Hexagram
A hexagram is, in the Chinese oracular context, a figure composed of six stacked lines, solid or broken, forming one of the 64 combinations of the Yi Jing (Book of Changes). Each hexagram carries a name, an image and a commentary.
Origin and etymology
The word comes from the Greek hexa (six) and gramma (letter, drawing). The 64 hexagrams of the Yi Jing are attributed by Chinese tradition to Fu Xi, mythical sovereign of the 3rd millennium BCE, then to King Wen and his son the Duke of Zhou in the 11th century BCE. The commentaries (the Ten Wings) are attributed to Confucius in the 6th century BCE, although modern datings place their writing between the 4th and 2nd centuries BCE. The hexagrams combine two superimposed trigrams, each trigram being one of the eight possible configurations of three lines. This double structure produces the 64 figures (8 x 8).
Evolution and tradition
The Yi Jing is one of the five Classics of Confucianism, but its reach extends beyond that school. The Taoist tradition, particularly Wang Bi in the 3rd century CE, proposed a cosmological reading. The Jesuit missionaries in China, such as Joachim Bouvet in the 17th century, were fascinated by the binary structure of the hexagrams, which they communicated to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: he saw in them a prefiguration of the binary calculus he was developing. In the West, the translation by Richard Wilhelm in 1924, with a preface by Carl Gustav Jung in 1949, launched the spread of the Yi Jing in esoteric and psychological circles.
Practical use
Consulting the Yi Jing consists of obtaining one or two hexagrams by tossing coins or yarrow stalks, and then reading the corresponding commentaries. The traditional method with 50 yarrow stalks gives a different probability distribution from the three-coin method. Changing lines indicate transformations underway that produce a second hexagram. On Tarotoui, the Yi Jing consultation is available with random hexagram generation and a commentary entry. Carl Gustav Jung, in his 1949 preface, proposed a reading through synchronicity.
Going further
The term hexagram is ambiguous: in the West it also designates the six-pointed star of the Seal of Solomon or the Star of David, unrelated to the Yi Jing. For that geometric meaning, see the star hexagram entry. Note also that the modern reading through synchronicity proposed by Jung is not the traditional Chinese reading, which is more mantic. Both approaches coexist in contemporary practice.