ASTROLOGY and the I CHING

© Chrissy Philp. June, 2013

or ...

How Life Works

This presentation proposes that Astrology and I Ching are not separate, unrelated esoteric systems but, like mathematics and physics, just different ways of interpreting the same phenomena, the mysterious phenomena that is ....

Us Here Now ... the phenomena we call LIFE.

In the late 1980s I began work on a series of books introducing a model of the brain I had stumbled across lying hidden within the ancient Anima Mundi. In Book One, Foundation, I introduced the I Ching, Astrology, and Modern Physics. At the end of Book One I printed simple diagrams illustrating the basics of these knowledge systems. Here are two of the diagrams.

These simple structures were so alike I wondered what would happen if I treated them as one .........

... so .. at the end of Book Three, Revelation, I published the result. The I Ching is based on eight trigrams and Astrology is based on twelve signs. This was no problem. As you can see, mutable signs of the Zodiac are mutable ... neither one thing nor the other, but either and both.

... All that remained for me to do was check out if this arrangement made interpretation sense.

YANG positivemotion/light/day/male

YIN negativematter/dark/night/female

YES NO

I Ching basics are very simple. There is an unbroken line that symbolises YES, and a broken line that symbolises NO. The ancients called these ‘the opening of the gates’ – YES .. go for it - and ‘the closing of the gates’ – NO .. hunker down.

Here is a computer. It is a ‘thing’ doing NO-thing. What do we need to make it run.

YES .. We need to supply it with energy, we need to switch it ON

SEE .. You've got it. You understand!

YIN

YANG

NO YES

A physicist would think of these as energy and mass. Yang is energy which expresses as motion .

zoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom

crack!

Yin is mass. Einstein called mass congealed energy, mass is that which holds things together. Mass can be broken apart.

On the smallest scales this can be stupendously energy consuming – think of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern.

=

But the ancients wanted more information than a simple yes or no answer so they piled up three lines – one for heaven, one for earth, and one for man. These two are the primary trigrams. The Creative Heaven signifies time and the Receptive Earth signifies space.

So now they didn’t only have energy and mass, but could work with the result of the interaction between energy and mass.

Time Space

Yuzhou/Kosmos

‘The Chinese binomial most frequently translated as kosmos is yuzhou, a term that overtly expresses the interdependence between time and space’.

Daodejung, Ames and Hall,(2003).

Space-time is not a new concept, is it?

B a sic R u les o f th e I C h ing

T h e e ig h ttr ig ra m s

T h e fi r m a n dy ie ld in g lin e s

Ta o

y an g y in

T he C reativ eH e av en

T he R ecep -

tiveE arth

T he Jo you sL ak e

K e ep ingS till

M oun t-a in

S ho c kT hun de r

(bir th)

T heG ently

P ene tra -ting

T he A by ss

T heM oon

C lar ityT heS un

p o s it iv e n e g a tiv e

P O L A R O P P O S IT E S

T H E E V O L U T IO N o f th e T R IG R A M S

+

-

+

-

-

+

+ -

T h e Ta o

Piling up a second line and a third line onto the original single line gives us eight trigrams to which the Chinese masters gave eight separate meanings. It all begins with the mysterious Dao (Tao) .. that which Lao Tzu tells us cannot be ‘named’ or ‘spoken: ‘Mystery of mysteries’.

Change ‘lines’ to 1’s and 0’s in your imagination and you will see that The I Ching, is a BINARY SYSTEM.

Four Hsiang

Leibniz was interested in the binary system. He could see that it could be used as the basis of a new language. In 1666, he acquired an I Ching. This is what Time Life Books says in Computer Basics.

In 1716, fascinated by Leibniz’s ideas, the Scottish mathematician George Boole created a logic system with the AND, OR and NOT, gates Leibniz had only wondered about.

Then in 1867 Sanders Peirce was teaching Boolean logic in New York when it occurred to him that the gates (remember the opening and the closing of the gates) described in Boole’s binary system were either on, or off, just like an electric switching device.

Sixty-nine years later Claude Shannon, a student roped in to care for Bush’s massive and unwieldy mechanical computer, wrote his master thesis inspired by Peirce’s insight.

1716. George Boole creates a logic system based on Leibniz’s ideas.

1867. Sanders Peirce teaches Boolean logic in New York and recognises its potential as an electrical switching device.

1936. Claude Shannon looks after Bush’s decimal machine – puts Peirce’s insight to good use.

BUSH

Oily gears and shafts

I CHING Leibniz Boole Pierce Shannon

INTERNET!

B a sic R u les o f th e I C h ing

T h e e ig h ttr ig ra m s

T h e fi rm a n dy ie ld in g lin e s

Ta o

y an g y in

T he C reativ eH eav en

T he R e cep -

tiveE ar th

T he Jo you sL ak e

K eep ingS till

M oun t-a in

S ho c kT hun der

(bir th)

T heG e ntly

P e ne tra -ting

T he A by ss

T heM oon

C la r ityT heS un

p o s it iv e n e g a ti v e

P O L A R O P P O S IT E S

T H E E V O L U T IO N o f th e T R IG R A M S

+

-

+

-

-

+

+ -

T h e Ta o

So now we understand that this binary system also underpins our modern web based world. Next we need to decide whether the meanings carried by the I Ching trigrams correlate with the meanings acquired through combining the binary system with Astrology. Born of isolated cultures unless there is a foundation connection there is no logical reason why they should. The primal pair are made up of all YES lines, or all NO lines. They are called the Creative Heaven, Ch’ien, and the Receptive Earth, Kun.

Four Hsiang

Astrologically this gives us Aquarius for the Creative and Capricorn for the Receptive. Capricorn is ruled by Saturn and it seems meaningful to me that before the discovery of Uranus in 1781 Aquarius was also ruled by Saturn. In astrology Saturn is the element earth at its most structured: stones, bones, teeth, walls, boundaries, and, when applied to human endeavours, secular authority.

KUN CH’IEN

Here is Saturn in his role as Old Father Time : Saturn is indispensible but he is inflexible. This is Riga Mortis: NO, NO, NO.

Saturn’s partner is a powerful dis-ruptive force, Revolutionary Uranus is ‘the awakener’. YES, YES, YES.

Leo is fixed fire, Aries is cardinal fire and Libra is cardinal air. The ruling planets are the Sun, Mars, and Venus. We have already looked at fixed air, Aquarius. The upper line is always yang on fixed signs and always yin on cardinal signs - I am not yet sure why but I am sure this is the case. Perhaps the power to make manifest is cardinal?

And look! The trigram Li which means Clarity and whose symbol is the Sun turns up as Leo, fixed fire. Leo’s ruling planet is the Sun! Aries, cardinal fire, ruled by the warlike planet Mars, is Chen, Shock, Thunder. Both Mars and Chen mean ‘birth.’ Libra, ruled by Venus, cardinal air, is Tui, the Joyous Lake.

Li: Here is light (yang) emanating from the atomic reactions in the centre of the Sun - or a log (yin) burning on a fire. The I Ching says fire ‘clings to that on which it feeds’.

Chen: Out of the physical emerges New Life. This is Mars in action. The I Ching says: Shock, Ha Ha, laughing words.

Tui: Pollen in water jiggles. It is this that suggested ‘something’ (they gave the name atoms) is continually active in the water. The lake is active beneath a surface that reflects its surroundings; the famous mirror of Venus - a surface tension so strong things float on it without sinking.

Cancer is cardinal water, Scorpio is fixed water, and Taurus is fixed earth. The ruling planets are the Moon and Pluto and, although on this diagram Venus, old ruler of Taurus is depicted, for many first-rate reasons, since we first viewed our planet in 1961, Venus has been superseded by our home planet Earth.

Kan: Two physical NO lines enclosing a demand for self-expression, a YES line, is called The Abyss. Imagine the energy in a turbulent river trapped in a canyon. All that yang energy restrained on both sides by the demands of material reality.

These trigrams also fit with the signs that relate to them on the binary system. Cancer’s ruling planet is the Moon. The trigram Kan means the Moon

And here is Sun the Gentle Penetrating Wind. Scorpio is famously suspicious - well known for penetrating every nook and cranny. This trigram is also related to wood – roots growing deep into the earth supporting new growth.

Ken: You can see that two broken lines and a straight line on the top represents a mountain. You need determination to get to the top but wow what a view when you get there. ..... WE HAVE LIFT OFF .

O med to

Fixed

Cardinal

Fixed Cardinal

Cardinal

Cardinal

Fixed

Fixed

Here they are. All EIGHT of them. They look good to me.

2

3

1

2

1 2

12

1

2

1

212

1

2

1

4

2

1 3

1

2

2

1

3

1

3

33

12

2

3

4

4

This is a slide from the first lesson I give on astrology. I have added the tri-grams so that you can see how beautifully they organise themselves on the Zodiac. I have put the Zodiac up Ptolemaically with Cancer and Leo at the base. Aries, the first sign, begins at the spring equinox, Aries is 1-1-1.

Secta: positive 1 negative 2Quadruplicities: Cardinal 1 Fixed 2 Mutable 3Four Elements: Fire 1 Earth 2 Air 3 Water 4

We have trigrams for cardinal and fixed signs but not for the four mutables, so now that I have introduced the eight trigrams we can check out these missing mutable signs - first a look at a very ancient model - the Fu Hsi or King Wen arrangement.

00 Aries

00 Libra

Here it is, scanned from my original Chinese edition translated by Wilhelm into German and Baynes (from Wilhelm ‘s translation) into English. Wilhelm tells us that ‘the eight primary trigrams are named in a sequence of pairs that, according to tradition, goes back to Fu Hsi – that is to say, it was already in existence at the time of the compilation of the book of changes under the Chou dynasty. It is called the Sequence of Earlier Heaven, or Primal Arrangement’ . This is translated literally as ‘Before-the-World-Sequence.’ There are modern writers who explain this ancient model as an expression of ‘the dynamic reaction of opposites’ but you will see that this analysis is not strictly accurate.

They do indeed represent positive and negative polarities but (apart from Sun and Moon) they are, astrologically, polarities that originally shared a single planetary ruler. On the Anima Mundi they are named Complementary Connections the yang-yin, energy-mass, space-time expression of a meaningful whole. The Sun and Moon offer us a good example of what ‘complimentary’ means. Sun and Moon in astrology, Father and Mother, might be poles apart in function, but they are essential to each other’s operation – they work as a team. Complimentary means ‘to make complete’. Researching data for this presentation I came across this in Wilhelm’s translation of the Ta Chuan. I am delighted to learn that

my choice of title for these connections is exonerated: ‘they balance each other’. YES!

Apart from Capricorn (Saturn) winter, the seasons do not fit with the signs. I haven’t yet understood why.

Here they are again with old planetary rulers added.

Pos Neg

On the diagram on the right they are arranged according to the Ptolemaic Order. Mutable signs are not included.

When we consult the oracle we throw three coins six times, one throw for each line. Six throws of the coins, beginning from the bottom and working up, gives us a hexagram. Tails count as two, they are YIN because they tell us the divisible value of the coins. We buy ‘things’ we need using that value. Heads count as three. We know that one is heaven’s number but we are physical beings consulting the oracle in a physical world, so we add that one to two and count three for heads. Heads represent the ‘idea’ of authority, the authority invested in the coin, a ‘concept’ that is indivisible. Two tails and a head add up seven. Seven is YANG, a straight line. Two heads and a tail add up to eight. Eight is YIN, a broken line.

Throwing three heads gives us a nine. This is an old (unstable) YANG – so we mark our line with a circle. Three tails gives us a six. Six is yin but also old so we put a cross on our broken line.

Unstable lines give us two hexagrams. The changing lines tell us the actions that we are applying to the unchanging hexagram. This all explained in another presentation – for now you just need to know the symbols that apply to unstable lines.

Now we can check out the Mutable Signs. This is where the correlations get interesting. I shall begin with Pisces, mutable water, ruled by the planet Neptune.

dolphin embryo and

human embryo

YES about to change to NO .... NO about to change to YES

In Astrology, Pisces, the fishes, rules the Twelfth House, the house just above the Ascendant. The Ascendant, representative of 00 Aries on the diurnal chart, is the place of birth, so planets in the twelfth can be understood as assembling themselves in a womb. The month belonging to Pisces has both snow and snowdrops. Is it winter or spring? Everything is in flux but there is a promise in the air. Neptune has no fixed form but is full of expectation.

MUTABLE

HUANDissolution

CHINGThe Well

C

CF

F

So here is an example of a mutable sign made up of a mix of cardinal and fixed in the element water. Remember, I explained that The Gently Penetrating means both wind and wood. The hexagram The Well gives us an image of roots drawing up water from Kan, The Abyss, or a wooden bucket doing the same job. The second hexagram is called Dissolution. The Ching says: ‘wind blowing over the water disperses it as mist.’ Neptune is connected astrologically with mist and fog. These hexagrams are neither fixed Scorpio nor cardinal Cancer, but both. By a change in the top line of the trigram from yin to yang we get a portrait of a ‘double-bodied’ sign.

FENGAbundance

SHIH HOBiting through

C

CF

F

This is my favourite example. Here is the King on Mount Olympus brandishing his thunder bolt: Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, ruler of Sag. Leo is the king. The I Ching says: ‘The king attains abundance – be not sad be like the sun at midday.’ We call Jupiter ‘The Law Giver.’ The I Ching tells us that ‘in Biting Through laws are laid down, in Abundance they are applied and enforced.’

CH’IENModesty

POSplitting Apart

C

CF

F

Here is mutable earth – the hexagram Modesty - does this sound like Virgo?I have explained in previous presentations why I think Chiron and all the asteroids between Jupiter and Mars rule Virgo – they are a proto planet in bits and they explain this hexagram Splitting Apart. The I Ching tells us that ‘devotion and docility’ will see us through. These are monastic qualities highly valued by the nuns of the Virgin in the previous age and my friend Nick Oakley Smith writes about the Virgo’s critical analysis breaking things apart.

LU TreadingKUAI BreakthroughTa Chuan Page 335 ‘The hexagram Breakthrough has Tui , words, above, and Ch’ien, strength, below. It means giving permanence to words. .. Here the significance of writing in the organisation of a large community is emphasised.’

C

F

F

C

In Breakthrough: the I Ching says – ‘one must resolutely make the matter known in the court of the king’. Mercury is the messenger of the gods isn’t he? It adds – ‘it must be announced truthfully’. This might be difficult for Mercury.

In Treading we are told ‘the superior man discriminates between High and Low and fortifies the thinking of the people’. This hexagram describes a young tiger biting dad’s tail. It’s a warning to take care when playing with words. Does Mercury play with words? I think he does.

INFLUENCE, WOOING

Having looked at the mutable signs I thought I would give you an example of a hexagram constructed out of two trigrams that are not specifically related. This one is made up of fixed earth, Taurus, and cardinal air, Libra. The Joyous Lake over the Mountain. Venus rules Libra and she is old ruler of Taurus and this hexagram is called wooing! The I Ching says: ‘to take a maiden to wife brings good fortune’.

Remember a hexagram grows from the base up, like this little flower.

Doubling the trigrams gave the ancient oracle masters sixty-four separate situation hexagrams. I like my friend Suzie’s word – when consulting the oracle she says the hexagrams supply CONTEXT. Here is a page showing all of the hexagrams. It is from The Wilhelm I Ching. We have looked at 31, Wooing, and we have looked at the hexagrams that describe the mutable signs; 10, Treading and 43, Breakthrough: these are Mercurial. 15, Modesty, 23, and Splitting Apart: these are Virgoan. 21, Biting Through, and 55, Abundance: these are Jupitarian, 48, The Well, and 59, Dissolution - Neptunian. Now we need to take a look at the all-important primal pair.

The hexagrams The Creative and The Receptive are distinguished from their trigrams by the capital letter on the definite article, the word ‘the’. A single yang line represents energy and it’s compliment, a yin line, signifies mass. Three lines in a trigram give us time and space. When these trigrams are doubled it supplies a depiction of the space-time environment that our brains are designed to interpret .

1. The Creative Heaven 2.The Receptive Earth

The Imagination

The Creative Heaven

YANG

The Body

The Receptive Earth

YIN

Sensing

Feeling

Thinking

Intuition

Here is a slide from my presentation introducing the model I found hidden in the Anima Mundi. It shows how The Receptive Earth and The Creative Heaven work as a team. Whether they are ‘interpreting’ or ‘constructing’ our life experience is a moot point.

AIR

FIRE

EARTH

WATER

LEFT RIGHT

Yes yes yes yes yes yes ... action, action, action, action, action, action. The Creative Heaven, we are told, is strong and untiring. Shout STOP at the heavens and see if it has any effect. On the Anima Mundi, The Creative is responsible for our right brain processes – air and fire, thinking and intuition - these work complementarily with our receptive left brain. We are constructed out of the material of The Receptive Earth. She is mother nature, she supplies the food that sustains us, responding to all our needs. In our cognitive system she is earth and water, sensing and feeling, in our brains it is her job to connect our consciousness to its internal and external physical environment.

AIR

FIRE

EARTH

WATER

So .. are we clear on this point? The Receptive and The Creative are a single interacting unit. Yang/yin, energy and mass, built up into hexagrams are the primal constituents of ..

.. life the Universe and Everything.

Here, again, is hexagram one: The Creative Heaven. There is only ONE heaven. We experience the constant motion produced by energy as TIME. To study time we watch the sky. The Sun rises and sets; our response to day and night is inherent in our being. Astrologers are experts on time. They don’t (like clocks and watches) model only the Sun, they take into account other moving bodies in the heavens.

This is the cosmic environment set for this moment at this place. The variables are so great it is unlikely to look exactly like this ever again. Zodiac from

Solar Fire

After and Before Completion, the last two hexagrams also have special significance. Just as The Creative and The Receptive have between them decided the layout of our brains, so the last two hexagrams in the I Ching can be seen in the layout of our Zodiac. Time never stops – it is always before or after the completion of a moment in time. Since our Zodiac is a big Cosmic Clock calling these hexagrams Before and After Completion is relevant.

63. After Completion 64. Before Completion

YINYANG

YINYANG

YINYANG

YANGYIN

YANGYIN

YANGYIN

Before Completion

64

After Completion

63

YANGYAN

GYAN

G

YINYINYIN YIN YIN YIN

YANGYAN

GYAN

GThe Creative The Receptive 1 2

So hexagram 1.The Creative is made up of all positive lines and hexagram 2. The Receptive is all negative lines. When mixed up in all possible ways they create sixty-four different patterns. The lines in the last two hexagrams, hexagram number 63, After Completion, and 64, Before Completion alternate.

YINYANG

YINYANG

YINYANG

YANGYIN

YANGYIN

YANGYIN

Before Completion

The Spring equinox falls BEFORE the ruling fifth line

After CompletionThe Autumnal equinox falls

AFTER the ruling second line

All hexagrams have ‘ruling lines’ that convey their meaning most expressively. You can see that if we line the Zodiac up according to the Ptolemaic Order the ruling lines of the hexagrams define the equinoxes.

Ruing line of The Creative Heaven.9 in the 5th place means: Flying dragon in the heavens. It furthers one to see the great man.

In The Book of Revelation Time is described as a dragon waiting to devour mother Earth’s children from the moment they are born. Here he is.

But The Creative is helpless alone, isn’t it? It is totally dependant on The Receptive. Here is another example of this axiom. Light permeates space but space is black - just like this slide ...

.. until it bumps into some ‘receptive’ hardware.

And here is another precious piece of hardware, this one is so special it reflects the energy of The Creative with uncanny complexity. This is our home planet, our Earth, so hyper-receptive is our planet she doesn’t just reflect light she has allowed for the evolution of intelligent life.

The Receptive Earth.

6 in the 2nd place means: Straight square great, without purpose, yet nothing remains unfurthered.

A cube symbolises space. A cube has three dimensions that we can move around in - up down - side to side - back to front. This mouse is exploring these dimensions. Of course he also needs ‘time’ to do this exploring in - he couldn’t do this – not for one moment - without the Creative, which is why physicists sometimes call ‘time’ the fourth dimension. This line applies, of course, to our primal instincts which this mouse is also utilising to explore this space.

And this is The Receptive Earth’s ‘ruling’ line.

So now we are coming to the end of this presentation. Here is a hand drawn version of this integrated model published in the Astrological Journal, July August 1991. I had forgotten how long ago it was that I came up with this combination of the two systems of Astrology and the I Ching. Soon after, my young friend Nick Oakley Smith also wrote an interesting article published in the Journal on this same subject. Charles Harvey, the then President of the Astrological Association, was a friend and he and Roger Eliot were interested in my ideas, but when they died the interest faded away. The time was not right.

The next diagrams are from my academic essay Treading on the Tiger’s Tail (remember Gemini, Treading). I wrote this essay in 2006. Treading is the title of the hexagram the I Ching gave me at the beginning, the middle, and at end of writing. In this essay I asked; Is there an archetypal constant? Clearly there is, but in a university environment where known facts are sacrosanct and creativity frowned upon I was up to no good. I caused a kerfuffle. The first marker was so impressed with this essay he gave me unusually high marks and that worried the second marker who remarked – you can’t make eight trigrams fit with twelve signs, and marked me down. Did I mind? No - the oracle warned me that I was stomping on the ‘Mores’. In the hexagram Treading, rebellious Uranus, the Creative, is sitting on top of Libra-Tui, which we now know means ‘words’; revolutionary ideas are disturbing the waters of the lake. Ooops. With Uranus conjunct Saturn on myMC, the place where the Sun is at midday, and Jupiter conjunct Mars in Gemini making a Sextile to Mercury conjunct the Sun in Aries, I do this all the time.

My Dad’s nickname for me was ‘Trouble’.

Computer Binary

I Ching Binary

You can see these three systems match at their foundation level –

I included genetics in my essay – once eight control genes developed there was a long period called The Cambrian Explosion when mutations flourished. You can read this essay on my website. It has a lovely Chinese picture of a tiger on the front!

Astrological Binary

LAST WORDS. There you have it. These two esoteric systems work because they are based on something real ...

.. this is How Life Works .. .. life is a binary system, just as Leibniz suspected, and the I Ching and Astrology are ancient, spectacularly successful attempts to interpret its natural expression. Scientists know nothing about the genius of Astrology and the I Ching. It’s not their fault. They think these subjects are ‘occult’ hangovers from a previous superstitious age, but these systems are no more ‘occult’ than esoteric equations concerning string theory or multiple universes. I understand how scientists feel, I was also educated to think like them, but in my case Saturn, who is responsible for traditional values, cannot command unquestioning allegiance in spite flaunting impressive qualifications, not with Uranus snuggling up to him in such a prominent position on my birth chart. Uranus insists I think for myself: He also awards me creative energy - he is the Creative after all. Saturn enables me to see the structure of things and even Uranus appreciates that! Uranus might be rebellious but he is not stupid. I am up to date with scientific thought, I read The New Scientist every week but recently it has begun to frustrate me. Until they take on this information they are bound to be floundering and its hard for me to watch. .

Hi scientists,

WAKE UP

Please ....

THE END