It was while camping at this knoll of rest and recuperation that I gathered sixty-five yarrow stalks.
This was of course not in Yosemite National Park! It is flagrantly illegal to cut and gather vegetation in any National Park! I would never do that!
No. Certainly not! Instead, I teleported to another place when I was cutting these stalks by that spring.
I intended to cut sixty-four — one for each of the hexagrams in the I-Ching, but one stalk was bent, so I cut a spare.
And, “Yarrow stalks?” What is this hippy-dippy bullshit?”
In ancient Chinese philosophy, there is a primordial current of “duality.” Mother, Father; male, female; light, dark; sky, earth; creation, reception; and so on, on and on; make up your own.
Further, these dual principles are not opposed but complement and complete each other. Creation is not opposed by destruction, fore example, but is compared to reception. It is “breathe in, breath out.”
Cyclic.
Everything in cycles. Repeating cycles.
I found this way of seeing to be peace inspiring.
I first discovered Asian philosophy through particular examples of Asian art when I was a young teen. My period of wandering from the Calvinist doctrines of my childhood through rejection of their absolutist determinism to a world view that let one choose which Book of Life to write about one’s own life, one’s family, one’s team, one’s nation, one’s species.
It was all simply more civilized than the Abrahamic savagery of my youthful indoctrinations.
A year or so after the early Ming Buddhist art from the Western Hills came learning of a much earlier work called I-Ching.
How to describe it?
I will call them as “Lessons,” first. There are sixty-four.
These lessons are each represented by a “hexagram” that is composed of two “trigrams.” These are fancy words for six marks and three marks, by the way/
I will illustrate now.
Hexagram:
——
——
——
——
——
——
Trigram:
——
——
——
Each of these “lines” can be solid as I have shown, or broken, as I will now show.
Solid line:
——
Broken line:
— —
We add a further layer of sophistication when we combine solid lines and broken lines in trigrams. There are eight possible combinations, and each has a Chines name as well as traditional interpretations. I will name a few.
All solid lines. Sky, father, creation:
——–
——–
——–
All broken lines. Earth, mother, reception:
— —
— —
— —
I debate now whether to list out the other six possibilities, but at the risk of being tedious, let me do so. I always remember the as “The Six Children.” It was natural to do so because there are six kids in my family! Moreover, three boys and three girls. In the I-Ching, you have oldest son, second son, and third son; with the girls, it is the same ordering oldest daughter, middle daughter, youngest daughter.
These in turn correspond to thunder, the deep, mountain; and wind, lake, and fire. The “girls” have two solid lines and one broken line; the “boys” have two broken lines and one solid line. These exhaust the eight possibilities for each trigram.
Two trigrams make a hexagram. Each trigram has a much richer symbolism than I have so briefly sketched. But since there are eight possibilities for the “lower” trigram and eight possibilities for the “upper” trigram, the total number of possibilities for six lines is eight time eight.
That equals sixty-four.
You may remember I said I was gathering “64” yarrow stocks?
These will be described as for example fire on the mountain, “the wanderer,” or, wood below earth, “growing upward.”
I the I-Ching, each of the sixty-four hexagrams has a chapter. Each chapter has the same order to it in all the translations. First, the basic symbolism and why it could mean that is discussed. If there are variant traditions, these will be mentioned. There is then a pronouncement of an ancient poem about that text, called a “judgment” in English, and it is known to be oracular, but general, in nature.
There follows then a listing of the meaning of each line in the hexagram, and it is here that a specific prognostication will be made.
But I have to back up. “Each line,” you might ask?
Yes.
We will get to the “casting of fortune” part.
For now, understand that the lines are discovered, one by one, bottom up through one of many “divination” methods. These are many in Asia. I will not describe them here, not the three-coin method, nor the eight-jewel method, except for exactly one: the yarrow stalk method.
It is a tricky problem and uses some clever, ancient math. You have with each line, four possibilities! It is simple when you break it sown though. You already know of two: either a broken line or an unbroken one. But there are also these special lines in the I-Ching, and why it has a name that means, “The Book of Changes.” for they are lines that appear at first to be one kind yet change to the other kind!
So there are four kinds of lines.
To review:
Solid line:
——
Broken line:
— —
But now we add, respectively, Solid Line Changing To Broken Line:
—
o—
And, finally, Broken Line Changing To Solid Line:
— x —
I am going into all this elaborate detail in what was supposed to be a hiking post because there is a method “fortune telling” that uses fifty yarrow stalks.* It involves dividing by the sticks by two and then making little piles until you have certain amount left. It sounds complicated because it is, kind of.
I was gathering these stalks because I know a couple people who would appreciate the gift. Yarrow stalks so perfectly selected and collected from a sacred spot?
I also carefully bundled and dried the cuttings. I had successfully done that before with yarrow I had cur from my own back yard. I simply tied the stalks together and had them use each other to straighten out. I thought there was some kind of poetry in that mechanic.
These stalks I gathered in the high country were much more slender! We shall have to see how their strength properties change as the stalks dry. At no time did the earlier ones appear to become brittle and fragile. They remain strong. It would be nice to make a set of divination sticks that were narrower than usual. Any magician would appreciate that refinement!
That, simply, was what I had in mind. A “shaman gift” I called it. I did gather my green wands with proper observances. I went barefoot. (I cut my foot too, the one and only time of he whole trip, drat!) I took only one here and there. I accidentally pulled up two by the roots when my knife got dull from cutting dirt and I was trying for better cutting angles.
I hid the bundle in my tent stake bag as it stuck up from my back pack on the walk back too, It was quite the operation, those yarrow sticks. To whomever I give them, I will tell the story, and they can tell the story too.
That is real magic!
Aside from its use in telling fortunes to gullible punters, the I-Ching is the collected wisdom of a people ancient and wise. You will find such luminaries as Confucius Himself had a hand in the making of what became the traditional manuscript. A manuscript that survives unchanged.
Quite the Opus, is the I-Ching.
It is not that I do not believe in magic; it is that magic and science only appear different when one or the other is successfully deceiving you.
In recent history, the deceptions have mainly been on the magic practitioner’s side, wouldn’t you say? I mean, it is all about “Illusions,” no?
Whereas science has tried to limit itself to those things that can be proven.
I am not sorry to admit that the plain honesty and humility of the scientist as I idealized him always appealed to me. I had no such ethical admiration for spin doctors.
Nothing had changed that way.
I will just leave this post at that.
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* Practitioners like to say “divination” because it makes it sound all grand.