My first introduction to I-Ching was about 35 years ago when a librarian in South Carolina suggested it because I was getting books on ancient religious texts like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, nordic history and eddas, Wicca, kemetic reconstructionism, Japanese Tendai Mikkyo Buddhism, and Mayan culture and just… devouring anything and everything I could about world religions and mythology.
I was really into heavy metal music, science fiction television, horror movies, and fantasy books (okay mainly Red Sonja and Dragonlance, but there’s almost a hundred Dragonlance novels) but also at the same time reading about Taoism and reading German to English scholarly translations of 3,000 year old Chinese texts.
I was a weird kid.
The Richard Wilhelm translation was frustratingly difficult but also exceptionally interesting and rewarding, mostly because unlike most ancient Western traditions, they didn’t get burned out scorched earth style, then salted by Christianity.
It was a living breathing text that had practitioners that still to this day is relevant, I mean shit… Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was inspired to write binary code based on the I-Ching. The backbone of this digital age runs literally on yin (broken 0) and yang (solid 1) lines.
Anyhoozle, I would have LOVED to have had this supplemental book to Wilhelm’s Complete I-Ching, I didn’t know this text existed until five days ago… and it was in hardcover with the other book by him for 950$ USD, but I got this paperback for nine bucks on Amazon used.
Fifteen year old me wouldn’t believe I would be using the internet, hell we had BBS that we would “call” computer-to-computer direct line and we were still so rural and poor that we couldn’t access Tandylink or America On-Line before they connected to ARPANet to later become the internet… much less to order books originally published in German in the 1950s that translate 3,000 year old Chinese texts into English so that I can read them in 2025… running code based on the stuff I’m reading about.
