A collection of the people, objects and moments the I Ching has passed through over three thousand years: the writers and musicians who worked with it, the manuscripts buried with it, the diagrams that carried it to Europe, and the places it still turns up today. Open a drawer below to browse.
In her essay “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be,” Le Guin asked the I Ching to describe a yin utopia, a society built on softer, receptive values. It answered with Hexagram 30, changing to Hexagram 56, The Wanderer, and she said those texts shaped how she wrote and revised the essay.
Cameron was a painter, poet, actor and occultist in postwar Los Angeles. The I Ching was one of the divination practices she worked with, a very different Western encounter from the scholarly translations of the same years.
Harris painted the Thoth Tarot with Aleister Crowley. Her letters to him show she chose the I Ching as one of the systems she wanted to study while searching for a new way to paint.
Stein’s book is a feminist rereading of the I Ching. Instead of only translating it, she questions and reframes it, reading the old text through a modern understanding of gender.
Dick consulted the I Ching while writing The Man in the High Castle and let its answers decide turns in the plot. His characters consult it too, inside the alternate world of the novel.
Cage composed with a copy of the I Ching, three coins and a large chart of sounds beside him. He threw the coins again and again, and let the resulting hexagrams decide the structure of the music.
Jung wrote the foreword to the Wilhelm-Baynes English edition. He saw the I Ching as a key example of synchronicity: meaningful coincidence between what happens inside us and around us.
McKenna studied the traditional order of the hexagrams mathematically, measuring how much each one changes from the last. He turned those numbers into his “Timewave”, a theory of time and novelty built on the I Ching’s sequence.
In Dick’s 1962 novel, characters consult the I Ching to make decisions, and Dick consulted it himself while writing. The book uses the oracle both as part of the story and as a way of writing it.
Cage’s 1951 piano work is one of the clearest cases of the I Ching used as a working system. Coin throws produced hexagrams, and each hexagram chose the next sounds, durations and dynamics.
In the 2013 episode “The Crash,” Don Draper walks into the agency’s writers’ room and finds Wendy, a young stranger, reading the I Ching with three coins. It is a brief, dreamlike scene: an ancient oracle sitting inside a modern advertising office.
Pink Floyd’s 1967 song “Chapter 24” takes its lyrics from Hexagram 24, Return, in the Wilhelm-Baynes translation. Lines from the I Ching become the words of a psychedelic rock song.
George Harrison said the I Ching was on his mind when he started the song. Thinking about chance in the same spirit, he opened a book at random and took the first words he saw, “gently weeps,” as the seed for the song.
The Shanghai Museum holds bamboo strips from around 300 BCE that include an early copy of the Zhou Yi. Scholars study them to see how the text read before it became fixed. The photograph shows another manuscript from the same collection.
A Han dynasty tomb at Mawangdui, sealed in 168 BCE and opened in 1973, held a copy of the I Ching written on silk. Its hexagrams are in a different order from the version we read today.
Before coins, readers cast with 50 dried yarrow stalks, dividing and counting them in a long sequence to produce each line. It is slower than coins and gives slightly different odds for each kind of line.
Casting with three coins became the common, quicker alternative to yarrow stalks. Three coins are thrown six times, and each throw gives one line of the hexagram.
Wilhelm’s German translation, made with the scholar Lao Naixuan and published in 1924, became the most influential Western version. Cary Baynes’s English translation of it, published in 1950, spread it much further.
This chart of the hexagrams was sent by the Jesuit Joachim Bouvet to the philosopher Leibniz in 1701, and Leibniz added his own numbers to it. It links the history of the I Ching to the history of European mathematics in a single sheet of paper.
This line from Hexagram 3 describes a young woman who refuses a marriage and accepts only after ten years. Scholars Geoffrey Redmond and Tze-ki Hon note that, read without later commentary, the early text shows women with some say over their own marriages, and none of the later rule that women should stay passive and at home.
The I Ching grew out of the Zhou court, where divination, ritual, decisions and writing were bound together. Archaeologists study it alongside bronze inscriptions and divination records from the same world.
Leibniz received a chart of the hexagrams from Joachim Bouvet in 1701 and published his binary arithmetic in 1703. The link between the two is documented. The popular claim that the I Ching gave him binary is a later simplification: he had developed it already.
Jesuit missionaries in China carried knowledge of the I Ching into Europe. Bouvet’s letters to Leibniz are the best-known example, and Jean-Baptiste Régis and colleagues made a full Latin translation in the 1730s.
In the 1960s the I Ching became part of the Western counterculture. The Wilhelm-Baynes edition sat on shelves beside books on Zen and psychedelia, and writers, musicians and artists began using it to make work and decisions.
Manuscripts dug up in the last fifty years, from the Shanghai Museum strips to the Mawangdui silk, show different wording, formats and orders. They show the I Ching as a tradition that changed as it was copied, not one fixed book handed down untouched.
Each card lists its image credit and source. Where a photograph shows a related object instead of the exact one described, the card says so.