Blue Fox Shaman

Captain’s log, stardate 100714.62: Beginning a routine training mission with a new crew aboard the starship Argo. Our first stop is in the vicinity of the Crab Nebula.

Ahem. Yes, but remember that characters and personalities interacting, as aboard a ship, using the medium of a story, is the basis of all…

Well, I was going to say divination, but Fox reminds to say it is the basis of all our ways of thinking about the world and relating to it. Perhaps we have reduced many of those characters whose inter-play is our World (inner and outer) to the status of mere automatons (machines), but the tendency to “anthropomorphize” is strong nonetheless. It is natural, given our evolution as social animals.

My orders for the training to conduct with you on this, our maiden voyage, came as the text of Hexagram 1. The Creative Heaven::Heaven, which in my magic grab-bag of imagery is also the Tarot card Five of Pentacles and the Greek word ΝΑΥΣ (ship). Hopefully, the relationship of all those disparate images will become more clear as we proceed, and I encourage you to follow up on your own, but for now, with our course laid in, engage!

Rather than calling it “The Creative”, a better way of saying it might be “That which gives form and pattern to”. The thing that receives the impression of that pattern, or form, and which becomes pregnant with it, if you will, is “The Receptive” (Hexagram 2. Earth::Earth). The Creative creates structure, hierarchy, pattern. The Receptive is that which is capable of receiving and incarnating that pattern, hierarchy, or structure. Often, in commentaries on the Hexagrams, Earth is the crew, the masses, those that take orders. (For example, Hexagram 7. The Multitude Earth::Water.)

But we were speaking of personalities. The trigram Heaven (乾 Qian), taken alone, I associate with the Tarot card The Emperor, which is the highest representative of the hierarchy of society. But every man is king of his own castle, so the pattern is repeated at each level, fractal-like. The Emperor is a synecdoche. (Love that word! Go grab your dictionaries, friends, and browse for awhile!)

The trigram Earth (坤 Kun) taken alone is the Tarot card The Empress, another synecdoche (yes!) for all those things that shall willingly receive our (and society’s) command or cultivation. Ha! In your dreams, buddy! It is both wild and untamed and receptive and yielding by turns. It opens itself fully to the one who approaches it with love. It is the matrix (Mother) of all, of all we are, and of all we are becoming. We associate it with the Greek word ΩΓΥΓΙΗ (Ogygia), the Isle of Circe the Sorceress who helps men realize they are pigs, after all.

[A brief pause to remind our readers that we will be speaking in extreme sexist terms, identifying the male gender and female gender with certain roles with which they have been associated in the stories and myths which have come down to us. It is left as an exercise for the reader to recall the arbitrariness of these associations and make whatever adjustments are necessary given their own Weltanschauung.]

So these two characters, Heaven and Earth, are Papa and Mama in the family we are describing. Their roles, characteristics, and way of being/relating will also be reflected in their children, the remaining six Trigrams, whom we we will meet next. Here, at the outset, in the first two Hexagrams, we see the essential natures of these two.

“Make it so, Number One!” quoth Captain Picard. Why? Because the Captain represents Heaven/Papa, and Lieutenant William Riker, Number One, is the Oldest Son (Trigram 震 Zhen, Thunder). Thunder is the Arousing. He sets the Captain’s will (name puns, sheesh!) in motion and gets it done. (Oh! You’re asking why are we using Star Trek: The Next Generation to explicate the I Ching, and divination generally? You’re not a Star Trek fan? Pity! Suck it up and move on friends. That’s an order!)

“Wait, wait!” we hear you saying… Just last episode (blog), you heard us say that the Trigram Mountain was Captain Picard, the Ego, etc. We’ll explain more as we go, but for now let’s just say that, eventually, Youngest Son must sit in the seat of the Father, in the Captain’s chair. In psychological terms, having the Ego become the Superego and take command, once it has mastered the right nature of commanding, is the most desirable outcome of all our stories. Now back to our regularly scheduled program…

Thunder, Oldest Son, is that handsome, lucky bastard who gets everything he wants. He doesn’t deserve it, he just takes it. He convinces everybody to follow some hair-brained scheme, and what’s worse, it often works out. At least for him. He’s that guy that sold you the used car that broke down completely a month later and, when you went back to the dealership, it was now a frozen yogurt stand. The Arouser. And right now he’s getting our dander up. [We’re constructing the Jungian “Shadow” now–projecting what we really wish we could be if it just weren’t for those someones or somethings that makes us dare not try. The point is, we have the same motivations, but apparently this other guy has none of our restraints. That son of a bitch!]

Speaking of bitches, Oldest Son is Mama’s favorite. Oh, right… I forgot to mention that in our crazy Brady Bunch sitcom, all members of each separate family form a couple, not just Father and Mother. Psychiatry is like marriage counseling for four couples, simultaneously, all closely (almost incestuously) related and all living under one roof, for better or worse. It’s a mess. So, one family consists of Mother, Oldest Son, and Middle and Youngest Daughters. They pair off with Father, Oldest Daughter, and Middle and Youngest Sons. Where did we get this strange notion? Fox won’t say, exactly, but it works. No, really, trust us! You’ll see.

Thunder, then, is motivation (obviously). It is what gets us going. Usually we experience this, internally, as strong emotion (anger, fear, lust… the whole troop). So, it’s no surprise that he’s attracted to Oldest Daughter who is the Container of Beauty. She is the Trigram Wind (巽 Xun, the Gentle, the Penetrating), whom Thunder would certainly like to penetrate… er, sorry! [Down, boy!] Now, the best definition I can give you of Beauty is that it is The Good. All you Platonists will understand me, although I’ve just tricked you all by substituting one metaphorical category for another. How about this: it is our Highest Aspiration; it is our Inspiration. (Get it? “aspire”… “wind”? Okay, never mind.) Her perfume wafts through our minds, gently penetrating to every corner. Like Glade, only better. But I call Oldest Daughter/Wind the “container” of this Good because there is one potential fly in her ointment.

[Quick digression. Since we mentioned “ointment” let us tell you, while we’re thinking about it, that Wind is the Physician, the Healer. More on that later as well, but recall in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Lieutenant Riker had the hots for Counselor Troi, the healer of the psyche, anyway. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! Ah, no more ads for tobacco products. Sorry! Got it! How many commercials are we going to inflict on you?! No more in this episode, I hope.]

As I was saying, I call Wind/Oldest Daughter the container of Beauty, but there is one caveat. One, rather large caveat, actually. You won’t see it much in the commentaries on our divinatory systems, but it is recognized on occasion–I’m referring to the notion of the Heavenly Aphrodite versus the other, what’s her name?… The Whore of Babylon. You see, what’s contained in that container may have started out as the Good, but depending on many factors, She may actually end up rotten to the core. I’m referring specifically to Hexagram 18. “Branching Out” (in the older texts) or “Work on What Has Been Spoiled (Decay)” (in the newer), Mountain::Wind. I associate this Hexagram with two Tarot cards: the Six of Wands (which depicts a noble hero receiving acclaim in the Waite-inspired versions) and The Devil. Herein is the meaning of the saying of the Master (Jesus): “The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!” (Matthew 6:32-33).

That’s it for this episode. Tune in next time for another exciting adventure where we’ll introduce you to the rest of the combined families and their often rocky, but always wacky, relationships as they travel around the Galaxy. Ta ta!