![]() ![]() The book does not get off to an auspicious start. And perhaps it is all to the good that a writer with complex technical matters to impart provides a little entertainment along the way by making it sound like he is back-engineering an alien device. Compton is at times rather like a dog with a bone with his suspicion of ancient agendas and secret hidings of the truth and encoding of data from the past, but many great discoveries were made by someone who was a bit barmy so we just have to put up with that in the hope that we have another genius. Instead I read the book as a sort of set of design notes for building such a machine now. Though Compton is obviously keen to prove the existence of a 3000-year-old spinning trigram device for forming hexagrams, I personally dismissed that idea straight away, not least because all the evidence suggests that hexagrams predate trigrams, and there are no known graphic representations of the Before and After Heaven circular trigram arrangements before the Song dynasty (960–1279). Compton, however, has an interesting take on how numbers assigned to trigram lines can indicate direction of rotation, which we will come to shortly. (Compton has made a patent application for a linear form of such a device based on these investigations.) The idea of reading hexagrams off concentric circles of trigrams is nothing new, there are Chinese diagrams showing the Before and After Heaven sequences concentrically arranged such that it is clear that rotation will produce varying hexagrams (such as this one). While this seems a fanciful view of history, it is still an interesting starting point for an exploration, since such a machine could be constructed in the present. But Compton wasn't willing to believe the sequence on his plaque was just a mistake, for him it became a kind of missing link and he continued regardless, for two decades, on the investigation that is the subject of this book.Ĭompton postulates the existence of an ancient device that used rotating disks of trigram arrangements, similar to the Enigma machine, to obtain hexagrams. These are usually considered to be mistakes and are not taken seriously as sequences in themselves (see, for instance, Dickinson and Moore, Trigrams and Tortoises: Sino-Tibetan Divination, 1997). Tibetan plaques frequently show a sequence that is broadly the King Wen (aka After or Later Heaven, houtian) arrangement but with several trigrams misplaced, or with one duplicated and another missing altogether. ![]() It led him to buying the Wilhelm and Legge I Chings and the study continued fired up by his noticing that the Tibetan plaque had the trigrams in a different order to the two common circles, the Before and After Heaven arrangements. I generally find I have to grit my teeth a lot when reading books that have a fallback position of potboiler phraseology such as 'the secret computer of the ancient gods', it is just too von Däniken for my tastes, though I concede that there's plenty of people who appear to like this sort of stance.Ĭompton's long-term enquiry began after the chance discovery of an artifact – a beaten copper Tibetan bagua (eight trigrams) plaque – in a Brighton antique shop. This appears to be an ongoing project, Mr Compton has informed me: There are new areas of research which I am interested in, particularly on a Star Gate and the Mayans and I Ching related cubism similar to the work of Sung (1934). And the third book is called 'The I Ching Key: The Pictographic Library of the Ancient Gods'. That's called 'The I Ching Key: The I Ching and the Genetic Code'. This spiral-bound A4 book is Volume 1 of a three-volume set (so far) under the overall title of The I Ching Project, but is self-contained in that the second book is about the correlation between hexagrams and the genetic code (Johnson Yan, Martin Schönberger, and Katya Walter have previously written books on this topic). Compton-Kowanz Publications, East Sussex, 2006, xvi + 301 pp, £32. It has exerted a living influence in China for 3,000 years, and interest in it has been rapidly spreading in the West.The I Ching Key: The Secret Computer of the Ancient Gods ‘The I Ching’, or ‘Book of Changes’, a common source for both Confucianist and Taoist philosophy, is one of the first efforts of the human mind to place itself within the universe. It can also be read as a book of wisdom revealing the laws of life to which we must all attune ourselves if we are to live in peace and harmony. Used for divination, it is a method of exploring the unconscious through the symbolism of its hexagrams we are guided towards the solution of difficult problems and life situations. The I Ching is a book of oracles containing the whole of human experience. I Ching Or Book of Change by Richard Wilhelm and Cary Baynes ![]()
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