A Cosmological Alphabet

The trigrams function as a small alphabet of cosmic qualities from which the larger vocabulary of the hexagrams is built, and they carry meaning in their own right, in feng shui the bagua maps the trigrams onto the areas of a building or site, and in Chinese cosmology they organise the relations of yin and yang.

The atlas gives each trigram its image, family and directional and elemental associations, and its two classic arrangements. The hexagrams built from them are treated in their own category, and the trigrams connect to the wider Chinese systems under Eastern Systems.