Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Articles

The I Ching Underneath

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Learn More
The I Ching Underneath

Every Gene Key sits on a hexagram, and the two should not be confused.

The I Ching, the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest continuously transmitted texts in the world. Its sixty-four figures are stacks of six lines, each broken or unbroken, and the core text attached to them is conventionally dated to the Western Zhou period, with the commentarial layers known as the Ten Wings accumulating over subsequent centuries. It has been used for divination throughout, and read as philosophy for nearly as long. The commentarial literature around it is vast, and the meanings of the hexagrams are documented in detail from sources that long predate anything modern.

The Gene Key is a reading laid over the number. Rudd's Shadow, Gift and Siddhi for each position are his own composition, published in 2009, and the correspondence between his triad and the traditional meaning of the hexagram varies enormously across the set.

Sometimes it is close. The forty-eighth hexagram is The Well, whose image is an inexhaustible source that serves a town unchanged, and the forty-eighth Gene Key runs from inadequacy through resourcefulness to wisdom, which is recognisably the same idea. The fifty-second hexagram is Keeping Still and the fifty-second Gene Key ends in stillness.

Sometimes it is not. The eleventh hexagram is Peace, the most auspicious figure in the book, and the eleventh Gene Key concerns obscurity, idealism and light. The eighth hexagram is Holding Together, about belonging to a group, and the eighth Gene Key is about refusing to be absorbed into one.

Both kinds of case are interesting, and neither is a defect. What matters is that the reader can tell which layer they are looking at. In this atlas the hexagrams are described in their own right, from the classical material, and the Gene Keys are described as what Richard Rudd made of the numbers.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Article On

Sources
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.