Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Lowering the Bow Before It Is Too Late to Lower It

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Lowering the Bow Before It Is Too Late to Lower It

Nine at the top resolves Opposition and it is addressed to the person who has been getting it wrong. The line shows a subject alone in the estrangement who sees a pig loaded with mud and a cart of ghosts, draws his bow against the approaching party, then lowers it on recognising a near relative coming about a marriage. Rain follows and the outcome is good. A querent drawing this line is being told that the hostility they have been reading in somebody is their own construction.

The two images are worth taking seriously as a description of how suspicion works. A pig fouled with mud is disgust and a cart of ghosts is dread, and the line puts them in that order because contempt usually arrives first and prepares the ground for fear. Neither is presented as a lie the other party told. They are what a person alone for long enough begins to see, and the drawn bow is the point at which seeing turns into doing.

When the line changes, the upper trigram Li becomes Zhen and the figure becomes The Marrying Maiden, King Wen 54, which the classic treats as an irregular and unequal union to be entered with full awareness of what it is. The destination follows the line's own last word, since the approaching party was coming about a marriage, and it withholds any suggestion that the reconciliation is tidy. What ends the estrangement is a real connection on imperfect terms, made by somebody who has just put a weapon down.

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