← Going Deeper: Intermediate Astrology · lesson 38/38
If you've read the plain-English introduction, you know what a hexagram is and why the question matters. This article is about what we've actually built with it, and — more usefully — when to reach for it rather than something else.
Rather than selling half a dozen different I Ching products, there's one consultation with a choice of approach. The cast is the same; what changes is what gets emphasised and how the reader talks to you.
| Approach | Reach for it when |
|---|---|
| An open consultation | The general case. You have a question and want the situation described. |
| What is going on here? | Something feels off and you can't yet name it. This one describes rather than advises. |
| A decision to make | You're weighing whether or how to act, and want the ground you're deciding on laid out. |
| What stage is this in? | Something's already in motion and you want to know where in its arc it sits. |
| A contemplative reading | Not asking what to do. Cast with yarrow, read as a mirror. |
| This hexagram and my chart | You want the cast cross-read against your own chart — see below. |
| Between two people | A hexagram read as two parties: what each brings, how they stand to one another. |
There are also periodic readings — daily, weekly, monthly and a year-ahead — which work a bit differently, and we'll come back to those.
They're not rivals; they answer different shapes of question.
Tarot is a mirror. It's very good at feeling, at what's underneath something, at the parts of a situation you already half-know. Cards give you images to react to, and the reaction is half the value.
The I Ching is more like a description of the terrain. It's process-shaped: what stage a thing is in, which way it's moving, what this moment asks of you. Less "how do you feel about it", more "here is the shape of what you're in".
Rough rule: if you want to understand your own response to something, tarot. If you want to understand the situation and its timing, the I Ching.
A transit forecast is a schedule. It's built from where the planets actually are and where they'll be, so it can say when — this month, around the twelfth, for about three weeks.
The I Ching says nothing about dates. It reads stage and sequence — beginning, awkward middle, turn, full expression, past the peak — and what each stage asks. It's the difference between a weather forecast and a description of the sea you're currently swimming in.
If you want to know when, use a forecast. If you want to know what's happening and how to meet it, cast.
This is the part we think is genuinely unusual, and it comes from a real correspondence rather than a marketing one.
The modern Human Design tradition — synthesised by Ra Uru Hu in 1987 — numbers its 64 gates identically to the 64 hexagrams. Gate 1 is hexagram 1, straight through to 64. Those gates are laid around the zodiac, each occupying a small arc of it.
Our Embodied Energy Chart is our own independently-built take on that tradition, and because it already places all 64 around the ecliptic, an I Ching cast can be cross-read against your chart. That gives one of three answers, and they mean genuinely different things:
We'd rather show you which of those it is than flatten all three into "connected!".
The I Ching and astrology aren't strangers, and the connections are historical rather than invented:
The twelve sovereign hexagrams. Han dynasty scholars mapped twelve hexagrams onto the twelve solar months — the yang line returning at the winter solstice, filling from the bottom until the hexagram is all yang at midsummer, then yin doing the same. It's a calendar, not a divination: the month you're in has a governing hexagram whether or not anyone casts anything. Our monthly and year-ahead readings use it directly.
Jing Fang's Na Jia. Around the first century BC, Jing Fang mapped the Chinese sexagenary calendar — the same stems and branches used in Chinese astrology — directly onto the lines of a hexagram, weighing them against the day and the month. That's not an analogy between two systems; it's one system built on the other. (We don't implement this method — it needs sources we don't yet have, and we'd rather leave it out than guess at it.)
Shao Yong's Plum Blossom. An eleventh-century method that derives the hexagram from numbers and the moment itself rather than from chance, which is why it was later folded into Ming-dynasty Yijing astrology. Also not implemented here, for the same reason.
A fair objection: isn't casting on a schedule missing the point? If the oracle answers questions, what's a hexagram cast every Monday actually about?
It's a good objection, and it's why the periodic readings are built the way they are.
Every one of them carries a standing question — yours, which you can set and change. "How do I stay steady while the move happens?" asked weekly is a real question, honestly put, revisited on a rhythm. That's different from casting into the void and hoping something turns up.
And the monthly and annual readings have a second layer that isn't cast at all: the sovereign hexagram for the solar month, which is simply a fact about the season. We keep the two visibly separate — here's what the season is doing, which is true for everyone, and here's what your own question looks like inside it.
Being straight about which parts are ancient and which are ours matters here. The daily and the year-ahead have long precedent. The weekly doesn't — there's no week in the Yijing, and we'd rather say so than dress up a product decision as tradition. Its value is the regular return to the same question, not the calendar.
We won't predict deaths, diagnoses, legal outcomes or money. We won't tell you to leave someone or stay. And when a reading touches something that deserves a professional, it will say so.
The I Ching is a way of looking at a situation carefully. Everything after that is still yours.