取

Take (as in take a wife) is ear+hand. Literally grabbing someone’s ear.

憧

Unsettled is heart+child. The mercurial, tempestuous nature of a child’s heart.

从

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昃

Setting is Sun+slanting. Slanting is a man bending under a low cliff.

焚

Burn is two trees and fire.

棄

Cast out/ Abandon is a beautiful and tragic ideogram, a child in a basket being let go of by hands. You can see in the oracle form below, the baby being thrown away.

While this word is applied to Satan in this case, the ideogram is very clearly Moses. Exodus 2:2

² And the woman conceived, and bare a son: and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.

³ And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river’s brink.

涕

Tears is water+I, the water that comes from “me”. I is a humble I, a spear wrapped in leather, as the usual self is just a spear.

戚

Sorrow is scythe+ beans. Very Saturnian, this the “Grim Reaper”, harvesting Pythagorean souls.

醜

Shameful/ugly is bottle+ghost! Extremely vivid! Jung writes of this motif at length in Alchemical Studies, Chapter IV “The Spirit Mercurius” Part I “The Spirit in the Bottle”.

“There he heard a voice calling from the ground, “Let me out, let me out!” He dug down among the roots of the tree and found a well-sealed glass bottle from which, clearly, the voice had come. He opened it and instantly a spirit rushed out and soon became half as high as the tree. The spirit cried in an awful voice: “I have had my punishment and I will be revenged! I am the great and mighty spirit Mercurius, and now you shall have your reward. Who so releases me, him I must strangle.”

-The Spirit in the Bottle by the Brothers Grimm

Though you are likely most familiar with Disney’s Aladdin, or hopefully The Fisherman and the Jinni from the Arabian Nights:

“Thereupon quoth the Jinni, "Know, that I am one among the heretical Jann and I sinned against Sulayman, David son (on the twain be peace!) I together with the famous Sakhr al Jinni;" whereupon the Prophet sent his minister, Asaf son of Barkhiya, to seize me; and this Wazir brought me against my will and led me in bonds to him (I being downcast despite my nose) and he placed me standing before him like a suppliant. When Sulayman saw me, he took refuge with Allah and bade me embrace the True Faith and obey his behests; but I refused, so sending for this cucurbit he shut me up therein, and stopped it over with lead whereon he impressed the Most High Name, and gave his orders to the Jann who carried me off, and cast me into the midmost of the ocean.”

Translator Richard Burton (who truly is worth an exploration if you’re not aware of him) notes of the bottled Djinn:

This alludes to the legend of Sakhr al-Jinni, a famous fiend cast by Solomon David son into Lake Tiberias whose storms make it a suitable place. Hence the "Bottle imp," a world-wide fiction of folk-lore: we shall find it in the "Book of Sindibad," and I need hardly remind the reader of Le Sage's "Diable Boiteux," borrowed from "El Diablo Cojuelo," the Spanish novel by Luiz Velez de Guevara.

I could write of this motif alone all day!

Qabalah

It is important to note, as I briefly did in the piece, that Tiphereth corresponds to Christ, the Son of God, and the Sun itself, as well as to Satan as the bright solar angel.

Crowley writes in Book 4, part III, chapter V:

The exalted “Devil” (also the other secret Eye) by the formula of the Initiation of Horus elsewhere described in detail. This “Devil” is called Satan or Shaitan, and regarded with horror by people who are ignorant of his formula, and, imagining themselves to be evil, accuse Nature herself of their own phantasmal crime. Satan is Saturn, Set, Abrasax, Adad, Adonis, Attis, Adam, Adonai, etc. The most serious charge against him is that he is the Sun in the South. The Ancient Initiates, dwelling as they did in lands whose blood was the water of the Nile or the Euphrates, connected the South with life-withering heat, and cursed that quarter where the solar darts were deadliest.

In my scheme, Tiphereth is comprised of this and hexagram 14.

It relates to the 6 of Wands, Victory, and the 6 of Swords, Science. Though as Tiphereth, it takes on the Princes as well (the Sons), particularly the Prince of Wands and the Prince of Swords (the prince of the power of the air1)

習

I translate this character as “Gaze” as in Nietzsche’s “Gaze into the Abyss”

It shows wings and the sun, like a baby bird, Icarus, or David Gilmour, this is “learning to fly” how to get one’s wings closer to the sun. It translates as practice, study, learn.

臽

Abyss: One can clearly see the man falling into a pit.

棘

Thorns: One can clearly see a thorny plant.

Qabalah

Here we have the pure hexagram of Yesod, water doubled. Complement to hexagram 5, Waiting. As such, it is given the Nine of Cups and the Nine of Disks, the two purest expressions of Yesod in the tarot.

橈

Bending is tree+towering. A tree bending under its own weight.

枯

Withered is old+tree

華

Flower is simply a flower.

Qabalah

Chesed containing its opposite, Hod. This hexagram lands in Hod because of this opposition, while most paths are “mechanical”: the corresponding trigrams of two sephira meet on the path, this follows the logic of the maxim “Malkuth is in Kether”. Jupiter and Mercury are zodiacal opposites, Pisces is opposed by Virgo, Sagittarius by Gemini. The vast and the particular.

It given the Four of Wands and the Four of Swords, a very fun relationship which won’t last, and a brief truce which will not last.

龜

Turtle is very clearly a turtle.

欲

Desire is valley + lack. Very Lacanian!

“Desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists.

“This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil” -Seminar II

Lack itself (欠) is a kneeling person with an open mouth.

眈

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逐

Chase is walk+pig. Chasing a pig which has gotten loose.

This exact situation occurred this week with my good friend Lydia and her pig, Bacon!

豶

A gelded pig is,

pig+adorn (the name of the 22nd hexagram!) Which makes me thing of the rhyming “gilded pig”.

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藥

Medicine is grass+joy, joy is a musical instrument.

獲

To obtain is Dog+Catch. Catch is an owl and a hand.

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遠

Far is walk + a long robe.

休

Rest is a man leaning against a tree, in the shade.

頻

Again and again is a man near the water’s edge.

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剝

Stripping is also “Cutting”, peeling, etc. It is the image of a knife carving wood.

It immediately calls to mind the Hebrew work Chakak

חָקַק

(CH Q Q)

Which means to engrave or to carve, the word used to describe how God created the World in the first verse of the Sepher Yetzirah:

With 32 mystical paths of Wisdom

engraved Yah

…

And He created His universe

with three books (Sepharim)

with text (Sepher)

with number (Sephar)

and with communication (Sippur)

Aryeh Kaplan writes about this brilliantly in his commentary.

床

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須

Beard is the image of a bearded face.

白

White is the image of an acorn, for the inside of an acorn is white.

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噬

Biting is a fascinating character, I discussed it briefly in the article, but let’s dig deeper in

The image is a mouth beside divination. See the hands (bottom right) throwing yarrow stalks (top right). Between is a hall in which two people are talking. In many ways this is the image of the whole hexagram, the relationship between the mouth and knowledge, chewing on ideas, biting into mysteries. Getting to the truth.

肉

Meat is directly an image of meat or ribs.

遇

Finding or “finding out” is walking+monkey. The curious monkey finds things as he walks. Consider the knowledge gathering character of Thoth in his Baboon form. This is the Virgoan side of Mercury, while Gemini is the Ibis bird.

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觀

The title itself deserves special attention, the perfect visual expression of a “bird’s eye view”

The image characters are bird+seeing

闚

Peeping is a door through which a man is looking.

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Let’s look at some of the luminous ideograms within the text.

憂

Worry is 100+heart/mind+footprint. The heart feeling one hundred things, the mind thinking 100 things.

知

Knowing or teaching is particularly beautiful, adult+speak+child. The image of wise speech, gaining knowledge. Though over time, the child was dropped, and “adult” became arrow. Teaching as “pointed words” or a sharp tongue.

“All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.”

敦

Offering is a lamb at an altar. While the character has meant “cook” or “rich”, I chose to translate it directly as the image, what is utilizing wealth if not making appropriate investments and sacrifices?

Qabalah

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蠱

The titular character itself has a very vibrant seal script form, the three bugs in a bowl.

“The traditional preparation of gu poison involved sealing several venomous creatures (e.g., centipedes, snakes, scorpions) inside a closed container, where they devoured one another and allegedly concentrated their toxins into a single survivor, whose body would be fed upon by larvae until consumed. The last surviving larva held the complex poison. Gu was used in black magic practices such as manipulating sexual partners, creating malignant diseases, and causing death.”

Worth reading the wikipedia!

The title has been translated as “Work On What Has Been Spoiled, The Symbol of Destruction, Decay, Arresting of Decay, Work after Spoiling, Fixing, Rectifying, Corrupting, Branch, Degeneration, Misdeeds "Can refer to heredity and psychological traits.”

I chose “Sin (Decaying)” because it gets to the meat of the whole picture, decay with a wicked purpose.

幹

Atone, a character I really wrestled with over the course of the translation. The components are a Sunrise and a Man (as can be seen in the character for hex 1) with a shield/weapon/pestle, a tool. The character has been used interchangeably with that of hex 1’s Heaven 乾.

It can mean: “main” “to do” (both doing and fucking) “work”.

In the context of the hexagram, it has been translated as

Setting right, rectify, correcting, managing, dealing, attending.

To me “Atoning” was a victory, the perfect complement to Sin and Decay. Criminals and Sinners atone. One can purify what has rotted and decayed. Christ atoned for all sins. Yet again it’s worth reading about the word itself.

父

Father is a hand holding an axe.

母

Mother is very literal: large breasts. The character began as a woman with large breasts, but over time became just the breasts.

Together they make me think of the nursery rhyme

Hush a by baby,

Daddy is near,

Mommy’s a lady,

And that’s very clear

Qabalah

The hexagram falls on the Path of Pe, the Mouth. It is given to the tarot card the Tower and the planet Mars. You can see the mouth in the lower right corner of the Thoth card.

The path connects Netzach and Hod, Beauty and Mind. Many evocative images arise when contemplating this complex!

An obvious one is “tooth decay” which funny enough relates perfectly to the ideogram. In ye olde days, people believed that toothaches were literally caused by worms!

While the Tower card shows destruction coming from the top down, this hexagram shows destruction coming from the bottom up. A bad foundation rather than a catastrophic event.

The weak soil beneath the leaning tower of Pisa rather than the Twin Towers.

係

Cling to is a leashed man.

失

Lose is a fallen man surrounded by blood.

明

Shining or Bright is the Sun and Moon. One of the most beautiful ideograms in the language. This was a key to understanding Chinese for me.

Fenollosa and Pound write of it in The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry:

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I describe in the article that the name is “giving+elephant”, let’s look at the elephant in question.

象

How cute is that?

盱

Wide eyed is… wide+eye

遲

Late is walk+rhinoceros

疾

Sickness is an arrow flying toward a man.

While obviously a man struck by an arrow will get sick, esoterically this calls to mind the etymology of “Stroke”.

From Katharine Briggs’ Encyclopedia of Fairies

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謙謙

A linguistic convention in Chinese, reduplication or 叠词 “stacked words”. Multiple appear throughout the I Ching, but I thought I’d give my translation philosophy here. The stack in question is “modest modest”, which I very simply translate as “Modestly modest”.

鳴

Sound or Cry is mouth+bird.

The bird.

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Now onto the ideograms!

彭

Sound is a hand, a drum, and hair (as a comic book style image of the sound)

What a vivid image!

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To start, let’s look at the title.

同人

Together+people. Together is a house, 1, and mouth, also considered as a large object being moved by a group of people. Notably, in Japanese this is “Doujin” which is often translated as “Fandom” or “clique” or “circle” and most Americans know it as a term for fanfiction, especially DIY porn mangas!

Legge translated it as “Union of Forces”, Wilhelm as “Fellowship with Men”, Cleary as “Sameness with People”. I chose “Coming Together” as a bit of a dirty joke (cumming together in a circle jerk), but it also best expresses the subject of the hexagram.

門

A very clear picture of a gate or doorway.

宗

Family or Clan is a House with an Altar. The House of the Ancestral Shrine.

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羞

Shame is Goat+ugly. An “odd goat” or being “ugly as a goat”. Ugly is a hand with long fingernails.

繫

Tie is hit+thread.

傾

Collapse is a man with a tilted head.

喜

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