The If-Will Continuum and Divinatory Shame
I’m making my way through Edward Shaughnessy’s The Origin and Early Development of the Zhou Changes, a rather masterful (and free to read!) overview of the history of the early Yijing. Shaughnessy engages in extensive discussion of the minute details of the language of the Yi, and does some great work in proposing interpretations and likely original intentions of key terminology, including the cryptic but moving 元亨利貞 yuan heng li zhen hexagram statement for the first hexagram 乾 Qian.
Of more general interest for diviners, beyond those obsessed with the early stages of written Chinese (although I would thoroughly recommend getting obsessed with the early stages of written Chinese as a light relief), Shaughnessy goes into detail breaking down how Chinese turtle-shell divination (卜 bu) questions were actually framed.
The question-asking paradigm for these diviners was developed inside a very different cosmology to contemporary Yijing diviners, but the questions share a lot in common with how many diviners I’ve encountered today formulate their questions. These questions also help illustrate a general issue I have with a false binary between “predictive” and “non-predictive” divination questions and systems.
I haven’t got the laptop battery left to scour through Shaughnessy’s book for exact page references (and hey, one reason I started this blog was to avoid having to be too academic! — but a lot of this is contained in Chapter 2 for the curious), but the process Shaughnessy presents for asking questions questions of turtle-shell divination, which followed through to later milfoil divination, is:
The diviner would state (or ‘affirm’, 貞 zhen) a ‘charge’ or ‘command’ (命 ming1), which was the action that the individual (in the case of recorded turtle-shell divinations, usually the Emperor) was going to undertake. The prognostication of whether the action will be successful or a failure, auspicious or inauspicious, would then be determined by the diviner. It is possible that the auspiciousness of the action was enmeshed in an animistic world-view, wherein the diviner was more directly asking if the action would have the backing of spirits (whether specific ones or the spirit world generally) — backing that would naturally be auspicious!
This is very similar to one of the most common contemporary Yijing question formats: “If I do such-and-such, what will happen?”
While these questions are (usually) less about going to war, the principle is the same: before an action is taken, the querent seeks to know if it will be successful.2
I’ve encountered, sometimes indirectly, comments by Yijing readers to the effect of it being less “predictive” than other divination methods — often presented as a virtue, as the Yi focuses the querent on broader topics of personal development, morality, and spiritual action, rather than simple “fortune telling”. Yet it is clear that these are still predictive questions that seek a predictive answer. The answer does not (necessarily) predict whether or not the querent will do the action in the question, which leaves open a spot for free will, but such a spot is contained within even the more “predictive” systems.
Horary astrology is the best example for this: questions for horary are generally framed as clear cut “What will happen?” or “Will such-and-such-a desired event/outcome occur?” However, contained within these are heavily implicit ifs. “Will she marry me?” is a predictive question, but it relies on a series of assumed actions taken by the querent — “If I continue to be in a relationship with her, and eventually propose, will she marry me?” is simply a more specific version of “If I continue to be a relationship with her, what will happen?”
There are many divination questions wherein there are almost no implicit ifs, except maybe an “If I do nothing, what will happen?” — asking about bureaucratic processes which are making decisions about the querent but are out of the querent’s hands are a good example, such as the querent asking if they will get a job after a job interview has been finished. There are further actions that could be taken by the querent to affect the outcome, for example, throwing their phone into the ocean guaranteeing they will not get a call-back, but these are unlikely. The “What will happen?” element is stronger in these questions.
All divination questions contain both a “hard” predictive aspect of laying out what will happen once a certain course is taken (or how an existing course will play out), alongside an aspect of interaction from the querent, to varying degrees. I call this the “If-Will Continuum”, which sounds like a bad sci-fi show, but it’s a useful heuristic for understanding how divination questions are formed across systems. More-so, this allows you to analyse your own questions for reflecting on what ifs and wills you are asking about.
This dispels the idea of “non-predictive” divination — even if the question is concerned entirely with internal personal growth and decisions made by the querent, it is still predicting something about the outcome of those actions or growth, otherwise asking the question is useless. Even extremely abstract divination questions, such as asking for a symbol to meditate on, involve some kind of predictive work: at the very least, the assumption that the symbol to meditate on will be in some way useful for the querent.
But why is dispelling this idea important? I have the feeling that among divination practitioners, particularly newer ones, there can be an element of shame regarding asking predictive questions. Many introductory books, perhaps well-intentioned, perhaps wanting divination to be taken more “seriously” by people who might not believe claims to its reliability, emphasise divination as a tool for personal growth, and will sometimes go as far as trying to separate out the proper use of Tarot, Yi, astrology (etc.) from “fortune-tellers” or “simple” cases of trying to “just” tell the future.
But in practice, we are all trying to tell the future — what differs between us is only which futures we dare ask about.
Peace,
⭕