The Occult I Ching: The Secret Language of Serpents

By Maja D'Aoust In this illustrated guide, Maja D'Aoust applies her significant experience as a professional practitioner and scholar of the I Ching to provide a history of the oracle, explain the mechanisms at work behind it, and offer a new experiential approach to its interpretation. The author begins by examining the discovery of the I Ching by the first mythical emperor of China, Fu Xi, a divine being with the body of a serpent. She reveals how Fu Xi's eight original trigrams, also called the Ba Gua, provided a sacred language of symbols that allowed for communication between the diviner and the spirit world. Using the I Ching's principles of cosmology as a basis, the shamans of ancient China developed the earliest Taoist philosophies of nature, medicine, martial arts, and mathematics as well as ecstatic practices, war strategies, birth and death rituals, agricultural systems, and alchemical studies. D'Aoust further shows how the I Ching relates to the mathematical sequences of bi