sackett
23rd October 2003, 08:54 AM
One way to confuse astrology believers - well, confuse them further - is to introduce them to the Chinese equivalent of astrology: the I Ching.
Many of you will know this already, but for those who don't:
The assumptions underlying the I Ching are nice and symmetrical, amounting to a kind of cosmology tied to the lunar new year.
Everybody who's ever been to a Chinese restaurant and read his paper placemat knows about the Twelve Animals, one of which is associated with each calendar year in a repeating cycle.
Each animal is in some unspecified way associated with one of the Five Elements (water, earth, fire, wood (?), and metal): the Dragon is a Fire animal, the Ox is an Earth animal, and so on.
Then you have the famous Hexagrams, 64 little arrangements of solid and broken lines, that are used both for horoscopes and for divination. Each Hexagram has a traditional name: Retreat, The Corners of the Mouth, The Army, Influence, and so on. By tossing coins or yarrow sticks, the huckster, excuse me, fortune-telling master builds up a hexagram and finds its "meaning" by consulting the I Ching, a book of wonderfully cryptic adages composed by god knows who and handed down in various versions from a fairly remote antiquity.
The twelve-month year is divided into six two-month periods to correspond with a line of the hexagram associated with that year. Your birth period is thus associated with a particular line of a hexagram. Needless to say, hexagrams are also associated with Elements. Thus you have the Animal and its Element for your birth year, the Hexagram and its Element for that year, a specific line of a Hexagram for your approximate birth date, and finally the I Ching reading for that Hexagram, which the master will interpret for you upon suitable payment. For example, my Animal is the Ox (Earth) and my Hexagram is Retreat (Water), making me an Earth-Over-Water sort of guy: not quite natural, a little uncertain, prone to retire too soon from a situation. (Dunno what my I Ching reading says; I haven't owned a copy for many years; might have to do a Google on that some day. Yawn. Blink. Oof, where was I? Oh yes.)
Thus Chinese "astrology" has a pleasing regularity about it. You can play endlessly with numbers like 5, 6, 12, and especially 64. Further, and this is really delightful in its way, every time you cast somebody's "horoscope," it comes out the same! Anybody can do it! Conversely, if you "consult the oracle" with a specific question, you'll get a different Hexagram every time, and can delight your fancy with a different I Ching reading - and I promise that your reading will appear to apply to your question: twenty centuries of con men have refined the I Ching to prevent dissatisfied suckers. Dang, there I go again: I meant clients, of course.
So what's my long-delayed point here? Simply that Western and Chinese astrologies have NOTHING in common, and don't even take similar approaches to reading the future. And yet, the I Ching and its associated rubbish are accepted implicitly by huge numbers of people, and you may be sure that they really and truly govern their lives by it. No wonder: Chinese astrology is probably older than Western, and it looks considerably more sophisticated; it even looks "rational" if you use an elastic definition of the term. I can testify that its readings have an eerie way of seeming to hit the mark that no Western reading can ever do. Some determinedly rational people keep an I Ching around and sometimes dip into it, just for fun.
Bounce the I Ching and its symbolic cosmology off the head of a Western-style astrology believer sometime, and watch him get first agitated and then angry. With luck, he may even begin to doubt.
Many of you will know this already, but for those who don't:
The assumptions underlying the I Ching are nice and symmetrical, amounting to a kind of cosmology tied to the lunar new year.
Everybody who's ever been to a Chinese restaurant and read his paper placemat knows about the Twelve Animals, one of which is associated with each calendar year in a repeating cycle.
Each animal is in some unspecified way associated with one of the Five Elements (water, earth, fire, wood (?), and metal): the Dragon is a Fire animal, the Ox is an Earth animal, and so on.
Then you have the famous Hexagrams, 64 little arrangements of solid and broken lines, that are used both for horoscopes and for divination. Each Hexagram has a traditional name: Retreat, The Corners of the Mouth, The Army, Influence, and so on. By tossing coins or yarrow sticks, the huckster, excuse me, fortune-telling master builds up a hexagram and finds its "meaning" by consulting the I Ching, a book of wonderfully cryptic adages composed by god knows who and handed down in various versions from a fairly remote antiquity.
The twelve-month year is divided into six two-month periods to correspond with a line of the hexagram associated with that year. Your birth period is thus associated with a particular line of a hexagram. Needless to say, hexagrams are also associated with Elements. Thus you have the Animal and its Element for your birth year, the Hexagram and its Element for that year, a specific line of a Hexagram for your approximate birth date, and finally the I Ching reading for that Hexagram, which the master will interpret for you upon suitable payment. For example, my Animal is the Ox (Earth) and my Hexagram is Retreat (Water), making me an Earth-Over-Water sort of guy: not quite natural, a little uncertain, prone to retire too soon from a situation. (Dunno what my I Ching reading says; I haven't owned a copy for many years; might have to do a Google on that some day. Yawn. Blink. Oof, where was I? Oh yes.)
Thus Chinese "astrology" has a pleasing regularity about it. You can play endlessly with numbers like 5, 6, 12, and especially 64. Further, and this is really delightful in its way, every time you cast somebody's "horoscope," it comes out the same! Anybody can do it! Conversely, if you "consult the oracle" with a specific question, you'll get a different Hexagram every time, and can delight your fancy with a different I Ching reading - and I promise that your reading will appear to apply to your question: twenty centuries of con men have refined the I Ching to prevent dissatisfied suckers. Dang, there I go again: I meant clients, of course.
So what's my long-delayed point here? Simply that Western and Chinese astrologies have NOTHING in common, and don't even take similar approaches to reading the future. And yet, the I Ching and its associated rubbish are accepted implicitly by huge numbers of people, and you may be sure that they really and truly govern their lives by it. No wonder: Chinese astrology is probably older than Western, and it looks considerably more sophisticated; it even looks "rational" if you use an elastic definition of the term. I can testify that its readings have an eerie way of seeming to hit the mark that no Western reading can ever do. Some determinedly rational people keep an I Ching around and sometimes dip into it, just for fun.
Bounce the I Ching and its symbolic cosmology off the head of a Western-style astrology believer sometime, and watch him get first agitated and then angry. With luck, he may even begin to doubt.