay. So what do we want to know?
CB: We want to know how will this podcast episode be received, and how will it Influence people.
BW: Well, we just – okay, so that’s the question presented, and let’s say the result was a fixed hexagram and so you only have hexagram 35. Like, really good. You know, advancement, steady growth – that’s really good news. And there’s this idea of the pawn becoming a queen, so this idea of something that sort of went unnoticed rises to a position of power, a position of notoriety or notability. So that’s sort of what hexagram 35 Chin is about. It’s this idea of something that was kind of overlooked before and now is given a position of notability because people finally see it for what it’s worth and the merit and value of it. So that’s how you would sort of generally generically interpret Chin hexagram 35.
CB: Okay, let me share it on the screen. I just pulled up the Kindle version so I could show it here. And all right. So this is the hexagram itself, and so the hexagram itself is – starting from the top – is one full line and then a broken line and then a full line, and that represents fire. And then the next one is three broken lines on top of each other, which represents earth. So then you put it together and the six lines form the full hexagram.
BW: That’s correct, yeah.
CB: All right. So in terms of the composition then of the text, we then have the oracle. And this oracle was written – this is the primary thing that you’ve translated, right?
BW: That part would be what I wrote. So the oracle is the summary. So for example, let’s go back to the image, right. So the image on the bottom, you have three dark lines. The three yin lines. And so you always move from bottom up, so you wanna look from bottom up. So what it looks like is darkness, almost like a cave – this idea of, you know, the earth, the deep down on the ground buried underground, which is the earth, right? And then what does it lead into? It transitions into fire, which is light. This is where you – and so one way of interpreting why does hexagram 35 mean, you know, something that was not seen before becomes notable and visible – that’s where we get that idea. The idea comes from just literally looking at the images of yin and yang lines and trying to interpret what the movement or transition and progression of lines might possibly mean. So that’s where that comes from. And then —
CB: So interpreting that symbolically but also interpreting it in terms of notions of change and what would it mean for, like, earth to transition into fire.
BW: Yeah, absolutely. But then – I mean, it’s both, right? Because where we get why that trigram of, you know, solid line – the light – and then empty hollow – the dark, the broken line – and then the solid, why that’s fire is the idea of that represents light. Like, that represents a flame. And so it is, it’s kind of both. Right? Like the idea why these specific, you know, codes or images represent particular concepts in nature, it comes from what those light, dark, or cool and warm lines mean.
CB: Got it. So then you wrote a delineation of this, and do you want to read your delineation?
BW: Oh, so the oracle, the part that you see in the gray box – that’s the whole summary. Right? So if you wanted to get a holistic picture that’s from my own words, but it’s also a summary of the line text from the subsequent six lines and also a summary based on the 10 wings, which is what you see on top. So if you see the three columns of Chinese text above, I take that, I synthesize that into the oracle. So if you were to get this in a reading and you really just want to focus on getting the meaning of your divination, then you would say, “You have stood where you are for long enough. Now is the time for advancement. May the pawn become a queen. Flames must burn, and in the wake of ashes, you are the phoenix that rises. Support those above you with loyalty; support those below you with generosity.” And so there’s that idea of virtue coming in. So you know how this concept of how to be a virtuous person once you achieve notability, that comes from the 10 wings – the Confucian writings and the Confucian thought that goes into influencing how we interpret the I Ching. This is how you expand your influence. Advance like a mouse; surmount the throne like a lion. All hail the Queen Mother. And the idea of the Queen Mother – Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West – comes from some of the actual line text. So some of the actual line text attributed to the Duke of Zhou does make a reference to a Queen Mother of some sort. And then over the centuries, we attribute that to a presence, the Divine presence, or the influence of Xiwangmu who is the Queen Mother of the West, an actual mythological goddess figure in Taoist magic, or just Taoism I think I would say. Taoist esotericism. .
CB: Got it. Okay. So and then what’s below the delineation is the line text itself, and what part of that is coming from what part of the tradition?
BW: Okay, so then underneath the gray box when you start seeing the words, that’s actually the translation of the three columns above. So if you see what’s on screen, there’s those three boxes. This comes from the 10 wings, and so this first initial part is how you, is the translation of the image, the judgment, and the description of the hexagram, so that’s where you get this initial line text before you get into the actual lines. So if you keep scrolling down, and this is explaining – because there are certain lies in here that are a little bit vague so I don’t like how the publisher did the layout here. This is not me; this was the publisher, whoever did the layout design – I don’t like how that looks. But basically this part is, yeah, the translation of the actual 10 wings explanation of what hexagram 35 means. And then once you get to the first line, the part inside the box, this is the part that’s the direct translation of the line text attributed to what the Duke of Zhou wrote. So this is the actual divination, the “riddle.” So for example, let’s say you did a reading where the changing line was the first line, which made it the most notable; you would read that first line. And so what you see inside that box is the actual translation of what you see in Chinese.
CB: Got it. Okay. So it says, “There is progress, though there is havoc. Pushing from behind, causing tension in the front. You will still find your fortune. Favors granted. To enrich and be plentiful, slow and steady. There is no blame.”
BW: Right. And then it’s like, okay, well, how do you interpret that, right? And so then below that in unbolded text, that’s my commentary; that’s what I wrote. So that is sort of reconciling – I’m very influenced by Jing Fang, so I read him and then there’s a couple of other I Ching scholars over the centuries that I just have been heavily influenced by. So then this is my personal commentary and interpretation of what that first line within that box might possibly mean.
CB: Got it, okay. So you write, “Pushing to break free from an ensnarement. Struggling causes more chaos, and chaos brings uncertainty. Take the longer route, slow and steady. That’s how you’ll arrive at your destination.”
BW: That’s right. And then it continues on. And so that would just be me offering my thoughts as somebody who’s practiced I Ching divination for at this point two and a half decades. Just over the years what I found to be “true” or a reliable way to interpret the first line. But of course, that’s from my perspective.
CB: Got it. Okay. And then so you just go through systematically interpreting all six lines or at least you’re translating the text at first and its commentary on all six lines and then doing your own subsequent commentary.
BW: Yes, exactly. And so for example, the second line within the actual original line text dating back to the Zhou dynasty, you see the “All hail the Queen Mother.” That fourth line – so if you’re reading it from a western vantage point, it looks like the first vertical of Chinese, but Chinese is written, you know, right to left, right? So it’s the last line. So that last line, but what you might see as the first column of Chinese text on screen, that’s where it says, “All hail the Queen Mother.” And then how do you interpret that? What does that mean? And so that’s where you get into the really interesting commentary. And so for me, because I do practice Taoist forms of magic and mysticism, it’s pretty clear – at least among Taoist mystics – well, this definitely is the divine presence of Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West, but of course that’s a very Taoist mystical practitioner’s perspective.
CB: Got it. Okay. And then you go – oh yeah, and you have actually a whole section on that on the next page, the Queen Mother goddess. Got it.
BW: And then it has, I guess the layout design shows how there’s sort of a carve-out where it’s supposed to be sort of like, in a book a separate section that is blocked out to kind of give a more in-depth explanation of that “all hail the Queen Mother.”
CB: Yeah. And then you go through the third line is “Everything, everyone is as it should be. Disappointments vanish.” So this is the third line. So you really are – and this is the subsequent commentary tradition from like, a few centuries BCE that actually started giving some delineation principles there, and then this is the core of what everyone’s then built subsequent interpretations of over the next several centuries.
BW: Yes, that’s correct. And what’s even interesting is in terms of doing direct Chinese to English translation, and it’s not just Chinese but it’s sort of the ancient form of Chinese. Like, here – so for example, in the Chinese, you obviously see two characters for the first line on the right, and then you see two more characters on the left. So you’re like, okay, that’s really, really terse; there’s like nothing there. But then what I’ve done in terms of translation, there’s a lot of words. So how did you get so many words in English from those small characters, right? Doing the translations are so hard, but that first character – it’s this idea of like, all over the place, like everything, everything, everything, right? And then the second character is, well, this whole chaos, everything that you see that is happening in this world is like, overwhelming – this overwhelm of sensations and experiences is exactly what it needs to be. And the second character sort of symbolizes this idea of what’s happening that’s crazy is actually not crazy; it’s meant to be. And the second one, the first character – disappointment – this idea of what is disappointing to you, the second one is “vanish,” so that’s kind of just a sort of background behind the scenes of how the translation works.
CB: Yeah, that’s beautiful. The way that you’ve rendered that is really good and like, poetic throughout this. Did you have ones that were more challenging where you ran into one where you really had a like, struggle to render that into English?
BW: I think all of them. They were so hard! Like —
CB: Okay.
BW: — it’s funny, like, whenever I see people like, “Oh, that’s not the right translation; it should be this,” I’m like, “Legit.” Like, because it’s so hard to do the translations, and there’s so many subjective ways to look at it that, yeah, I really struggled. So anytime I struggle with doing the translation, I would have to go back and – so you sort of lean into my academic training because, you know, I used to write peer reviewed legal research, and they were published a lot. So I kind of used that sort of academic rigor, the legal analysis training that I have, to then do research into various scholars over various centuries, and I looked into their background to understand where their ideas were coming from. So it becomes sort of the coalescing of many different scholars and points of view to even come up with that translation itself.
CB: Yeah, totally. That actually brings up a question I had as a brief interruption, but do you have like, a prominent Mercury or like, Gemini or Virgo placements in your chart? Because you’re such a good writer and communicator, and also you’ve written so much. I was just curious what your birth chart is like and if you share that.
BW: Well, first, very kind of you. I always feel like I don’t speak very well, so that’s very, very nice of you to say. Mercury – well, okay, I do whole signs, so I’m Aquarius rising. I do whole signs astrology. Mercury is in Libra – 27 degrees – and it’s part of a stellium. So in my Libra house – nine – I have a stellium. It’s my Sun because I’m a Sun sign Libra, Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto, and then I like to look at Vesta. So Vesta is also there, and then you have Mercury. And Mercury is right there at 27 degrees, so it’s right at the cusp of the 10th house with Scorpio in the 10th.
CB: Would you mind if I like, cast your chart and showed it?
BW: Absolutely! Sure.
CB: What’s your birth data?
BW: September 24, 198 – you know what, can I give it to you instead of saying it out loud to everybody?
CB: Yes. Let me see; let me think of how to do that. Yes, I think you can – chat. Send it, do it in the email.
BW: Oh, it says “to everyone.”
CB: Yeah, I think this’ll be okay. Okay, so —
BW: Are you able to see that?
CB: Yeah. Cool. And then you want me to not show that data on the screen but just the chart itself?
BW: Yeah, that’s… I guess. I mean, I don’t really care too much, but yeah. Like, if it’s possible, please. If it’s not possible, it’s fine. I guess I’m not too – it’s out there anyway. I think if someone’s really like, aggressive about looking for it. I remember seeing my birth details, like, part of my – with a book or something. I’m like, how did that happen?
CB: Here we go. I think I can show just the chart. So you have, for those listening to the audio version, so you have Aquarius rising. The ruler of your Ascendant is Saturn, which is exalted in Libra in the 9th whole sign house, which is the place of publishing. You have a Libra stellium with a day chart with the Sun, Jupiter, Pluto, and Mercury all in the 9th house. I love that. That’s a really brilliant chart. I love that Mercury-Pluto conjunction. That makes you a really good, like, investigator and like, getting to the bottom of things. And then Saturn is conjunct Jupiter right there in a day chart; that’s really brilliant. Yeah, and you have Uranus on the Midheaven in Scorpio. I also have Uranus on the Midheaven and Aquarius rising, so I’m a big fan of your chart; we have very similar overlaps here, except I have everything in Scorpio and you have everything in Libra. So that’s pretty cool.
BW: Yeah. I think, you know how in sidereal it kind of just shifts a little bit – I can’t remember if it moves into Scorpio, like the stellium, does it become a Scorpio stellium or a Virgo stellium? That part I can’t remember.
CB: Mostly – your first three planets would move into Virgo, so you’d have a Virgo stellium in sidereal. Yeah, but that’s a pretty cool chart. Okay. I was curious about that; I’m always curious what different writers have and what different astrologers have in terms of, you know, what comes through. And how many books have you written at this point?
BW: Three published books.
CB: Okay. Three published. And how many unpublished?
BW: I have no idea.
CB: Oh, okay.
BW: I mean, like, so for example, the Spirit Keeper’s Tarot – I wrote a 700 page book that’s just a guide book to go with my tarot deck to explain all of the history and the lore, you know, so there’s that. I have several novels that I’ve completed that just hasn’t gone anywhere and hasn’t been published. I have a lot of [speaking Chinese], also Ba-Zi, the Four Pillars of Destiny – I have a half-baked book on that. I have a half-baked book on – I was translating the Tao Te Ching into English, so.
CB: Oh wow. Okay. How do you find the time? like, what is your process of writing? because that’s like, a lot of writing. That’s like Stephen King level of writing just in terms of your output and your ability to write. Like, what’s your process?
BW: It’s very hard; everyone always asks me that question. Like —
CB: Okay.
BW: — how do the things, right? So I think, if I’m really trying to think back to what it is, it might be my father’s military background. And so why I say that is so it’s one to two things – the military background and the military discipline that was drilled into me from a very young age where every single minute of your life had to be scheduled and had to be doing something productive and of utility. And so that philosophy, for better or for worse, was drilled into me. And so I feel like, you know – and then my dad also said, you know, you should work harder than the Sun. So that means you have to wake up before sunrise and you should still be working well after sunset. So you should be working harder than the Sun was another ethos drilled into me. And then I’ve practiced meditation since my elementary school years. So since I was in grade school, my parents made me meditate. And so I have laser sharp focus that I thought everybody had, and then I realized it’s actually not that common where you do something and you just completely are sucked into the world of whatever you’re doing. And I actually lose track of time and I’m completely sucked into the world of what I’m doing, and so it feels like I’ve done three hours of work, but when I come back up for air, it’s only been one hour.
CB: Yeah, that’s your —
BW: That’s how I get, yeah.
CB: That’s the Mercury-Pluto conjunction; you can just really focus in and sometimes like, obsess about something. But if it’s like, a good obsession it’s like, super productive and then —
BW: That’s true.
CB: — obviously you have the really exalted Saturn that’s very strong in terms of the discipline as well, so that’s such a great combination of all those different factors.
BW: Right. And if it’s a negative obsession that you, you know, dig yourself into a black hole and you get lost in an emotional maelstrom and you never come back out. So it’s —
CB: Yeah. That is the downside, the obsessive quality of the Mercury-Pluto contraction, which I also share. But at least we’ve made careers we can mostly put that towards good focus by being researchers, essentially.
BW: Exactly.
CB: Nice. All right. So back to before I interrupted us – we were just looking through the rest of the lines of that hexagram and just getting a sense for what you were translating. And so we read the third line. I guess we’re at the fourth line now, which it says, “There is progress though there is a marmot, a Rat. Prognostication of difficulties to come.”
BW: Yes. And so that word there is – so is it a rat or is it a marmot? And so that kind of becomes one of those things where I didn’t know how to translate that particular word. It’s obviously an animal that’s either marmot- or rat-like with that long tail and has that sort of, you know, that animal quality to it, so I just put it in both words. And then the reason I put “rat” in capital is because that word “shi,” the word for rat or marmot, I know it’s a zodiac animal. It’s the first zodiac animal in the zodiac and also has particular symbolic meanings. And so if you were a diviner using the I Ching, the fact that the rat is referenced would have been symbolic to you from an astrological perspective, because it does represent something. It designates something from an astrological perspective, so that’s why I put “rat” in capital.
CB: Got it. Okay. And then you go through all the lines. And so the bottom line is the first; is there a prioritization in terms of which line is the most important?
BW: People say the fifth line is the ruler. You know how there’s – so every hexagram has a ruling line. So the ruler of the line, just like you have like the ruling planet for a particular zodiac houses and all that – so there’s that same concept of a ruling line. And so it’s often attributed to the fifth line. So the fifth line is in by default. In default, the fifth line is the ruling line. If you get into sort of the I Ching divination that’s equivalent to horary astrology or whatnot when you’re casting something, then that “ruling line” might change for their specific moment of divination. But by default, if you’re reading it in sequential order, the fifth line is always the ruler.
CB: Got it. Okay. So in this one, the fifth line says, “Disappointments vanish. Gains, losses —” In what? Sorry, say it again.
BW: The same two characters that we saw earlier in I think it was the first line, the second line.
CB: Oh, right – “Disappointments vanish.”
BW: Third line, yeah.
CB: Got it. And then it says, “Gains, losses — no misgivingings, no sympathy. Auspicious. Favorable, with potential for gains.”
BW: Right.
CB: I love the conciseness of that, because obviously you’re just translating like, a few characters, but how simple and straightforward is it on some level at its core in terms of the indications that it’s giving.
BW: Yeah. And so some purists who don’t want to get into commentaries because they’re afraid of the filter that might present a bias, once you get, for example, the divination takes you the fifth line, you would only read what’s in that box. So you would only read those three lines in boldface, and then everything else would be up to your own interpretation.
CB: Right. Because that’s really the core of the I Ching in terms of the textual tradition, and everything else aside from that is just commentary tradition that’s attempted to expand on and attempted to elaborate on that foundation.
BW: That’s correct.
CB: Okay. And how many – we’re talking about like, just like, hundreds and hundreds of commentaries in terms of the many, many centuries or in terms of the top level, are there a certain number of commentaries, like 10 top commentaries or something like that?
BW: I mean, I think there’s thousands. And also —
CB: Thousands, okay.
BW: — Japan itself also had a vibrant tradition of I Ching studies, I Ching discourse. Vietnam also had a very vibrant study of I Ching discourse. And so because of that, you will see very different perspectives. And so, I mean, I wouldn’t want to discount the scholarly works of other civilizations and kingdoms that also interpreted the I Ching. But if you’re looking at Chinese history specifically and how the scholars that came out of China – maybe I think 10? Yeah, you’re right. I would say 10 would probably be the biggest ones, and I wouldn’t be able to name them off the top of my head, but you know, yeah. I would say about a dozen.
CB: Got it. Okay. So at least like, a dozen like, top ones. And then that was a really good point that we didn’t touch on yet, but just the I Ching has been translated into many different languages and really influenced a number of different especially like East Asian cultures in huge ways, even so much that you pointed out in the book that the flag of South Korea like, has hexagrams on it basically, right?
BW: Right. And I mean, even if you look at South Korea – or at the time Korea, the various kingdoms of Korea – Japan, and Vietnam, the scholars there studied it in classical Chinese. So there were translations, of course, but I mean, they were looking at the original text.
CB: Got it; okay. So that brings in the whole other element just in terms of maybe different – so those traditions that were drawing on the Chinese text and then different local traditions maybe that developed and maybe added additional commentaries that were different in various ways.
BW: Yeah, absolute.y
CB: Got it. All right. And then going back, so then we get to eventually like, the sixth line, and it says, “There is progress in an advance with horns lowered. Proceed with conquest of the city. A perilous undertaking, yet prospects are good. There is no blame.”
BW: Yes. One of the – you know, you’ll see “There is no blame” a lot; it’s one of those recurring phrases that the I Ching has. A lot of the lines will say, “Crossing the great stream” or “Don’t cross the great stream,” and another one is “There is no blame,” “Auspicious,” “Inauspicious.” So there’s words that you kind of see repeated throughout the line text. “There is no blame” has – like, those two characters have confounded scholars for forever. Like, how do you interpret that? Because if you look at the characters, that’s essentially what it’s saying. Like, nobody is at fault. It’s saying, “This is a no fault situation” is essentially what those two characters are saying. It’s saying no fault. But divination is no fault, so what does that mean, right? and so I see it as like, it is what it is. Like, you know how whenever something happens, we always need to look for somebody to blame; we have to find a scapegoat. And so here, baked into the line text, it’s saying there’s no scapegoat to look for.
CB: I like that. That would be – that’d be a funny additional version you could do, which is just like, colloquial phrases like, “It is what it is.” You know, a translation of the I Ching.
BW: Yeah.
CB: All right. So and then that is the end of that hexagram essentially. You have your delineations where you expand on some of that and give additional context for each of those lines, but that’s the core of the text that everyone’s been drawing on. Yeah.
So the book is huge, and you did all 64 hexagrams. How long did it take you to put this book together? Which I have to say, as like a person that’s into books, as like a bibliophile, this is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever seen just in terms of the layout and everything was done like, very well and very beautifully. How long did it take you to put it together from start to finish?
BW: Well, my publisher will love that you said that you like the layout, so I’ll make sure I pass along the message. In terms of writing the text, so the translations I’ve had a complete working set of the translations of the 64 hexagrams, the line text, since I was in college. So I think in college was when I first sat down and I did the translations for myself, a private copy, because I was just working with it so often that it just made sense for me to have my own translations. And like I said, it’s a rite of passage if you, you know, pride yourself in being scholar, then it’s a rite of passage to be able to write your own commentaries and your own translations. So in terms of that and also just being interested in returning to my own culture and my heritage since I was 20 years old – so over the course of, I would say, two and a half decades is how long I kept revisiting and working and tweaking these 64 hexagram translations and commentaries is how long it took. So it was a working draft for the better half of my entire life.
CB: Wow. And even your exposure to it – you said that you actually bought it, your first copy of the I Ching, quite by chance when you were very young, right?
BW: When I was nine! I was in Taiwan, and then we went to those big sprawling bookstores in Taipei in Taiwan, and then my dad had said, “Okay, you can all” – everyone of his kids – “you can buy one book!” You know, choose one book, you can buy it, and then we’re leaving the store. And you know, of course, my two sisters – you pick like, little children’s books with as many illustrations as possible, and for some reason I was drawn to this copy of the I Ching where it had the Chinese on one side and the English on the other side. At the time, I didn’t even know what it was. I actually thought maybe this is a book of poetry, which it kind of is, right? Like, it is kind of a book of poetry. But that’s what I thought it was, and I got that book. And ever since then I’ve been interested in trying to be able to dismantle and understand that book that I bought at age nine.
CB: That’s amazing. What a great origin story. And then for you, as you got older, you said that it was also in some ways also part of the motivation was reconnecting with your culture in different ways or that that was an element as well?
BW: Well, I’ve always grown up with I Ching in my life because my mom and dad were both into the I Ching. And so maybe that colored why I picked it, too, because I think subconsciously I saw copies of it on my father’s, you know, home office desk or whatnot. My mom talks about the I Ching. My father’s a scientist with multiple patents, and so he comes from it with an interest in philosophy. So he thinks of the I Ching as this incredible, valuable work of Chinese philosophy and a cultural relic, and that’s why he values the I Ching. My mom is a diviner; she’s into the esoteric and she’s a mystic, and so she uses the I Ching for fortune telling. And so having that sort of pairing that I grew up with, it’s always been part of my life. But I did kind of push back against it and I wasn’t really deep-driving it in a focused, studied way until my college years when I wanted to get back in touch with my roots, I guess.
CB: Got it. Okay. That’s brilliant. And what is it that drew you to divination, because now at least in this side of your life, you have different sides of your life but divination has become a major part of it, both with your work on tarot and now with your work on the I Ching as well.
BW: You know, funny thing to say as a diviner and having written books on divination – I don’t know that it’s divination that I’m into as much as it is desiring to unravel the mysteries of the universe. I just want to understand the mysteries of the universe. And I want to investigate that to such an obsessive, passionate degree that what methods, what tools, can I use to unravel and understand the mysteries of the universe? And for me, the logical answer to that is divination, because I think there’s something about divination that brings in the two sides of your mind. I think to be a truly good diviner and to be accurate at these forms, these types of tools, these methodologies, even in astrology, I think there has to be an art to it, but they also has to be like, a methodical science to it. And you need to have a mind built to hold both and balance both. So I think because of that, what is required in order to do divination well is a point of fascination for me.
CB: Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Have there been things from your work in tarot that have been helpful for you or have informed your research into the I Ching or vice versa or any ways in which that’s been beneficial having investigated both simultaneously to some extent throughout your life?
BW: I think the best example I might be able to give is prior to really deep diving into the tarot, the images of the I Ching, the six lines, the hexagrams, were too abstract for me. Like, it was hard for me to see the visual of the code. You know what I mean? Like, scry into and see visuals of the code. And then after practiced use of the tarot, which that’s all tarot is – you see the vision and the visuals, and then you interpret concepts out of images – and then reversing that with the I Ching, I found I was able to do that conversion work a lot more smoother after I – well, not mastered, but after I became more fluent with the tarot. Being able to turn images into concepts, then I was able to take the conceptual and abstract image and turn that into visuals and illustrations and compositions in my mind.
CB: Got it. That makes sense. Do you feel like a point that I meant to ask you – my partner Leisa Schaim, she’s used the I Ching and tarot and different forms of divination and cards especially for years. But she said she has always felt like the I Ching has a unique personality sometimes in the way in the advice that it gives or the way that it gives advice. Do you think that that’s – to what extent have you experienced that? have you experienced that at all, or do you feel like different forms of divination have different modes of like, answering certain questions, or is there any uniqueness to those different forms of divination?
BW: I think isn’t that what Aleister Crowley said? So Crowley made this comment. He said that the spirit intelligence that’s driving, for example, geomancy were gnomes. And then he said the spirit intelligence driving the tarot was Mercury or Hermes. And then he said that the I Ching is this much older spirit intelligence that doesn’t have its own agenda. So he kind of implied that if you use the tarot, Hermes – the spirit intelligence driving the tarot – has its own agenda sometimes, or that he felt like that the I Ching’s, the voice, whatever divine or spirit voice was coming through with the I Ching, there was no agenda. And I find that that resonates with my own experiences of the personality, if you will, if you were to personify the I Ching, if you were to personify the tarot. I find that the I Ching can sometimes be harsher. It can be a lot more blunt. I think sometimes it tells it to you a little bit, like, too real. Like, it’s a little too much for you to digest in the moment. And then, however, I find that it’s very matronly and motherly for me, so it’s like, very strict with me when I need the unfiltered truth in a way that nobody else will give it to me. But at the same time, if I’m truly broken, like if I’m really like, truly, truly in a bad place – I find that the voice is very nurturing. Like, it has such a gentle, nurturing voice. It just almost knows what tone to take with me based on its ability to detect the level of health of my mind. You know, I think that’s something really interesting about the I Ching.
CB: So you do experience it as if something is speaking to you or interacting with you in some way?
BW: For me, yes. Absolutely. For me, I definitely feel like the I Ching is sentient in some way. And how exactly that is expressed, I don’t know. Is it channeling some sort of divine voice? Is it – there is this idea. Oh, so actually, there’s this idea of different types of divination systems having particular voices. So what Crowley said about spirit intelligences is a very old idea in Chinese metaphysics. So there’s a divination system called Taixuanjing, which is very similar to the I Ching but has three different lines instead of two. So instead of the binary of yin and yang, it has three different types of lines – heaven, earth, and humanity – and it forms tetragrams, so lines of four, I believe it was, for a total of 81 tetragrams. And so Taixuanjing was believed to be the spirit intelligence behind that was Jiu Tian Xuan Nu, the Lady of the Nine Heavens. There was another way, Guicang, so that one of the three mentioned types of divination in that old book of Zhou that was mentioned in tandem with the I Ching. Guicang was one that they believed was either the Queen Mother of the West that was the spirit intelligence or Chang’e, the Moon Goddess, was the spirit intelligence behind that divination system. So likewise, if that is to be believed, and there were a lot of line references that people use as evidence in the I Ching line text that says that the spirit intelligence of the I Ching is what we call Shang Di, which is like, sort of the one god of heaven that was attributed back to the Shang dynasty. So the idea of a monotheistic – the one god that was first born out of the Tao, that idea of the monotheistic expression of the divine is what is fueling the voice of the I Ching.
CB: Wow, okay. That makes a lot of sense. I had thought about, you know, I did an episode on artificial intelligence recently since it’s been all the rage over the past few years. And one of the questions we talked about at one point was just, you know, if inceptional astrology is correct, is a legitimate phenomenon, that when the moment something is born, the alignment of the planets tells you something about its character and future – like, if an artificial intelligence that originates, if one did originate at a specific moment in time could have some of the quality of that moment or if you could say something about its character at that time. It made me wonder if different forms of divination, if they had some origin point at certain points, if some of the character couldn’t be that it’s carrying something about the quality of the moment in which it originated at some point. And I realize that’s hard because we’re talking about something that’s in the distant past, and may or may not have a singular point of origin, but it made me wonder if that’s part of the almost quality that people might pick up on sometimes.
BW: So yes, absolutely. So you know how you have the wuxing, the five changing phases, but they also correspond with the five planets, apart from the Sun and Moon. You have the Sun and Moon, and then you have the five changing phases that correspond actually with Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn. And so what we believe is every dynasty corresponds with one of those changing phases, and so one of those planetary influences is dominant in every single dynasty. So then it helps in terms of if you can’t peg it to one single year, you would look at the dominant planetary influence based on the five changing phases that is the dominant influence during that particular dynasty.
CB: Got it. So we would be talking about the dynasty back around 1000 BCE.
BW: Yes, which I have no idea which planet would have been dominant at that time, but yes —
CB: Sure.
BW: — use that correspondent system, and then you, you know, peg each one back and then figure out the cycles, you could in theory figure out which planet was dominant during that dynasty. It’s written somewhere. Like, it’s probably Google-able. Like, you’ll find it; somebody has done the work somewhere.
CB: Yeah. That makes sense. And then going back to the character or like, the personality or character of the I Ching – I mean, sometimes this comes up the most where people talk about it when it comes to when sometimes people are told to stop asking like, a certain question or there’s almost like an element of chastising occasionally as well as sometimes the moral component that comes through in some of the commentaries and things like that, so maybe that’s part of the difference between people experiencing something like tarot or horary astrology or something like that.
BW: Yeah. I mean, well, hexagram four – there’s a whole hexagram that basically says, “You’re an idiot.” I mean, I don’t know, obviously, but it basically says that, more or less. Like, you know, “Stop asking the same question over and over again; you’re an idiot; just stop.” And then there’s actual lines itself, other lines that are not so overt in that but basically say the same thing. Or there are line texts that basically imply, okay, at this point, stop the divination, or you know, I can’t tell you what it is now. Do something and then it’ll say “in x amount of time,” and again, it brings in astrology. A certain number of orbits of Jupiter. A certain number of orbits of the Moon. Certain cycles. It’ll say this x amount of time, then you can come back and do a divination at that time. So that’s baked into the line text, and so yeah, absolutely. It says to stop; you’re done.
CB: Right. That’s —
BW: It cuts you off.
CB: Yeah, you’re like a drunk at a bar that’s like, you know, having too many drinks.
BW: Yes. The divine bartender says you’re done.
CB: Is cutting you off. Yeah. You have to pay your tab. That’s brilliant. So the last part that I wanted to circle back to is just Taoism and Confucianism, because we never really defined the core of like, what those are, and I know you’ve done separate videos about why those philosophies are so important in terms of influencing some of the different works on the I Ching. Is there like, a short version of how you would explain that and what unique component it contributes to all of this that’s useful and worth looking into for people in terms of how it informs your work and other people’s work with this?
BW: Yeah. The Taoism predates – so sorry, the I Ching predates Taoism. And then if you look at, you know, the fundamentals of the metaphysics that’s in the I Ching, the binary lines and all of that, it got integrated into other schools of thought. The yin yang school of thought is another one that was big during the Qin Dynasty. And so I think over the dynasties, you see things from the I Ching get folded into and it informs the development of particular schools of thought; one of them is Taoism. And so you can absolutely see influences of the I Ching in Tao Te Ching, which is the sort of canonical text on Taoism. And even some of it is repeated verbatim. Now that I’m doing the translations of the Tao Te Ching and sometimes I’m like, wait a minute, why am I looking at the – like, you see actual word for word text from the I Ching either written again word for word or paraphrased in the Tao Te Ching. And so there is that influence of the I Ching on Taoism. And then because things get lost over many, many centuries, sort of later down the line we then used Taoism to inform how we interpret the I Ching, right? so the I Ching birthed Taoism in many ways or influenced the trajectory of Taoism. But then as we go on in time, we lose sort of the original understanding of the I Ching, so we start at this point and we use Taoism to help us understand the I Ching. And then Confucianism, because he’s attributed with the 10 wings, and even if it wasn’t Confucius himself who personally penned the 10 wings, for sure they were Confucian scholars because at the time they were Confucianist scholars. And so they were the ones using the framework of Confucianist ethics to then explain and comment on the I Ching. And so then that’s how it becomes inextricably at this point. It’s hard to say what is sort of the original source and what is Taoism and what is Confucianism, but they absolutely are all tethered together now.
CB: That’s incredible, though, that it’s old enough that it’s influencing those philosophies, which to us are already incredibly ancient, like, more than 2,000 years old. And yet the I Ching itself, the core of it, predates that and influenced them.
BW: Yeah, absolutely.
CB: Yeah. All right. And the last thing then is just that what is the core purpose then of using it? I guess part of the purpose is that it can help you understand your place in the universe; it can help you answer questions. But there’s also a self-reflection element to it as well that’s very important, right?
BW: Yes. To know yourself. And I wonder if there’s even a difference between knowing yourself and then knowing the universe, understanding the universe. I think there is some – like, they’re all kind of, they all go hand in hand, you know, to be able to have knowledge and conversation with your higher self, to be able to understand who you are, why you’re here, to have a sense of purpose so you have a sense of why you live. And that goes into understanding the universe itself, I think, and so they all work together.
CB: That’s beautiful. So it’s like, that idea of like, that we are at the universe experiencing itself, and using the I Ching to understand the universe and to understand your life – it’s sort of reflecting something back into you that’s just helping you to look into your life and understand it better, even though ostensibly you’re asking an external entity for advice. But in some ways, you’re getting insight into what’s going on inside of you.
BW: Because they’re interconnected. You can’t know one without the other. How are you supposed to know your place in the world if you don’t know the world? You have to have the context, which is the world, to know where you fit in. So to know one you have to know the other. And then how do you know the world without having it be filtered through your personal view? And then in order to have a meaningful understanding of the world, you have to understand what that bias or filter is. So because no matter what, it necessitates a filter through you to understand the world, so you have to have as pure and as unadulterated a filter as possible to truly and fully understand the universe. And so you have to know yourself before you can know the universe. But to know yourself, you have to know the context, which is the universe. It’s kind of like a circle, right?
CB: Yeah. It’s like a never ending circular process then, but maybe instead of just a complete circle maybe it’s like a spiral, because maybe you’re making progress as you’re doing that so that you’re also moving forward in time.
BW: Yeah! Which is actually sort of the core thesis of the I Ching, that it’s a circle, it’s a cycle, and it keeps repeating itself. But every time it cycles, it spirals into an expansion. So it’s the idea of the spiraling universe that creates through expansion, and so it’s that cycle that keeps on going and it forms the mandala.
CB: Well, there we have just tied things back into astrology, because astrology is also looking at cycles and planetary cycles and those go in circles but also in spirals moving forward in time. But that then is probably the core of both of these is they both study change and movement in time in different and unique but potentially complementary ways.
BW: Yeah. I like that. I like how you brought it back full circle. No pun intend —
CB: Full circle – brilliant. All right. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for joining me tonight. This has been a great discussion. We sort of like, found it as we went, but we touched on so many different interesting things. Are there any final things that we should mention that we’ll kick ourselves for not mentioning before we wrap up?
BW: I’m a fan of your work. I’m very happy to be here, so thank you for this opportunity to chat. I think it was very productive.
CB: Yeah. Thank you. So the book – people can get the book on Amazon, and also you offer – you have other books and other offerings on your website, right?
BW: No other books. All my books are traditionally published through North Atlantic, so that would only be through, you know, Amazon or your local bookstore or whatnot. So I was selling my Spirit Keeper’s tarot deck, but we’re down to like, five decks left, so I think it’s going out of print. It’ll probably be out of print by the time this goes live, so no more selling anything, unfortunately.
CB: Got it. Okay. But people can check out your website just for more information about your work and writings in general. What’s your website?
BW: Benebellwen.com, and actually, we talked about lunar mansions – I have a whole PDF that’s a reference on the 28 lunar mansions and how to use lunar mansions in astrology. So that’s a free download on my website somewhere. But yeah, there’s a lot of free references out there, and if you’re into the I Ching, there’s a lot of free coursework on the I Ching and how to utilize the book. So it’s a good place to go if you want to get free downloads.
CB: Cool. All right. I’ll put a link to it in the description below this video on YouTube or on the podcast website where people can find out more. Thank you so much for joining me tonight.
BW: Thank you.
CB: All right. That’s it for this episode of The Astrology Podcast, so thanks a lot for watching or listening, and we’ll see you again next time.
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