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How Old Is This, and How to Read It

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How Old Is This, and How to Read It

A closing note on provenance, because these sixty-four entries can easily be read as older than they are.

The hexagrams are ancient. The sixty-four figures and the King Wen ordering belong to Chinese antiquity, with the core text conventionally placed in the Western Zhou period and the commentarial tradition, including the Ten Wings, accumulating over the following centuries. The I Ching has been continuously read, used and commented on ever since, and it is one of the most thoroughly documented texts in the world.

The gates are not. Everything Human Design says about a gate, its centre, its channel partner, its psychological character, its relation to types and authorities, dates from 1987 and after. The system is younger than the personal computer.

Nothing is inherited except the numbering and the binary structure. No Chinese source assigns hexagrams to chakras, to a body diagram, to planetary positions, or to codons. The chakra system, the Tree of Life and Western astrology, the other components of the synthesis, likewise contain nothing that anticipates this arrangement.

The origin claim is a revelation claim, made by a named individual about a specific eight-day period in January 1987, and it is described here as what it is.

None of this is offered as a verdict. Practitioners find the system useful and report that it describes them well, and a large teaching and consulting practice has grown around it in the four decades since. Whether it works is not a question these entries take a position on. What they do take a position on is dating: the structure of sixty-four is genuinely old, the mapping laid over it is genuinely new, and the two should not be allowed to borrow authority from each other.

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