Ways of divination: yarrow and tortoise.

For what reason did all peoples divine?

In the mailing-list of Middaughter (Mary Halpin) there was a short but in my eyes outstanding discussion about the use of yarrow (Milfoil). Mostly a monologue by Thomas Hood, although there were also other interesting contributions. If you are not the kind of reader who can (or wants to) digest lots of words, then just read this page. For the entire discussion, click HERE
And: Part of an article by Stephen Karcher about divination being the art of 'telling' the time.

It is all about eternal time, time out of time.

Why yarrow 30-5 THOMAS HOOD

Why was yarrow chosen as the original means for the I Ching divination ritual? There is no spirituality without moral connection -- an appreciation of effects, obligations, or place and kinship.

So why would yarrow be selected for use in divination? What is spirit-like about yarrow? I think there is a clue in Legge:

"... divination...by means of the stalks of a plant,
the Ptarmica Sibirica, which is still cultivated on and about the grave of Confucius,
where I have myself seen it growing" (p.40).

Primitive people have commonly believed that plants growing on the graves of the dead communicated with the dead and were infused with their spirits. Yarrow, by its growth habits, would be likely to grow freely on the undisturbed graves. And it is this common association which led to the selection of yarrow as the means for communicating with the spirits. In handling the yarrow, the diviner is also handling a direct connection to the spiritual world.

Grandpa's grave (cont. THOMAS HOOD)

I think that yarrow is best used green. This has no documentary basis, but appeals to my imagination: think of a family in ancient China who once a year go en masse to the family graveyard to clean and restore the graves of the ancestors. After the work is done, the head of the family sits down in a cleared spot of ground at Grandpa's grave, and using the fresh yarrow, communes with the spirit of the dead. Everybody is standing around and whispering to each other, "What did Grandpa say?" Better this than a séance in a darkened room.

Tortoise: heaven and earth 31-5 THOMAS HOOD

Try to think as a man might have thought many thousands of years ago. Imagine yourself outside on a clear day. Above is the dome of heaven, round like the upper shell (carapace) of the tortoise. Below is the flat earth, flat like the lower shell (plastron). Any creature who has the sensitivity to model the cosmos in his body is awesome, wise, and a means of spiritual access.

Man's place in the universe corresponds to a spot on the inside of the lower shell, and to such a spot a diviner would apply heat to determine the will of heaven.

49 (or 50) lunar phases 31-5 THOMAS HOOD

Why does one begin with fifty yarrow stalks, but set one aside?

The text in the The Great Appendix (Ta Chuan) reads like this:

"The numbers of the Great Expansion make 50, of which only 49 are used in divination. The sticks are divided into two heaps to represent heaven and earth. One is then taken from the heap on the right and placed between the little finger of the left hand and the next, that there may thus be symbolized the three powers, heaven, earth and man. The heaps on both sides are manipulated by fours to represent the four seasons; and then the remainders are returned, and placed between the two middlefingers of the left hand, to represent the intercalary month. In five years there are two intercalations, and therefore there are two operations; and afterwards the whole process is repeated." (IX - 3)

There are clues in this paragraph as to what "50" is fifty of. Notice the terms "heaven," "earth," "four seasons," and "intercalary month." The author of the Ta Chuan is thinking in terms of the cosmic process in the cycle of the year. So far as I am aware, there is only one phenomenon in the cycle of the year that has the property of being almost 50 but not quite: there are 49 and a fraction phases of the moon in a year. I believe that this is the source of the "fifty." The stalk that is set aside represents the partial lunar phase in the cycle of the year; the forty-nine stalks that are manipulated in divination represent the completed lunar phases.

From Britannica Online, here is a specific example of the use of a bundle of sticks to keep track of time: "No North American Indian tribe had a true calendar--a single integrated system of denoting days and longer periods of time. Usually, intervals of time were counted independently of one another. The day was a basic unit recognized by all tribes, but there is no record of aboriginal names for days.
A common device for keeping track of days was a bundle of sticks of known number, from which one was extracted for every day that passed, until the bundle was exhausted."

By using 50 stalks to count phases of the moon, primitive people could keep track of the progress of the year, and these stalks would represent in simple form the whole of cosmic process.

Cycle of time 3-6 THOMAS HOOD
... I consider it far more plausible that each stalk originally represented a phase of the moon, and so four of them would represent one lunation. But however a stalk is understood, the author of the Ta Chuan and I agree that all of them together make up a cycle of time, that is, a cosmic return.

Time out of time (cont. THOMAS HOOD)

  Another little detail: the remainders (the point of whole process) represent intercalary time. This rings a bell -- no, a siren -- to anyone who has ever read a little Eliade. Eliade described how, to ancient peoples, intercalary time was special time, "time out of time," the time of the origin, the time of divination -- exactly what's happening here. So the whole Yarrow Method process generates a representation of a bit of intercalary time. Now why would anyone want to do this?
  I just happen to have [another] theory handy, Intercalary Additive Theory, and it goes like this: intercalary time is the time of adjustment, the time when all the wheels of time are reset to zero. Intercalation (way back then) specifically adjusted the sun and the moon when they got out of whack. Heaven got rectified, back to time zero , primordial time, the original Supreme Ultimate, Tai Chi itself, the great renewal as the cycle of Nature resets itself and Creation renews.
  Intercalation happens all at once, with an intercalary day, week, month, etc. But as the year ages, the needed intercalary adjustment accumulates, so that at any particular moment, to get back to time zero you need the intercalary additive for that moment, and that is what the product of the Yarrow Method represents.

Original being 5-6 THOMAS HOOD

  As was presented in Yarrow Method Symbolism, Yarrow Method symbolizes the return to original being. Because the individual and his/her universe are the same, this symbolism also refers to a paralleling return to original being in the mind of the diviner.
  Ancient ritual was not an objective procedure. In contrast, modern Western culture has achieved world dominion because it is the culture that first de-ritualized life. Western culture produces objective information. This information, at its best, is free from both subjective and egocentric bias. It is cold, hard, certain, impersonal; it is the truth of the telephone book, but it is also dead and without significance. It is an information of things and not of individuals who in essence participate in the universe as a whole -- like the tortoise.
  The I Ching is a humane subject. It gives significance, not facts. People crave to be significant. They say they want family, money, power, prestige, status, pleasure, and other such objective things, but what really drives them is the quest for significance. Significance you get from the humanities: literature, philosophy, religion, art.
  We find being by returning to Original Nature. Original Nature is the core within. Jesus said that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Well, there are also things within that are not so heavenly, but to change we have to know what is inside. We can learn the hard way by experience, or we can learn with less suffering through the I Ching.
  If pursued with sincerity and reverence, divination reveal to us our own character -- not the character we pose for public appearance but the real character that is hidden within and is beyond conscious human control. True character is unconscious style or real being, and divination reveals it.

Mirror of the soul (cont. THOMAS HOOD)

Is divination prediction? Insofar as character is fate, I think it is. Shakespeare said that our fate is not in our stars but in ourselves. If it is in ourselves, how do we get it out? We do this by divination. The utterer knows himself in his utterance. The effort to make meaning of the I Ching gives one meaning of oneself. The I Ching is the mirror of the soul.
The great mystery is how the human connects with the divine. The invariable (I believe) answer in the past was that humans have souls, and the soul is the nexus between the human and the divine, but we forget we have souls and come to think that we are things and are driven out of the Garden of Eden.

And I do think that good divination helps one to reconnect with original nature. What you find in divination is a part of your own soul. We needn't be the least bit supernatural about this. We could, for example, say that your soul is what you live for. So the real advice you get from divination is that you remember what you are living for. This sounds like nothing, but when you forget what you are living for, you stop living.