Posts 2017-2022 at onlineclarity.co.uk (and maybe occasionally leisurely ongoing). Just a small number of posts, but many beautiful ones.
Thread: Article: "Elemental Changes in the I Ching?"
Date: Sat 7 Jan 2017 15:13:37 CET
Forum: I Ching News
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23830 (#1 by me)
Here is an article I wrote, which might interest you:
* * https://www.exactphilosophy.net/elemental-changes-i-ching.pdf
It is about a new way of arranging the trigrams of the I Ching in a circle and considers trigrams in terms of changes between the 4 "Greek" elements. See the article for full details and several illustrations.
About me: I am a Swiss physicist (*1966 in Zürich) and have had contact with the I Ching since about 15 years, but I am not an expert on it and cannot read ancient (or modern) Chinese. What I know very well (besides obviously having some skills in scientific areas), is Western astrology, and I have a certain overview over all kinds of similar "systems" worldwide...
And happy 2017 to everybody! :)
Alain (StaIder)
PS: There is also a German version of the arcticle if you prefer that:
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/elementare-wandlungen-i-ging.pdf
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Sat 28 Jan 2017 10:35:19 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#1 by me)
Happy Chinese New Year!
The plastron of a turtle (=belly part of the turtle shell) has essentially 6 scutes (from head to tail, see attached image):
- gular
- humeral
- pectoral
(hinge)
- inguinal
- femoral
- anal
This reminds of the structure of hexagrams, with two pairs of trigrams on top of each other.
I know of the following references to turtles related to ancient Chinese oracles (based on Wikipedia and the like, please correct me where I am wrong or imprecise):
- Early plastromancy in the Shang Dynasty, i.e. earlier than about 1000 BCE, where turtle plastrons where heated punctually in order to produce cracks in
the shell, which where then interpreted some ways of which the details are apparently unknown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone
- According to legend, the I Ching was created/discovered by Fu Xi after spotting the Yellow River Map and/or the Lo Shu Square on the back of a turtle
that emerged from a river.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_River_Map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_Shu_Square
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuxi
Are there more indications that would speak for or against early turtle oracles having influenced the I Ching?
As far as I understand the first written records about the I Ching are only a few centuries BCE and similarly for the legend of Fuxi, i.e. there is a huge historical gap to the Shang dynasty, or are there more indications in between?
One more incentive: Yin lines are called resp. drawn as broken lines and Yang lines as unbroken ones, which reminds of the breaking of a turtle shell under heat, even though the fractures usually had the shape of a T or the Chinese bǔ/pǔ.
Alain
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Tue 7 Feb 2017 00:58:39 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#2 by me)
In Shaughnesssy's dissertation, in the paragraph right next after the last paragraph in the excerpt linked above, he writes:
"As late as 1979 it was possible for an experienced paleographer to say in print that there was no trace of the trigrams and hexagrams in Zhou bronze
inscriptions. At about that time, however, the systematic ocurrence of groups of six numerical symbols in the Zhouyuan oracle-bone inscriptions led Zhang to
suggest that they were the prototype of the Zhouyi hexagram."
http://is.muni.cz/el/1421/jaro2011/RLB289/um/shaughnessy.pdf
That would maybe fit my suspicion that plastromancy was a way to determine numbers and then to derive something from the numbers and that broken/unbroken lines came later. In fact, even today, whenever you use coins or yarrow stalks with the I Ching, you first get a number between 6 and 9, and only then derive a changing/unchanging yin or yang line from that.
In "geomancy", as practiced from ancient Arab traditions, you hit the sand several times randomly with a stick and then count the marks, putting away
pairs of two until only one or two marks remain, and do this 4 times to get one of 16 geomantic figures (see attached image on the right).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomancy
I could imagine something similar in the case of pastromancy.
I have only seen a few oracle plastrons on the internet, so I can only speculate:
- When heat was applied with a hot stick of some sort, would the shell always crack?
- If not, would cracking or not maybe already count as a yes/no result?
- Or would it be retried and maybe counted how many times you have to do it until the shell breaks?
- Would you retry on the same spot in the back of the plastron or on a different spot each time?
Can one of these possibilities already be excluded, for example, are there (often? at all?) burns on the back of plastrons without corresponding cracks on the outside? Can you tell how many times the same spot was poked from analyzing the burns on the back? If you try to reproduce pastromancy, how often do you have to poke the same spot to get a crack?
A more poetic improvised remark* about the flying golden turtle (even with an Arab association via flying carpet): If you see the turtle flying from
below, you can see its belly, the plastron, so maybe Fuxi saw the turtle emerging from the great river in the sky, from the milky way, so that the two maps
represent the sky, or the stars cracks in its plastron through which then light can shine and maybe the hinge between the first and last 3 scutes is the
milky way, too...? Just to dream about a little...?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qixi_Festival
* Added 7 Feb 2017: I wrote that in reply to a reply that is apparently no longer here.
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Fri 10 Feb 2017 07:28:57 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#3 by me)
I gather from your replies that there is very little if at all that links ancient Chinese plastromancy to the I Ching according to contemporary research.
On page 72 (75 in the PDF) of Fracasso's glossary there is a figure with various cracks plus numbers and "crack-notations". I compared that with the attached image of a plastron with cracks and numbers/notations, from http://www.chaz.org/Arch/China/Oracle/Plastron_04.png
On the plastron there are 5 pairs of cracks, 5 cracks on the left, 5 on the right. Each crack has a number, from top to down. It appears that one horizontal line is "1", two is "2", and so on up to "4" and that an "X" stands for "5".
(Question on the side: What is not clear to me is how the crack-notations came about. Is it the shape and/or orientation of the cracks from which the crack-notations are derived? Is that known? I guess not in detail, but the overall principle?)
So there are 5 not 6 overall "horizontal lines" on the plastron, the top (=gular, I guess) pair of scutes has no cracks, and the numbering is "top to bottom" (head to tail) - all qualitative differences to the structure of the hexagrams of the I Ching and not that closely mirroring the 6 pairs of scutes of a turtle plastron.
I guess the basic premise behind oracles is that "things are connected", that you can ask a question at some place and find this reflected in other places.
Maybe it is in that sense that turtles/"turtles" occur in different places in Chinese history.
(One more question on the side: Are the plastrons that have been found so far all from the same region in China? How much is known about how widespread and harmonized the ways of casting oracles with plastrons was across China? Just to exclude that maybe in other regions there were ways of doing pastromancy that were much closer to the structure of the I Ching...)
In the same sense, similarities with "Arab" geomancy and other things in other places in the world could well be connected in an "oracular sense" without ever finding a direct historical link, I would presume...
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Fri 10 Feb 2017 18:39:25 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#4 by me)
Thanks a lot for all these good links (again), I will delve into them... 
In Flad's article on page 407 there is map with sites, quite a lot of them along the two big rivers and more, looks like quite a broad coverage of ancient China, presuming that also in China culture first emerged mainly around big rivers.
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Tue 21 Feb 2017 23:01:51 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#5 by me)
I have looked around quite a bit, but only one insight/idea seems worth mentioning at the time...
The turtle* is one of the "Four Symbols" [1]:
- Black Turtle of the North (Winter)
- Azure Dragon of the East (Spring)
- Vermillion Bird of the South (Summer)
- White Tiger of the West (Fall)
* English not being my native language, I was not aware until recently that turtles are the ones living (mainly) in water, tortoises the ones living on earth.
This made me look to the sky...
The 28 mansions [1] are Chinese constellations in the sky - the moon takes about one day to pass through each of them. (That is the so-called "sideral month", which is about 27.3 days, the time it takes the moon to get back to the same stars in the sky. But since the sun also moved during that time, the time between new moons (or full moons etc.) is a bit longer, about 29.5 days, this is called the "synodic month", see this animation for the difference: http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/content/sidereal.html ). So you can look at the moon at night and find out by the mansions (star constellations) which day of an about 28 day month it is, like looking at the hands of a clock.
The "Four Symbols" above are each associated with weeks of 7 days in a row during that cycle, i.e. with a division of the sky into 4 parts.
In that light, the turtle would be part of the fixed stars in the sky.
Now, the Fu Xing, the "5 Chinese Elements", are associated with the 5 planets that can be seen with the naked eye (without a telescope): Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. [2]:
"Xing (Chinese: 行) of 'Wu Xing' means moving; a planet is called a 'moving star'(Chinese: 行星) in Chinese. Wu Xing (Chinese: 五行) originally refers to the five major planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury, Venus, Mars) that create five dimensions of earth life."
And, coming to the I Ching, I noticed the following sentence in the Wikipedia article about the I Ching [3]:
"There is also an ancient folk etymology that sees the character for "changes" as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day."
So, how about the mansions / "Four Symbols", Wu Xing and I Ching simply representing different parts/aspects of the sky:
- Fixed stars: Mansions / Four Symbols (fixed, hardly changing, except over tens of thousands of years)
- Planets: Wu Xing (changing)
- Sun and Moon: I Ching (changing)
Let me add an important observation to this:
Using yarrow stalks to ask the I Ching, you start with 50 and put one away at the beginning, so that 49 remain. Now, 50+49 (synodic) lunar months (i.e. 99 new moons) is almost exactly 8 solar years, which is also why the Olympics in ancient Greece were held alternatively every 49 and 50 months [4].
So, you have 8 (the 8 solar years), which you could associate with the 8 trigrams, and with 50 and 49 you have a reference to the cylces of moon and sun
And change would be represented in two ways, by sun and moon (quite obviously, seasons and tides, and more) and by the five planets, less obviously, but also more interesting in the sky, because sun and moon always more steadily forward, but the five planets apparently stop sometimes and then even move backwards a while, e.g. Venus quite regularly, but Mars rather chaotically.
Alain
PS: The little fox icon of my website (= my avatar here) is based on the first response I ever got from the I Ching, 64 Wei Chi, Before Completion,
Success, which I read in the very beautiful description/interpretation of Richard Wilhelm [5]. And, being born in August 1966, I am born right in the middle
of a Fire Horse year... 
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-Eight_Mansions
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Xing
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching
[4] Valerie Vaughan, The Origin of the Olympics: Ancient Calendars and the Race Against Time, http://www.onereed.com/articles/vvf/olympics.html
[5] http://www2.unipr.it/~deyoung/I_Ching_Wilhelm_Translation.html#64
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Wed 1 Mar 2017 23:01:37 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#6 by me)
One more thing I looked at at the time was the "Xishuipo M45 Tomb":
http://members.westnet.com.au/gary-david-thompson/Grave45_HenanProvince.jpg
http://members.westnet.com.au/gary-david-thompson/Arrangement Tomb
M45.jpg
The arrow at the top right corner of the second image shows the direction of north (labeled north in chinese), so the feet of the buried man point north, his head south. On his right (east) is apparently a dragon made of shells, on his left (west) a tiger, also made of shells. At his feet are two bones and more shells arranged roughly in a triangle.
I have not been able to find sources so far that appear reliable, one dates the grave 5300 BCE, one 3000 BCE, and they interpret the arrangement at the feet of the buried man as the big dipper (ursa major), which would have been quite close to the north pole in the sky around that time frame (the north pole in the sky describes a circle every 26500 years because the earth axis precesses):
http://calgary.rasc.ca/images/precession.gif
In any case, tiger-west and dragon-east would fit with current views of the "Four Symbols". And that "turtle-north" would then be rather at the feet and "bird-south" rather at the head would fit with the nature of these animals, the turtle staying close to the ground, the bird able to fly high up
The second thing I looked at at the time was a passage from Zhuangzi featuring a turtle (here the James Legge translation):
"Zhuangzi was (once) fishing in the river Pu, when the king of Chu sent two great officers to him, with the message, 'I wish to trouble you with the
charge of all within my territories.' Zhuangzi kept on holding his rod without looking round, and said, 'I have heard that in Chu there is a spirit-like
tortoise-shell, the wearer of which died 3000 years ago, and which the king keeps, in his ancestral temple, in a hamper covered with a cloth. Was it better
for the tortoise to die, and leave its shell to be thus honoured? Or would it have been better for it to live, and keep on dragging its tail through the
mud?' The two officers said, 'It would have been better for it to live, and draw its tail after it over the mud.' 'Go your ways. I will keep on drawing my
tail after me through the mud.'"
-- http://ctext.org/zhuangzi/floods-of-autumn/ens
To me the theme of "death" and I guess "sacredness" was also mirrored at the time.
About sun and moon and maybe the I Ching:
When the sun shines, you can see the land and the water and everything else on earth in technicolor, but you cannot see the stars. When it is really dark, you can see the stars in the sky, but you cannot see the land and the water and everything else on earth. Depending on the moon phase, you have chance to see quite a bit of both and maybe how they might mirror each other. Especially in times before people had fire, moon phases must have made a huge difference.
Would turtles maybe mirror these two parts of the world, the lower part of their shell (the plastron) standing for the earth we live on, the round upper part of their shell for the sky and the stars? And since on the northern hemisphere you see the stars rotate around the north pole in the sky, maybe the turtle associated with north would be central in that sense, would be what all turns around and changes while the turtle lives "forever" and stays the same?
Last summer my best friend was visiting Lakota Indians in the USA and later showed me their arrangement of the four directions with animals and colors. Birds were in the south, but otherwise maybe not a direct correlation. I am not sure at the moment how old these attributions of the Lakota Indians really are, but if there were not brought in after Columbus, they might even be tens of tousands of years old, and if so, maybe also in other places on earth, to be seen...
Sorry for such a long post, but I would not know what to leave away...
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Tue 7 Mar 2017 22:19:43 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#7 by me)
Nice to see so many oracle plastrons, I had imagined them to be larger.
Here is a link to the first episode which is maybe accessible from more countries: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2j6xd3
At the risk of projecting not unlikely too much: As I wrote in the first post here, the plastron of a turtle has essentially six pairs of scutes. This reminds a bit of the hexagram for Earth with its six broken (yin) lines. Conversely, the upper part of the turtle shell contains at least 3 clear hexagons, each made of 6 "unbroken (yang) lines", which would fit the tentative interpretation of the upper part of the turtle shell with Heaven (6 unbroken lines) and the lower part (plastron) with Earth (6 broken lines)? To me maybe too far fetched without some historical support, but a nice way of remembering these two hexagrams and maybe still worth keeping in the back of one's mind?
At least 6 is associated with north in the Yellow River Map, as well as with the black tortoise...
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Thu 9 Mar 2017 08:31:00 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#8 by me)
Here is an illustration:
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Thu 9 Mar 2017 08:32:45 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#9 by me)
And the Yellow River Map with the "Four Symbols" and directions:
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Thu 9 Mar 2017 20:23:36 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#10 by me)
Maybe associations with turtle shells, similar to the one suggestively illustrated below*, really played a certain role for the development of the I Ching?
As far as my limited knowledge goes, the practice of casting oracles by poking turtle plastrons and bones would have essentially disappeared with the end of the Shang Dynasty, i.e. around 1046 BCE. Conversely, the oldest direct copies of the I Ching would be from about 300 BCE, but there appears to be circumstancial evidence that suggests that these texts would be copies of texts that were written roughly around 900 BCE (Western Zhou Dynasty, the dynasty immediatel following the Shang Dynasty)
So, was there maybe some kind of "cultural revolution" taking part then, between dynasties, during which the I Ching would have emerged in nearly its current form, and would still in some ways have been inspired by older practices of casting oracles, which would also mirror in the legend of Fuxi discovering the trigrams on a turtle emerging from a river...?
* Below on the left left a top view of a turtle, with 6 unbroken lines in the middle (Heaven), on the right right a bottom view of a turtle (plastron) with maybe 6 "broken lines" (Earth) on each pair of scutes? And hence the 62 other hexagrams would be in between?
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Sat 11 Mar 2017 09:42:48 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#11 by me)
Quote from "The Characterization of Tortoise Shell and its Imitations", Thomas Hainschwang and Laurence Leggio, Gems & Gemology, Spring 2006 [1]:
"Tortoise shell is a natural thermoplastic material, and behaves very much like certain synthetic or semisynthetic plastics. Using heat and pressure (molding), the artisan can fuse several thin pieces into one thick piece and then, to a certain degree, form it into desired shapes (Bariand and Poirot, 1998)."
This made me wonder if there is maybe a difference between the carpace (upper, dorsal shell) and the plastron (lower, belly part) in contact with heat. Would maybe(!) the carapace just "melt" and almost never crack, so that effectively only the plastron could be used for oracles? Hence the plastron would correspond to yin (weak/brittle broken line) and the carapace to yang (strong/malleable unbroken line)?
Maybe someone with practical experience with making jewelry etc. from turtle shells would know?
The above article mentions plastrons essentially only once in Figure A-3 on page 39: "The plastron (belly) plates of the hawksbill turtle have also been worked into objects; the resulting material is often referred to as blond tortoise shell."
A Google search for "blonde tortoise shell" finds combs and spectacle frames (typically imitations), suggesting that at least for everyday usage blonde tortoise shell would not be brittle.
[1] https://www.gia.edu/gems-gemology/spring-2006-characterization-turtle-shell-imitations-hainschwang
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Sat 8 Apr 2017 14:59:02 CEST
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#12 by me)
Below is a new illustration of two of the ideas that emerged from this thread, I privately like to call it "turtleverse"...
On my website, I have also added a little bit about the ideas from this thread: i ching
(a bit further down the page, in the "leads" section, but also assuming the reader would be somewhat familiar with the reasoning above and in previous
pages)
My website is mostly like a garden, most of the time I just let it grow, but from time to time I cultivate a little, so it is never perfect, but some
things are older and maybe already a bit wiser, while the stuff about turtles and the I Ching is still quite young...
Alain
PS: Feel free to share this image if you like it...
Thread: Sun / Moon / Venus and Change (8 Trigrams / 5 Wu Xing)
Date: Sun 16 Jul 2017 09:30:50 CEST
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 24678 (#1 by me)
The planet Venus stations 5 times every 8 years, drawing a pentagram with its stations [1]. These points shift positions only very slightly every 8 year cycle. In eight solar years there are also almost exactly 99 new moons.
In the "West", there is clear evidence that this was known to people in antiquity. The Olympics were alternatively held every 49 and 50 lunar months [2], i.e. about every 4 years and 49+50 = 99 (=8 solar years). The Mesopotamian goddess of love Ishtar was associated with an eight-pointed star, as well as with sun and moon [3].
In China, where I assume people must have been aware of these astronomical cycles, this seems to be reflected in least in two places:
- Using yarrow stalks to ask the I Ching, you start with 50 and put one away at the beginning, so that 49 remain.
- Change is represented by 8 Trigrams and/or 5 Wu Xing.
Is anybody aware of more such indications in Chinese culture or is the correlation with astronomy even explictly described in some ancient Chinese texts?
Alain
[1] http://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/five-petals-of-venus
[2] Valerie Vaughan, The Origin of the Olympics: Ancient Calendars and the Race Against Time,
http://www.onereed.com/articles/vvf/olympics.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar
Thread: Sun / Moon / Venus and Change (8 Trigrams / 5 Wu Xing)
Date: Fri 4 Aug 2017 05:14:01 CEST
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 24678 (#2 by me)
The eight-pointed star of Ishtar appears to be because every solar year the moon "advances" 3/8 of the circle, i.e. if the first solar year starts with a new moon, the second year starts with a waxing gibbous moon (3/4 full, getting fuller), the third year with a last quarter moon (1/2 full, getting less full), and so on.
Moon phases: http://s1.thingpic.com/images/w5/NbyYDABUn1HJAqpbyEtq8g6A.jpeg
Interestingly this gives two astronomically natural sequences of 8 phases of the moon (the normal sequence of phases during a month and the sequence of phases every solar year), which superficially reminds of old and new heaven arrangements of the trigrams.
But, so far, I could not make this idea more concrete, first attempts to map moon phases to trigrams were not very revealing, but I will continue to ponder this from time to time...
Once again, if anybody knows of previous work that relates the I Ching to the motion etc. of sun, moon and/or Venus, I would be interested to hear about
it
Alain
Thread: Sun / Moon / Venus and Change (8 Trigrams / 5 Wu Xing)
Date: Sat 5 Aug 2017 11:25:50 CEST
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 24678 (#3 by me)
I got some additional input in a forum primarily around Western culture regarding these cycles:
The greatest apparent angular distance of Venus from the sun (as morning or evening star) ist about 45-48°, i.e. about 1/8 of the circle, which would also relate the eight-pointed star directly to Venus.
For Venus the 8 year periodicity is very precise, shifts its position only about 1/4 of a degree at every 8 year cycle.
In contrast, for the moon the 8 year periodicity is about 18° off every 8 year cycle, but the moon still comes closer than in any other of the 6 years in between, so if you just look at moon phases, they essentially repeat after 8 years. (There is a more precise cycle of 19 years, the metonic cycle, where the moon is only around 4° off.)
The pentagram is related to the Golden Ratio (which I knew before), but what I did not realize is that that 8 / 5 = 1.6 is almost exactly the Golden Ratio (sqrt(5)+1) / 2 = 1.618..., i.e. only about 1% off.
Alain
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Fri 29 Dec 2017 15:10:55 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#13 by me)
I got a copy of David Pankenier's book "Astrology and Cosmology in Early China" that users 'tacrab' and 'lilly' had brought up in the thread "Sun / Moon / Venus and Change (8 Trigrams / 5 Wu Xing)". What a wealth of information about ancient Chinese culture in relation to stars and planets, illustrated and with lots references, all very carefully done for all that it appears to me!
Looks like the idea to see the turtle as symbolizing the universe, as I drew it above, is not new. Pankenier writes on page 185 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013): "As we saw above, the turtle has a very long history in China as a sacred animal and cosmological model, its carpace having been thought to represent the dome of the heavens and, one would think it follows, the belly plastron the Earth."
But rather than picking out more details from the book (especially not without at least a little bit of reading into it), I would recommend to get the book, if you are interested in connections between heavens and the I Ching, the five Wu Ching, and more things in Chinese culture, maybe going even as far (as it appears from glancing over some parts of the book?) as the origins of Chinese writing?
By the way, apparently there is not much about cycles of Venus (8 years) etc. in the book, so maybe still room for further research? Given the detailed accounts of the movements of the five planets in the appendix of the book (a translation of a treatise of about 100 BCE), ancient Chinese astronomers would have had to be aware of the cycles of Venus at least at these times, but most likely (I guess) also quite a bit earlier in history, considering that Venus is the most prominent of the five planets in the night sky.
Alain
Thread: Article: "Elemental Changes in the I Ching?"
Date: Sat 30 Dec 2017 13:47:55 CET
Forum: I Ching News
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23830 (#2 by me)
FYI, the article is now also available as part of a book:
Title: exactphilosophy.net 2017
Author: Alain Stalder (=me)
Publisher: Artecat Alain Stalder (=me too, essentially)
Year: 2017
ISBN: 978-3-906914-01-5
Pages: 50-55 (English), 56-61 (German)
I am providing this information mainly so that the article can now be referenced from other works in a maybe more permanent way, but note that the article will remain available in electronic form online for free as long as I possibly can. Also associated with this publication is a copy of the book archived at the Swiss National Library (due to the Swiss ISBN), which is also important to make the publication stick independently of me, since I did not publish the article in an academic journal.
That said, I find the book ist quite beautiful in its way (but also expensive), see here for more information:
• Google Books:
https://books.google.com/books?id=C8dBDwAAQBAJ
• Publisher's website (mainly in German):
https://www.artecat.ch/exactphilosophy-net-2017.html
• Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/3906914011
• Lulu:
http://www.lulu.com/shop/alain-stalder/exactphilosophynet-2017/paperback/product-23440594.html
All the best for 2018!
Alain
Thread: Hold/Release in the Trigrams
Date: Tue 29 May 2018 09:12:21 CEST
Forum: I Ching News
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 26077 (#1 by me)
The idea (which I had a few days ago) is that the 8 trigrams come in pairs of the "Greek" elements Fire, Air, Water and Earth *such that* for each element one of the two trigrams holds/binds its element together, while the other trigram lets go of it, releases it.*
EARTH
- Mountain (male, 3rd son) holds Earth together ("resting", "keeping still"), like hard rock.
- Earth (female, mother) lets Earth go ("devoted/yielding", "receptive"), like soft loess or sand.
WATER
- Lake (female, 3rd daughter) holds Water together.
- Water (male, 2nd son) lets Water go, releases it (rain, stream).
AIR
- Heaven (male, father) holds Air together ("strong").
- Wind (female, 1st daughter) lets Air flow freely.
FIRE
- Fire (female, 2nd daughter) holds Fire together (flame, "clinging").
- Thunder (male, 1st son) lets Fire go, releases its energy (lightning).
Pretty obvious and fundamental once you look at it like this, I find. Or not?
Not sure how to make this more publicly visible, though... (I think this is something that would probably interest many people interested in the I Ching...) Maybe I will just write a short article for the time being.
Alain Stalder
* Attribution to Greek elements is not new, but I think the bind/release duality is.
Thread: Hold/Release in the Trigrams
Date: Thu 31 May 2018 06:15:29 CEST
Forum: I Ching News
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 26077 (#2 by me)
Thanks a lot, is good to get feedback
Thread: Pyramids, Yin-Yang Hill and the four Greek Elements
Date: Thu 3 Jan 2019 13:25:17 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 27149 (#1 by me)
One of the oldest images for Yin-Yang appears to have been the shady and sunny sides of a hill (which rotate during the course of a day, since the sun moves resp. the earth rotates). Applying this image mentally to one of the great pyramids in Giza a few weeks ago, I playfully attributed opposites dry/wet and hot/cold to the corners of the pyramid - since the sun heats and dries - so that I found something that reminds quite a bit of Aristotle's definition of the four Greek elements in terms of these two pairs of opposites: Fire dry+hot (summer/south), Water wet+cold (winter/north), Air wet+hot (spring/east), Earth dry+cold (autumn/west). Note that the symbols for the four elements in the West are all triangles, like the four faces of a pyramid. See the article for a few more playful considerations:
English:
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/the-pyramids-and-the-four-elements.pdf
German:
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/die-pyramiden-und-die-vier-elemente.pdf
French (abbreviated):
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/les-pyramides-et-les-quatre-elements.pdf
Note that in ancient Egyptian mythology, the sun god Ra would fight each night with the snake Apophis/Apep, so Ra would likely be south/fire and Apophis north/(water?), which reminds of the 4 Symbols in China, where similarly the snake+tortoise would be north and the bird/phoenix south...
If you are interested in the ancient Greek elements, here would be another article I wrote with two new ideas (yes, the filename is really that long):
Thread: Pyramids, Yin-Yang Hill and the four Greek Elements
Date: Thu 3 Jan 2019 17:35:22 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 27149 (#2 by me)
Why "screech" almost immediately?
Are you an owl and me just a phoenix flying by?
The joy of fishes...
Turtles and the I Ching"
https://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/friends/showthread.php?23924-Turtles-and-the-I-Ching
Hold/Release in the Trigrams
https://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/friends/showthread.php?26077-Hold-Release-in-the-Trigrams
Article: "Elemental Changes in the I Ching?"
https://www.onlineclarity.co.uk/friends/showthread.php?23830-Article-quot-Elemental-Changes-in-the-I-Ching-quot
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/elemental-changes-i-ching.pdf
https://www.exactphilosophy.net/iching.html
Thread: Pyramids, Yin-Yang Hill and the four Greek Elements
Date: Sat 5 Jan 2019 05:48:46 CET
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 27149 (#3 by me)
In Richard Wilhelm's translation it is "Hu Hu" (pronounced "hoo hoo") instead of "screech", which is much more gentle and simply mimics the sound an owl makes.
Owl and phoenix are, as I see it, a priori just like Yin and Yang, simply two different worlds with quite distinctively separate viewpoints, one from high above, large distances, sky, sun, the other closer to the ground, more local, maybe earth, moon. Similarly with Ra and Apophis, or vermillion bird and black tortoise plus snake...
This simplicity mirrors, as I see it, so beautifully in the images of a hill/mountain or a pyramid, that in the very simple foundation "West" and "East" are the same, from the start, from earliest ideas.
"We don't need" - Who are the "we" you are referring to? Did you ask others if they agree with you? Or is it simply the "moon" that is collective, thus always implicitly a "we", and more caring, thus "take care"? And me maybe just me like the sun, more individual, and, yet, again two parts of the same, in constant flow, the path up and down are one and the same (Heraclitus), if you step into the same river (snake?) a second time the waters will be different (Heraclitus, too, in some way of reading the fragment)...
The 5 Wu Xing are - by their name - fundamentally in their history the 5 planets, Mercury-Venus-Mars-Jupiter-Saturn, but certainly also carry attributes of the 4+1 elements more to the "West", but so do the 8 trigrams of the I Ching, so that the same "things", sun/moon, 5 planets, elements, are "mixed up" differently in the "East" than in the "West".
I was hoping, since I did post a few links with previous posts, that since the simplicity of my initial image was apparently met with completely blind eyes - as it seemed to me and still does, helas! - that maybe more detailed explanations could make a difference, but that was maybe again a too different perspektive?
Well, all in all, it looks like the basic mythological themes in "West" and "East" are much closer to each other and possibly even influenced each other much earlier than currently "provable", until into North America...
That is what I wanted to show and it appeared to me like someone just took a "dump" on it with something exclusively based on a much later state of things in a much more local context.
Hence "hoo hoo" seemed the best way to mirror this...
And, in the end nobody can take away my pyramidal mouse from me...
Thread: Turtles and the I Ching
Date: Sat 8 Oct 2022 10:06:48 CEST
Forum: Open Space
From: astalder
Thread-ID: 23924 (#14 by me)
When taking a look at Pankeniers's article of 2018, I started to realize that there are "two anatomies" of scutes of the turtle plastron, one of the inner bone structure with 9 scutes, which is also where the bone oracles were made, and an outer (softer) keratinous layer with 12 scutes (2 x 6), which is the one that reminds so much of the hexagram for earth/mother with its 6 broken lines and the lateral separation in the middle where there is the hinge. Symbolically this could also be interpreted as bone oracles looking beneath the surface of earth...
In the illustration below, left the bone scutes (inner), right the keratinous scutes (outer layer).
From Rafaella Garbin's PhD Thesis "Intraspecific Variation in the Shell of Geoemydidae Turtles":
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Basic-scheme-of-a-testudinoid-carapace-top-row-and-plastron-bottom-row-showing_fig1_341727523
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341727523_Intraspecific_variation_in_the_shell_of_Geoemydidae_turtles_applications_to_systematic_and_paleontology
Probably worth a change/addition in the leads at https://www.exactphilosophy.net/iching.html in time...
And very interesting that about the three different kinds of cracks by Da Liu
