1. ASTROLOGY
and the I CHING
© Chrissy Philp. June, 2013
or ...
How Life Works

2. This presentation proposes that Astrology
and I Ching are not separate, unrelated
esoteric systems but, like mathematics and
physics, just different ways of interpreting the
same phenomena, the mysterious phenomena
that is ....
Us Here Now
... the phenomena we call LIFE.

3. In the late 1980s I began work on a series of books introducing a model of
the brain I had stumbled across lying hidden within the ancient Anima
Mundi.
In Book One, Foundation, I introduced the I Ching, Astrology, and
Modern Physics. At the end of Book One I printed simple diagrams
illustrating the basics of these knowledge systems.
Here are two of the diagrams.
These simple structures were so alike I wondered what would
happen if I treated them as one .........

4. ... so .. at the end of Book Three, Revelation, I published the result. The I
Ching is based on eight trigrams and Astrology is based on twelve signs. This
was no problem. As you can see, mutable signs of the Zodiac are mutable ...
neither one thing nor the other, but either and both.
... All that remained for me to do was check out if this arrangement
made interpretation sense.

5. YANG positive
motion/light/day/male
YIN negative
matter/dark/night/female
YES NO
I Ching basics are very simple. There is an unbroken line that symbolises
YES, and a broken line that symbolises NO. The ancients called these
‘the opening of the gates’ – YES .. go for it - and ‘the
closing of the gates’ – NO .. hunker down.

6. Here is a computer. It is a ‘thing’
doing NO-thing. What do we need
to make it run.
YES .. We need to supply it with
energy, we need to switch it ON
SEE .. You've got it. You understand!
NO YES

7. A physicist would think of these as energy and mass.
Yang is energy which expresses as motion .
zoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom
crack!
Yin is mass. Einstein called mass congealed energy, mass is that
which holds things together. Mass can be broken apart.
On the smallest scales
this can be stupendously
energy consuming –
think of the Large
Hadron Collider at Cern.

8. =
But the ancients wanted more information than a simple yes or no answer so
they piled up three lines – one for heaven, one for earth, and one for man.
These two are the primary trigrams. The Creative Heaven signifies time
and the Receptive Earth signifies space.
So now they didn’t only have energy and mass, but could work with the
result of the interaction between energy and mass.
Time Space
Yuzhou/Kosmos
‘The Chinese binomial most frequently
translated as kosmos is yuzhou, a term that
overtly expresses the interdependence
between time and space’.
Daodejung, Ames and Hall,(2003).
Space-time is not a new concept, is it?

9. Basic Rules of the I Ching
The eight
trigrams
The firm and
yielding lines
Tao
yang yin
The
Creative
Heaven
The
Recep-
tive
Earth
The
Joyous
Lake
Keeping
Still
Mount-
ain
Shock
Thunder
(birth)
The
Gently
Penetra-
ting
The
Abyss
The
Moon
Clarity
The
Sun
positive negative
POLAR OPPOSITES
THE EVOLUTION of the TRIGRAMS
+
Piling up a second line and a third line onto the original single line gives us
eight trigrams to which the Chinese masters gave eight separate
meanings.
It all begins with the mysterious Dao (Tao) .. that which Lao Tzu tells
us cannot be ‘named’ or ‘spoken: ‘Mystery of mysteries’.
Change ‘lines’ to 1’s and 0’s in your imagination and you will see that
The I Ching, is a BINARY SYSTEM.
Four Hsiang

10. Leibniz was interested in the binary system. He could see that it could be
used as the basis of a new language. In 1666, he acquired an I Ching. This
is what Time Life Books says in Computer Basics.

11. In 1716, fascinated by Leibniz’s ideas, the Scottish mathematician
George Boole created a logic system with the AND, OR and NOT,
gates Leibniz had only wondered about.
Then in 1867 Sanders Peirce was teaching Boolean logic in
New York when it occurred to him that the gates (remember the
opening and the closing of the gates) described in Boole’s binary
system were either on, or off, just like an electric switching device.
Sixty-nine years later Claude Shannon, a student roped in to
care for Bush’s massive and unwieldy mechanical computer, wrote
his master thesis inspired by Peirce’s insight.

12. 1716. George Boole creates a
logic system based on
Leibniz’s ideas.
1867. Sanders Peirce teaches
Boolean logic in New York and
recognises its potential as an
electrical switching device.
1936. Claude Shannon looks after Bush’s
decimal machine – puts Peirce’s insight to
good use.
BUSH
Oily gears
and shafts

13. I CHING
Leibniz Boole Pierce Shannon
INTERNET!

14. Basic Rules of the I Ching
The eight
trigrams
The firm and
yielding lines
Tao
yang yin
The
Creative
Heaven
The
Recep-
tive
Earth
The
Joyous
Lake
Keeping
Still
Mount-
ain
Shock
Thunder
(birth)
The
Gently
Penetra-
ting
The
Abyss
The
Moon
Clarity
The
Sun
positive negative
POLAR OPPOSITES
THE EVOLUTION of the TRIGRAMS
So now we understand that this binary system also underpins our modern
web based world.
Next we need to decide whether the meanings carried by the I Ching
trigrams correlate with the meanings acquired through combining the binary
system with Astrology. Born of isolated cultures unless there is a
foundation connection there is no logical reason why they should.
The primal pair are made up of all YES lines, or all NO lines. They are
called the Creative Heaven, Ch’ien, and the Receptive Earth, Kun.
Four Hsiang

15. Astrologically this gives us Aquarius for the Creative and Capricorn for the
Receptive.
Capricorn is ruled by Saturn and it seems meaningful to me that before
the discovery of Uranus in 1781 Aquarius was also ruled by Saturn. In
astrology Saturn is the element earth at its most structured: stones, bones,
teeth, walls, boundaries, and, when applied to human endeavours, secular
authority.

16. KUN CH’IEN
Here is Saturn in his role as Old Father
Time : Saturn is indispensible but he is
inflexible. This is Riga Mortis: NO, NO, NO.
Saturn’s partner is a powerful dis-
ruptive force, Revolutionary Uranus is
‘the awakener’. YES, YES, YES.

17. Leo is fixed fire, Aries is cardinal fire and Libra is cardinal air. The ruling planets are
the Sun, Mars, and Venus. We have already looked at fixed air, Aquarius. The upper
line is always yang on fixed signs and always yin on cardinal signs - I am not yet sure
why but I am sure this is the case. Perhaps the power to make manifest is cardinal?

18. And look! The trigram Li which means Clarity and whose symbol is the Sun turns
up as Leo, fixed fire. Leo’s ruling planet is the Sun! Aries, cardinal fire, ruled by
the warlike planet Mars, is Chen, Shock, Thunder. Both Mars and Chen mean
‘birth.’ Libra, ruled by Venus, cardinal air, is Tui, the Joyous Lake.
Li: Here is light (yang) emanating
from the atomic reactions in the
centre of the Sun - or a log (yin)
burning on a fire. The I Ching says
fire ‘clings to that on which it feeds’.
Chen: Out of the physical emerges
New Life. This is Mars in action.
The I Ching says: Shock, Ha Ha,
laughing words.
Tui: Pollen in water jiggles. It is this
that suggested ‘something’ (they
gave the name atoms) is continually
active in the water. The lake is active
beneath a surface that reflects its
surroundings; the famous mirror of
Venus - a surface tension so strong
things float on it without sinking.

19. Cancer is cardinal water, Scorpio is fixed water, and Taurus is fixed earth. The
ruling planets are the Moon and Pluto and, although on this diagram Venus, old
ruler of Taurus is depicted, for many first-rate reasons, since we first viewed our
planet in 1961, Venus has been superseded by our home planet Earth.

20. Kan: Two physical NO lines enclosing a
demand for self-expression, a YES line,
is called The Abyss. Imagine the energy
in a turbulent river trapped in a canyon.
All that yang energy restrained on both
sides by the demands of material reality.
These trigrams also fit with the signs that relate to them on the binary system.
Cancer’s ruling planet is the Moon. The trigram Kan means the Moon
And here is Sun the Gentle
Penetrating Wind. Scorpio is
famously suspicious - well known for
penetrating every nook and cranny.
This trigram is also related to wood –
roots growing deep into the earth
supporting new growth.
Ken: You can see that two broken lines
and a straight line on the top represents a
mountain. You need determination to get
to the top but wow what a view when you
get there. ..... WE HAVE LIFT OFF .

21. O
m
e
d
to
Fixed
Cardinal
Fixed Cardinal
Cardinal
Cardinal
Fixed
Fixed
Here they are. All EIGHT of them. They look good to me.

22. 2
3
1
2
1 2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
2
1
4
2
1
3
1
2
2
1
3
1
3
3
3
1
2
2
3
4
4
This is a slide from the first lesson I give on astrology. I have added the tri-
grams so that you can see how beautifully they organise themselves on the
Zodiac. I have put the Zodiac up Ptolemaically with Cancer and Leo at the
base. Aries, the first sign, begins at the spring equinox, Aries is 1-1-1.
Secta:
positive 1
negative 2
Quadruplicities:
Cardinal 1
Fixed 2
Mutable 3
Four Elements:
Fire 1 Earth 2
Air 3 Water 4
We have trigrams for cardinal and fixed signs but not for the four
mutables, so now that I have introduced the eight trigrams we can check
out these missing mutable signs - first a look at a very ancient model - the
Fu Hsi or King Wen arrangement.

23. Here it is, scanned from my original
Chinese edition translated by
Wilhelm into German and Baynes
(from Wilhelm ‘s translation) into
English.
Wilhelm tells us that ‘the eight
primary trigrams are named in a
sequence of pairs that, according to
tradition, goes back to Fu Hsi – that
is to say, it was already in existence
at the time of the compilation of the
book of changes under the Chou
dynasty. It is called the Sequence of
Earlier Heaven, or Primal
Arrangement’ .
This is translated literally as
‘Before-the-World-Sequence.’
There are modern writers who
explain this ancient model as an
expression of ‘the dynamic reaction
of opposites’ but you will see that this
analysis is not strictly accurate.

24. They do indeed represent positive
and negative polarities but (apart
from Sun and Moon) they are,
astrologically, polarities that
originally shared a single planetary
ruler. On the Anima Mundi they are
named Complementary Connections
the yang-yin, energy-mass, space-
time expression of a meaningful
whole.
The Sun and Moon offer us a
good example of what
‘complimentary’ means. Sun and
Moon in astrology, Father and
Mother, might be poles apart in
function, but they are essential to
each other’s operation – they work
as a team. Complimentary means ‘to
make complete’.
Researching data for this
presentation I came across this in
Wilhelm’s translation of the Ta
Chuan. I am delighted to learn that
my choice of title for these connections is exonerated: ‘they balance each other’. YES!

25. Apart from Capricorn (Saturn)
winter, the seasons do not fit with the signs. I haven’t yet understood why.
Here they are again with
old planetary rulers added.

26. Pos Neg
On the diagram on the right they are arranged according to the Ptolemaic
Order. Mutable signs are not included.

27. When we consult the oracle we throw three coins six times, one throw for each line.
Six throws of the coins, beginning from the bottom and working up, gives us a
hexagram.
Tails count as two, they are YIN because they tell us the divisible value of the
coins. We buy ‘things’ we need using that value. Heads count as three. We know that
one is heaven’s number but we are physical beings consulting the oracle in a physical
world, so we add that one to two and count three for heads. Heads represent the
‘idea’ of authority, the authority invested in the coin, a ‘concept’ that is indivisible.
Two tails and a head add up
seven. Seven is YANG, a straight line.
Two heads and a tail add up to eight.
Eight is YIN, a broken line.
Throwing three heads gives us a nine.
This is an old (unstable) YANG – so we mark
our line with a circle.
Three tails gives us a six. Six is yin but
also old so we put a cross on our broken line.
Unstable lines give us two hexagrams. The changing lines tell us the actions that
we are applying to the unchanging hexagram. This all explained in another
presentation – for now you just need to know the symbols that apply to unstable lines.

28. Now we can check out the Mutable Signs. This is where the correlations
get interesting. I shall begin with Pisces, mutable water, ruled by the planet
Neptune.
dolphin embryo
and
human embryo
YES about to change to NO .... NO about to change to YES
In Astrology, Pisces, the fishes, rules the Twelfth House, the house just
above the Ascendant. The Ascendant, representative of 00 Aries on the
diurnal chart, is the place of birth, so planets in the twelfth can be
understood as assembling themselves in a womb.
The month belonging to Pisces has both snow and snowdrops. Is it
winter or spring? Everything is in flux but there is a promise in the air.
Neptune has no fixed form but is full of expectation.
MUTABLE

29. HUAN
Dissolution
CHING
The Well
C
CF
F
So here is an example of a mutable sign made up of a mix of cardinal and fixed
in the element water. Remember, I explained that The Gently Penetrating
means both wind and wood. The hexagram The Well gives us an image of
roots drawing up water from Kan, The Abyss, or a wooden bucket doing the
same job. The second hexagram is called Dissolution. The Ching says: ‘wind
blowing over the water disperses it as mist.’ Neptune is connected
astrologically with mist and fog. These hexagrams are neither fixed Scorpio
nor cardinal Cancer, but both. By a change in the top line of the trigram from
yin to yang we get a portrait of a ‘double-bodied’ sign.

30. FENG
Abundance
SHIH HO
Biting through
C
CF
F
This is my favourite example. Here is the King on Mount Olympus
brandishing his thunder bolt: Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, ruler of Sag. Leo
is the king. The I Ching says: ‘The king attains abundance – be not sad be
like the sun at midday.’ We call Jupiter ‘The Law Giver.’ The I Ching tells us
that ‘in Biting Through laws are laid down, in Abundance they are applied and
enforced.’

31. CH’IEN
Modesty
PO
Splitting Apart
C
CF
F
Here is mutable earth – the hexagram Modesty - does this sound like Virgo?
I have explained in previous presentations why I think Chiron and all the
asteroids between Jupiter and Mars rule Virgo – they are a proto planet in
bits and they explain this hexagram Splitting Apart. The I Ching tells us that
‘devotion and docility’ will see us through. These are monastic qualities highly
valued by the nuns of the Virgin in the previous age and my friend Nick Oakley
Smith writes about the Virgo’s critical analysis breaking things apart.

32. LU TreadingKUAI Breakthrough
Ta Chuan Page 335 ‘The hexagram Breakthrough has Tui , words, above, and
Ch’ien, strength, below. It means giving permanence to words. .. Here the
significance of writing in the organisation of a large community is emphasised.’
C
F
F
C
In Breakthrough: the I Ching
says – ‘one must resolutely make
the matter known in the court of
the king’. Mercury is the
messenger of the gods isn’t he? It
adds – ‘it must be announced
truthfully’. This might be difficult for
Mercury.
In Treading we are told ‘the superior
man discriminates between High and Low
and fortifies the thinking of the people’.
This hexagram describes a young tiger
biting dad’s tail. It’s a warning to take care
when playing with words. Does Mercury
play with words? I think he does.

33. INFLUENCE, WOOING
Having looked at the mutable signs I thought I would give you an example of a
hexagram constructed out of two trigrams that are not specifically related. This one
is made up of fixed earth, Taurus, and cardinal air, Libra. The Joyous Lake over the
Mountain. Venus rules Libra and she is old ruler of Taurus and this hexagram is
called wooing! The I Ching says: ‘to take a maiden to wife brings good fortune’.
Remember a hexagram grows from the base up, like this little flower.

34. Doubling the trigrams gave the
ancient oracle masters sixty-four
separate situation hexagrams. I
like my friend Suzie’s word – when
consulting the oracle she says the
hexagrams supply CONTEXT.
Here is a page showing all of
the hexagrams. It is from The
Wilhelm I Ching.
We have looked at 31, Wooing,
and we have looked at the
hexagrams that describe the
mutable signs; 10, Treading and
43, Breakthrough: these are
Mercurial. 15, Modesty, 23, and
Splitting Apart: these are
Virgoan. 21, Biting Through, and
55, Abundance: these are
Jupitarian, 48, The Well, and 59,
Dissolution - Neptunian.
Now we need to take a look at
the all-important primal pair.

35. The hexagrams The Creative
and The Receptive are
distinguished from their trigrams
by the capital letter on the
definite article, the word ‘the’.
A single yang line represents
energy and it’s compliment, a
yin line, signifies mass. Three
lines in a trigram give us time
and space.
When these trigrams are
doubled it supplies a depiction
of the space-time environment
that our brains are designed to
interpret .
1. The Creative Heaven
2.The Receptive Earth

36. The
Imagination
The Creative
Heaven
YANG
The
Body
The Receptive
Earth
YIN
Sensing
Feeling
Thinking
Intuition
Here is a slide from my presentation introducing the model I found hidden in
the Anima Mundi. It shows how The Receptive Earth and The Creative
Heaven work as a team. Whether they are ‘interpreting’ or ‘constructing’ our
life experience is a moot point.
AIR
FIRE
EARTH
WATER
LEFT RIGHT

37. Yes yes yes yes yes yes ... action, action, action, action, action, action.
The Creative Heaven, we are told, is strong and untiring.
Shout STOP at the heavens and see if it has any effect. On the Anima
Mundi, The Creative is responsible for our right brain processes – air and
fire, thinking and intuition - these work complementarily with our receptive
left brain.
We are constructed out of the material of The Receptive Earth. She is
mother nature, she supplies the food that sustains us, responding to all our
needs. In our cognitive system she is earth and water, sensing and feeling,
in our brains it is her job to connect our consciousness to its internal and
external physical environment.
AIR
FIRE
EARTH
WATER

38. So .. are we clear on this point? The Receptive
and The Creative are a single interacting unit.
Yang/yin, energy and mass, built up into
hexagrams are the primal constituents of ..
.. life the Universe
and Everything.

39. Here, again, is hexagram one: The Creative Heaven. There is only ONE
heaven. We experience the constant motion produced by energy as TIME. To
study time we watch the sky. The Sun rises and sets; our response to day and
night is inherent in our being. Astrologers are experts on time. They don’t (like
clocks and watches) model only the Sun, they take into account other moving
bodies in the heavens.
This is the cosmic
environment set for this moment
at this place. The variables are so
great it is unlikely to look exactly like
this ever again. Zodiac from
Solar Fire

40. After and Before Completion,
the last two hexagrams also
have special significance. Just
as The Creative and The
Receptive have between them
decided the layout of our
brains, so the last two
hexagrams in the I Ching can
be seen in the layout of our
Zodiac.
Time never stops – it is
always before or after the
completion of a moment in time.
Since our Zodiac is a big
Cosmic Clock calling these
hexagrams Before and After
Completion is relevant.
63. After Completion
64. Before Completion

41. YIN
YANG
YIN
YANG
YIN
YANG
YANG
YIN
YANG
YIN
YANG
YIN
Before
Completion
64
After
Completion
63
YANG
YANG
YANG
YIN
YIN
YIN
YIN
YIN
YIN
YANG
YANG
YANG
The Creative The Receptive
1 2
So hexagram 1.The Creative is made up of all positive lines and hexagram
2. The Receptive is all negative lines. When mixed up in all possible ways
they create sixty-four different patterns.
The lines in the last two hexagrams, hexagram number 63, After
Completion, and 64, Before Completion alternate.

42. YIN
YANG
YIN
YANG
YIN
YANG
YANG
YIN
YANG
YIN
YANG
YIN
Before Completion
The Spring equinox falls
BEFORE the ruling fifth line
After Completion
The Autumnal equinox falls
AFTER the ruling second line
All hexagrams have ‘ruling lines’ that convey their meaning most
expressively. You can see that if we line the Zodiac up according to the
Ptolemaic Order the ruling lines of the hexagrams define the equinoxes.

43. Ruing line of The Creative Heaven.
9 in the 5th place means:
Flying dragon in the heavens. It furthers one to see the great man.
In The Book of Revelation Time is described as a dragon waiting to
devour mother Earth’s children from the moment they are born.
Here he is.

44. But The Creative is helpless alone, isn’t it? It is totally dependant
on The Receptive. Here is another example of this axiom. Light
permeates space but space is black - just like this slide ...

45. .. until it bumps into some ‘receptive’ hardware.

46. And here is another precious
piece of hardware, this one is so
special it reflects the energy of The
Creative with uncanny complexity.
This is our home planet, our
Earth, so hyper-receptive is our
planet she doesn’t just reflect light
she has allowed for the evolution of
intelligent life.
The Receptive
Earth.

47. 6 in the 2nd place means:
Straight square great, without purpose,
yet nothing remains unfurthered.
A cube symbolises space. A cube has three dimensions that we can move
around in - up down - side to side - back to front. This mouse is exploring
these dimensions. Of course he also needs ‘time’ to do this exploring in - he
couldn’t do this – not for one moment - without the Creative, which is why
physicists sometimes call ‘time’ the fourth dimension. This line applies, of
course, to our primal instincts which this mouse is also utilising to explore
this space.
And this is The Receptive Earth’s ‘ruling’ line.

48. So now we are
coming to the end of
this presentation.
Here is a hand
drawn version of this
integrated model
published in the
Astrological Journal,
July August 1991. I
had forgotten how
long ago it was that I
came up with this
combination of the two
systems of Astrology
and the I Ching.
Soon after, my
young friend Nick Oakley Smith also wrote an interesting article published in
the Journal on this same subject. Charles Harvey, the then President of the
Astrological Association, was a friend and he and Roger Eliot were interested
in my ideas, but when they died the interest faded away.
The time was not right.

49. The next diagrams are from my academic essay Treading on the Tiger’s
Tail (remember Gemini, Treading). I wrote this essay in 2006. Treading is
the title of the hexagram the I Ching gave me at the beginning, the middle,
and at end of writing.
In this essay I asked; Is there an archetypal constant?
Clearly there is, but in a university environment where known facts are
sacrosanct and creativity frowned upon I was up to no good. I caused a
kerfuffle. The first marker was so impressed with this essay he gave me
unusually high marks and that worried the second marker who remarked –
you can’t make eight trigrams fit with twelve signs, and marked me down.
Did I mind? No - the oracle warned me that I was stomping on the
‘Mores’.
In the hexagram Treading, rebellious
Uranus, the Creative, is sitting on top of
Libra-Tui, which we now know means
‘words’; revolutionary ideas are disturbing the
waters of the lake. Ooops.
With Uranus conjunct Saturn on my
MC, the place where the Sun is at midday, and
Jupiter conjunct Mars in Gemini making a
Sextile to Mercury conjunct the Sun in Aries, I do this all the time.
My Dad’s nickname for me was ‘Trouble’.

50. Computer Binary
I Ching Binary
You can see these three
systems match at their
foundation level –
I included genetics in
my essay – once eight
control genes developed
there was a long period
called The Cambrian
Explosion when
mutations flourished.
You can read this
essay on my website. It
has a lovely Chinese
picture of a tiger on the
front!
Astrological
Binary

51. LAST WORDS. There you have it. These two esoteric systems work
because they are based on something real ...
.. this is How Life Works ..
.. life is a binary system, just as Leibniz
suspected, and the I Ching and Astrology are ancient, spectacularly
successful attempts to interpret its natural expression.
Scientists know nothing about the genius of Astrology and the I Ching.
It’s not their fault. They think these subjects are ‘occult’ hangovers from a
previous superstitious age, but these systems are no more ‘occult’ than
esoteric equations concerning string theory or multiple universes. I
understand how scientists feel, I was also educated to think like them, but in
my case Saturn, who is responsible for traditional values, cannot command
unquestioning allegiance in spite flaunting impressive qualifications, not with
Uranus snuggling up to him in such a prominent position on my birth chart.
Uranus insists I think for myself: He also awards me creative energy - he is
the Creative after all. Saturn enables me to see the structure of things and
even Uranus appreciates that!
Uranus might be rebellious but he is not stupid.
I am up to date with scientific thought, I read The New Scientist every
week but recently it has begun to frustrate me. Until they take on this
information they are bound to be floundering and its hard for me to watch. .

52. Hi scientists,
WAKE UP
Please ....

97. THE
END