I will describe a procedure for using sticks to consult the Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching) as an oracle on matters of interest. There are a bunch of other ways, but this one is by any measure the least lazy of them all. The concept behind this divination is to use a ritual process to generate one of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, which you then interpret to your satisfaction.
Divination is the art, craft, pseudoscience or just plain malarkey means of getting information or making decisions based on some supernatural connection established by any of a small plethora of possible means. Whoo-woo, ...
OTOH, it might be a valid and effective way of engaging with one's subconscious to help in sense-making or decision-making. The oracle is your subconscious.
Believe what you prefer to believe, like Jesus the Christ intended.
My description here is couched in terms of engaging one's subconscious, which is where I'm coming from as a compleat philosophical monist and total science-freak who would like very much to believe in magic, but places it at the very bottom of the list of possible ways to organize and conduct one's life.
What you need
- A sheet of paper
- A largish clear surface in front of you, like the floor or an empty table. A carpet or cloth covering is nice to keep the groups of sticks tidy.
- A set of fifty sticks that you can easily grasp as a bundle your hand.
- In one Chinese tradition, yarrow stalks cut to a convenient length were used. They are skinny, irregular, and there is no reasonable reason to use them rather than anything else. Don't waste your money buying a set of them online.
- I recommend making your own sticks, even if that means as little as cutting the sharp ends off of 50 wooden BBQ skewers. The reasoning is that the more intentional effort you put into this, the better your results might be, either from better connection with Woo-Woo or better engagement with your subconscious (which happens to be most of you, by the way).
Back when I was actually doing this, I used sticks I cut from some reeds growing on sand dunes near the beach on Padre Island, Texas in 1972. Mine were about 10 inches long and 3/16 inch in diameter, +/- 1/16 inch (I know these measurements by sight, because I make fine things from wood.)
What you do
OK. The objective is to get a set of 18 'changes' to determine the six lines of an I Ching hexagram. Each line takes three changes (mutations) to set. You get the three mutations by repeating a subprocess six times, with each subprocess being three repetitions of a sub-subprocess. Clear, yeah?
The algorithm:
Get the hexagram:
Repeat the following six times to obtain a hexagram of six lines, which will be one of 64 types (26):
Repeat the following three times to obtain one line, which will be one of four types (solid or broken and old or young, by one description):
Go through seemingly meaningless bother to obtain one mutation.
Interpret the hexagram
The actual procedure in painful detail:
(TL;DNR: go watch a YouTube video)
- Remove one stick from the set of 50 and set it aside. You aren't going to use it.
- Take the remaining bundle of sticks and divide it into two sets of about the same size.
- Set them down, one to your left and one to your right, leaving some clear working space between them.
- Take one stick from the set on your right side.
- Now you're going to use your left hand as a kind of storage rack for sticks. Place the one stick between your little finger and ring finger of your left hand and hold it there.
- Now pick up the bunch of sticks that are on your left and hold them in your left hand between thumb and index finger, keeping that one stick between the fingers, where you put it earlier.
- Start removing sticks from the bunch four at a time, setting them aside on the left. Continue until you have no more than four sticks remaining from that bunch (1, 2, 3, or 4 sticks).
- Take the remainder and store them between your ring and middle finger of the left hand.
- Now pick up the bunch from the right side in your left hand and repeat steps 6, 7 and 8, but storing the remainder between middle finger and forefinger.
- You now have three sets of sticks between fingers on your left hand. Put them together and set them in the work area in front of you. You have thus generated one 'change'.
- We need three 'changes' to determine one line of the hexagram, so now take up all the other sticks up in one bundle and repeat the entire process from step 2 through step 10 to obtain a second small group, and then once again to get our third and final group.
- This leaves us looking down at three smallish groups of sticks, each representing a change or mutation. That's enough to determine one line of our hexagram. Now we count the sticks in each group.
The first group total is either 5 or 9, but most likely 9. (1+4+4, 1+3+1, 1+2+2, or 1+1+3)
The second is either 4 or 8, with equal probability. (1+4+3, 1+3+4, 1+1+2, 1+2+1).
The third is is also either 4 or 8.
- Now use those count for each group to assign another number to the group according to rules:
For each group of 8 or 9, count 2.
For each group of 4 or 5, count 3. Add the three numbers up to get a total of 6, 8, 9, or 7. Each of those four numbers corresponds to a type of hexagram line as shown in the table below.
- Find the hexagram line that corresponds to the number you just obtained and draw it on a piece of paper.
- Fun, right! Good. Now we have to do all of that again five more times to get a complete hexagram of six lines!
Table from Wikipedia
|
Number
|
Yarrow stick probability
|
YinYang
|
Signification
|
Symbol
|
|
6
|
1/16
|
8/16
|
old yin
|
yin changing into yang
|
---x---
|
|
8
|
7/16
|
young yin
|
yin unchanging
|
--- ---
|
|
9
|
3/16
|
8/16
|
old yang
|
yang changing into yin
|
---o---
|
|
7
|
5/16
|
young yang
|
yang unchanging
|
--------
|
You might be thinking that's a lot of effort, and it really is, but not as much effort as it takes to describe it, I'll tell you that.
What it means
-
Probably nothing, but maybe something.
-
If you're learning, you are demonstrating major determination and commitment to a purpose through repetitive action, thus developing a channel to your subconscious (or a connection with the Woo-woo, if you prefer).
-
If you are well-practiced to the point of performing mostly with muscle memory, you are engaging in a form of meditation similar to, well, meditating. Or bowling, playing billiards or pool, running long distances, or maybe playing hacky-sack. You are abdicating to your subconscious self.
-
You have obtained a sign that you can now interpret with unexplained science or magic for whatever purpose you have and using whatever will you have to believe.