Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

A Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) printed edition of the I Ching — one of the earliest surviving printed versions of a text that had been transmitted for approximately three thousand years before the invention of printing. The Song period saw an intense revival of I Ching scholarship and the development of many of the Neo-Confucian commentaries still studied today In 1701, the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz received a letter from the French Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet, who was working at the Chinese imperial court. Enclosed with the letter was a diagram: the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, arranged by the Song Dynasty scholar Shao Yong in a sequence that mapped each hexagram to a binary number from 0 to 63, using broken lines for 0 and solid lines for 1. Leibniz, who had independently invented binary arithmetic a few years earlier, recognized what he saw immediately: the oldest divination text in the world, composed in China three thousand yea...

Of all the divination systems humanity has ever developed, none is as philosophically rich, as mathematically elegant, or as enduringly mysterious as the I Ching — the Book of Changes . Composed over three thousand years ago in China, used by emperors and peasants alike, studied by Confucius, translated by Carl Jung's collaborator Richard Wilhelm, and consulted today by millions worldwide, the I Ching is not merely a fortune-telling tool. It is a complete philosophy of change, pattern, and the relationship between the human being and the cosmos. "The I Ching insists upon self-knowledge throughout," wrote Carl Jung in his famous foreword to Wilhelm's translation. "The method of the I Ching does indeed take into account the human factor as an integral part of the process of change." This article explores what the I Ching is, where it came from, and how its underlying structure encodes one of humanity's most profound understandings of reality. What is t...