I'd like to know more about finding one's natal hexagram.

What does this information provide us with?

Is this a description of our true self..Or is it a guide to sucessfully fullfilling our destiny?

Hope this makes sense :\

Jeannie

I googled "Natal Hexagrams". These look nice:

http://www.psychicsophia.com/taoofbirthdays/natalhex.htm
METHOD FOR FINDING NATAL HEXAGRAMS

About I Ching Astrology
http://www.erosastrology.com/iching.htm

Natal hexagrams and yearly horoscope of Albert Einstein.
Natal hexagrams and yearly horoscope of Marilyn Monroe.
http://www.crystalray.org/iching/sampleread.htm

Tom

Okay so I found that my natal hex is 24 - how do you read your i ching astrology?? i'm a libra & i used that link above to read all about me [which i've done many places elsewhere too], but i am unsure about the i ching astrology, is that different? does it go by hex's?

wow. according to psychicsophia, I'm 28. How shockingly accurate.

http://www.wayofheaven.com/

Here you can calculate your own birth-hexagrams. Both earlier and later heaven. It is good, but occasionally wrong. It seems it is very difficult to write a software which can calculate it without faults.

Everyone has a stem and branch for the year, the month, the day and the hour of birth. Like "Metal Dog", or "Wooden Horse".
Every stem and branch has numbers associated with it. All even numbers added are the earth-trigram, all odd numbers the heaven-trigram. The hour decides about the changing line.
Every yang line covers 9 years of life, every yin line 6 years.

My own experience is, that it works. Although I have not the slightest clue how.

The natal-hexagram of Pocossin's link is more like Western numerology, and based op the Western way of numbering the years.

LiSe

Of the three links I gave, the second and third are radically different from the first. I had never taken 'natal hexagrams' seriously because clearly they are a relatively new innovation, a consequence of Moslem or Jesuit influence. Ancient Chinese characterized the person by the moment of parental intercourse, not the moment of birth as in western astrology.

Wherever it comes from, though, interesting material lurks in I Ching Astrology.

First, it uses the purely solar hexagram calendar of the taixuanjing (Blofeld) rather than the exceedingly complicated solar-lunar calendar of Chinese almanacs.

"The year for I Ching astrology starts at the winter solstice, the culminating point of winter, which falls on the 22nd or 23rd of December."

"The year used for I Ching astrology is also different than the one used for Zi Ping Ba Zi, Zi Wei Dou Shu or "Four Pillar" astrology, ...."

http://www.crystalray.org/iching/ichingastro.htm
About I Ching Astrology

Second, I Ching astrology uses the system of hexagram interpretation found in Plum Flower Mind I Ching. That is, hexagrams are interpreted in terms of ti, yung, and five element relationships, but unlike Plum Flower Mind, I Ching astrology also uses the appended hexagram text.

http://www.dataship.com/emas/readings/emaster/pre_hev.html
Pre-Heaven Hexagram and Reading for Energy Master

Energy Master's homepage is the beginning of an extensive example of the natal hexagrams for Energy Master itself.

http://www.dataship.com/emas/readings.html
ENERGY MASTER: I CHING ASTROLOGY

So far as I can tell, erosastrology, crystalray, and dataship are all using a similar method for calculating and interpreting natal hexagrams. Apparently it is an authentic Taoist method.

Tom

Question: what is the great fascination of birth hexagrams? I noticed this when I first posted a link to them in the newsletter - a very, very clicked link. The idea of simply asking Yi for 'your' hexagram doesn't seem to hold the same appeal as something calculated by date of birth. Can anyone make out why not?

I guess it is the ritual. The moment of birth is the first real 'moment in time' in a life. It seems to be a belief in all peoples that a special moment decides about the time after that. Like new moon decides about the coming month, or solstice about the year.
So birth decides about a life.

Casting one at 'a' moment has no ritual. Maybe a bit more at a certain point in time. At the start of a cycle, or at a special happening.

And a birth hexagram, at least the Chinese one, has a way of calculating it which is directly connected with your personal birth signs. They have proven over the years to have meaning. So the birth hexagram also acquires this same meaning.

When it is THIS hexagram, and it cannot be changed, then one really explores it. If I had cast mine myself, I would not have taken it seriously. It did not 'fit'. But I was stuck with this one (I have 13 to 30), so I had to find the meaning. And that proved to be very valuable. Taught me a lot about myself.

LiSe

Hi Hilary,

Yeah, what LiSe said.

I think doing a "me" or "my" hexagram reading 'feels' more like a branding; something you're sorta stuck with. By making it an object outside yourself, like the stars, it feels more flexible, change-able.

I use the word 'feel' because you seemed to be asking why most people are more comfortable with one over the other.

For future readers of this old thread: as designer behind the birth hexagram calculator on www.wayofheaven.com I'd just like to emphasize it was subjected to extensive testing before being put online in Dec 2001.

Manually double-checking one suspect case submitted by Lisa (see above) revealed a miscalculation on her part (it was a leap year--it is easy to forget to add one day in those cases). I myself put the manually calculated case of Lady Di as a sample on the site and only after a long time realized it was in error. By chance I discovered the calculator produced a different hexagram and after manually double-checking it the calculator was found to be in the right.

And while on the subject of confessing human shortcomings: Swedish author Strindberg was another case manually calculated by me and mentioned in passing on the site, only to be removed when I again found a different hexagram was produced by the calculator. Going through the case a second time I solved the puzzle: I had happened to manually read a table vertically rather than horizontally, thus obtaining a wrong numeric value. But before realizing that I spent five hours pulling my hair in search of a non-existent error in the computer code!

So, a correctly implemented computer algorithm is of endless value since manual mistakes are obviously very easy to make. You can rest assured you won't be wasting thoughts on a hexagram that's wrong to begin if using my calculator. I have even included an automatic adjustment of the Winter Solstice to the local timezone. This is missing from Sherrill & Chu's book "Astrology of I Ching" since it very rarely would lead to a different birth hexagram. On the other hand, it would make EVERY computation even more time consuming.

But a word of warning is in place. Both of the two programs producing hexagrams according to this method that I have so far found and downloaded from the Internet were poorly designed and gave wrong answers. One even stumbled in its very first step, picking the wrong numeric value for the year in question!

And last, pay no attention to the stray opinion that the (only) published book on this system itself contains an error (thus affecting all software), this is not so. This critic has misunderstood the way the trigrams are derived from numeric values.

/Siwert

March 11 1948, in the Wan Nian Li (Chinese almanac):

Year: wood yang, 6 and rat, 1+6
Month: wood yin, 2 and hare, 3+8
Day: wood yin, 2 and sheep 5+10
Hour: (on a yin wood day, 10.50 local time) metal yin, 4 and snake 2+7

When I add them all: earth trigram 6+6+2+8+2+10+4+2= 40
And heaven trigram 1+3+5+7= 16
Yang year and woman, so 40=KAN is top trigram
And 16=QIAN is bottom trigram
Huh.. hex.5 ?????

What did I do wrong?? I found my initial mistake, had 1 for yang wood instead of 6, and then you get 61 as natal hex. But this time?

Never again going to say about any program, that there are occasional mistakes. Sorry for that, Siwert!

LiSe

Since this thread started, I learned my own time of birth. And succumbed to curiosity (still not convinced this is worth more than just asking Yi in the ordinary way, but somehow it's hard to resist) and went to wayofheaven.com

Birth hexagram 44, 'later nature' hexagram 5. Really not sure what to make of that!

The cycle I use can also calculate birth hexagrams in a number of areas. The Sun, the Ascendent, Midheaven, IC, Descendent, all the planets. (you would need an accurate time of birth) And it would also enable you to see a model of how your energy moves daily, showing you different transforming lines and hexagrams according as related to timeframes.

I will deffinately add here, that my own interpretations of the cycle I use are completely personal by nature, therefore they could be completely wrong. I am happy to accept this. But the greatest versatility the cycles allow is for you to concentrate on particular energies and try to understand this over the course of a day. Ask the universe a question, and the answers are already trying to find you.

So, if anyone would like one done, but not view it too seriously, and with good humour! PM your time and date of birth and I'll send you the details back.

September 15, 1954 at 11 hrs 45 mins

Heylise: I notice a difference in the values assigned the heavenly stem and the earthly branch for 1948 compared to the method presented by Sherrill & Chu. The Astrology of I Ching uses three sexagenary cycles and 1948 is the middle one. 1948 has Earth (1) as the heavenly branch and water (1 & 6).

I stop there since the reasons for the differing results are already apparent. Neither of us is right or wrong! These seem simply to be two different methods with different outcomes! How confusing!

Hilary: hexagram 44/5 has only come before me once since I too prefer questioning the I Ching on the fly, as questions come up. Where multiple cases of the same hexagram and line have amassed, this method has indeed proven to be strange. Sometimes the hexagram is literally spot-on but sometimes it must be considerably stretched to fit the facts.

Mozart and Jack Lemmon for instance were both born under the same auspices if the birth times published on the Internet are to be trusted. One, Mozart, ultimately WAS a failure in his lifetime as predicted by hexagram 18 line 4, while the opposite was true of Jack Lemmon. I just added a little text on Mozart to my site, but there are more brow-raising celebrity cases in store, whenever I get around to preparing more texts.

The sole case of 44 line 5 in my unfortunately very few saved files on "ordinary" people did have her share of early problems but the woman, formerly a nurse, did finally mature and become a most beautiful person. The trouble in early life related to the father, as he is seen in hexagram 44 locking up the melon (his daughter) behind bars to "protect" her against the outside world until she is of marriageable age. (Remember that the hexagram deals with loose living of all sorts.)

This corresponded to a very old-fashioned method of upbringing, even extending to cruel beating in this, the single case I am aware of (experiences were thus in direct opposition to the recommendation of the fifth line to treat Yin softly!). An enormous forbearance has developed in this person who now "allows the easily spoiled melons to develop in their own good time." She has allowed herself the drawn-out and rather slow process of personal growth indicated when there is a majority of yang lines in the birth symbol (in accordance with ancient Chinese sayings about the "good qualities always taking the longest to arrive").

A most notable case of hexagram 44, confirming the basic idea of denying the dark yin principle entrance, is Oscar winner Michael Moore who is born to the bottom line where strict measures are taken against all potential evil! Just check his one man war against the corruption and stupidity prevalent in the US! If this is not the essence of hexagram 44 I don't know what is!

Jack Nicholson is also born to the same bottom line, and the way he looks when frowning upon any "darkness descending upon him" in his various movie parts also shows the extent to which he is probably possessed by the spirit of this very either/or type of hexagram. Remember his obsessive washing of hands in "As Good As It Gets." That says something of the concerted effort to keep all lowliness, evil or yin stuff out of one's world - at least as things are formulated at the early stage of the bottom line. Line five of course represents a better perspective and will not be prone to such deeply felt revulsion and disgust as seen in many of Nicholson's characters and in Moore himself. We also find eccentric and mysterious "Kung Fu actor" David Carradine with his ways of bringing betterment to the world by blocking evil at its entry point (think of his TV series as a promoter of peace via the philosophical use of the martial arts). And his sneer, when faced with "evil," is every bit as good as Nicholson's!

Hexagram 44 consists of one line of aberrant polarity (indicating a leadership type of person) and especially line five is obviously "good" for fame since this line is shared by several of the 430 celebrities I recently calculated. Here, try find their common denominator if such really exists, that is, if the Astrology of I Ching really says something useful: Claudia Cardinale (actor), George Harrison (musician), Olivia Newton-John (actor, singer), Bette Davis (actor), Ringo Starr (musician), Tom Jones (singer). A pretty disparate bunch at first sight but easily explained since Harrison also had a share in 46/2, Newton-John in 61/5, Davis in 4/2, and Starr and Jones both a share in 18/2 ? these last two both being jokers and pranksters, seen also in the two above-mentioned "deteriorated" artists, Mozart and Jack Lemmon! Thus only Claudia Cardinale can be studied as a "pure" example of hexagram 44 line 5. Although physical aspects do not generally seem to be a part of the hexagrams as birth symbols, the actor is very reminiscent of the "ordinary" nurse mentioned earlier ? both are strikingly beautiful dark-haired people. But again, this is most likely pure coincidence.

However, the most intriguing case among the celebrities born under 44 is Gene Simmons (KISS) on the fourth line where the evil principle has gotten completely out of hand. A very interesting concurrence given the biographical data about this "horror rocker;" his obvious attempts to exorcise the shadows of Nazi atrocities with which his lineage had a brush back in time. Certainly hexagram 44 with its single yin line seems to indicate some sort of fixation on the nasty or corrupting aspects of earthly life.

The hexagrams thus take on entirely new meanings when checked empirically against living persons. Hexagram 23 means AMBITION to make to the top when featuring as a birth hexagram! This makes perfect sense when you see the same fixation on the Light (located at the top) as 44 is fixated on the Dark (entering from below). Several well-known Hollywood actors have apparently managed to climb to the top as shown by a hexagram that is normally understood to be only a "destructive" pattern of downfall or falling to pieces. In view of this wish to shine and stand a bit taller than all the rest, the image text therefore takes on a new and profound meaning: "you can only preserve a position this high by generously giving to all those you have walked over in your attempt to progress singularly!"

Hilary, I misread your post. I wrote of hexagram 44, line 5 and not "44 developing into 5." There may yet be a few hints in the text.

Question:

Does the method (calculation) for deriving ones 'natal' hexagram follow for deriving (calculating) a particular hexagram for a specific period of time?

Using the math here http://www.psychicsophia.com/taoofbirthdays/natalhex.htm

Can this formula be applied to any particular date?

Thank you.