i ching
ok so you clicked. what were you hoping to find?
an insight into a problem at hand? you could try consulting the i ching, an ancient chinese oracle — and : no need to throw a tortoise into the fire and interpret the cracks in its shell, or obtain fifty yarrow stalks. you can even leave your three coins in their box. because thanks to the internet you can just click here and get an instant i ching reading. unfortunately the interpretation on this website of the hexagram/s thus obtained leaves much to be desired, but then many things do.
for a number of years in my early twenties i was a semi-serious student of chinese medicine and philosophy, even making a foolish half-hearted attempt to learn mandarin. back then i probably would have said, on some days at least, that i was a taoist. the wilhelm/baynes translation of the i ching which i bought with real money in sydney at gleebooks in 1981 has been with me ever since.
the wilhelm/baynes translation can be found online here but there is a new translation of the book of changes or i ching. this is not news that would normally fill me with either joy or hope since there are an extraordinary bunch of butcherings committed by all kinds of schmoopers over the last fifty years since the i ching became a favourite hippie text and was popularised by bob dylan and john cage amongst others.
but the new translation appears to be by a scholar with a significant reputation, john minford, who has also translated the tao te ching. his publisher could find no space in the book for the footnotes so minford put them online.
i sometimes find footnotes fascinating because they reveal something about the author that the main text doesn't, and in some books, even of fiction, an entirely different dimension for reading the book is created, a classic example of this being, of course, infinite jest.
i am interested in having a look at this new translation now.
If you explain divination like wikipedia, “as a systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand” it is no different from science : part of a long tradition of humans looking for order and insight by whatever means possible.
Used in various forms throughout history, diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a querent should proceed by reading signs, events, or omens, or through alleged contact with a supernatural agency. The word comes from the Latin divinare, 'to foresee, to foretell, to predict, to prophesy', and is related to divinus, 'divine'), or “to be inspired by a god.” is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual.
for thousands of years charlatans have claimed inspiration from gods to deceive people and take advantage of them but now that god is dead and we have the internet, if you want to gain insight into a question or situation but you're not up for an occultic, standardized process or ritual, like disembowelling a goat, you can click here.