Stephen Karcher

I have just heard that Stephen Karcher, author of Total I Ching and How to Use the I Ching, collaborator on the original Eranos edition, has died. I owe Stephen a great deal, so I’m writing this to express my gratitude.

My very first encounter with the Yi came when I found a copy of Legge in the Oxfam bookshop – but it was when I borrowed the Ritsema/Karcher Eranos edition from the library that I first realised I’d found something I could connect with. Yes, I know now that the Eranos version isn’t perfect, but for me it opened the way into the heart of the oracle – a revelation. I monopolised the library’s copy for a long time, renewed it, and renewed it some more, and finally bought a copy… and then had the idea of doing readings for other people.

Then I found How to Use the I Ching, a modest little beginner’s book that provided exactly what it said on the cover. It has a really excellent introduction – one that doesn’t, unlike most, stop at telling you how to cast a hexagram, but walks you in detail through a process of interpretation.

This introduction was where I first learned to understand the second, resulting hexagram of a reading as the ‘relating hexagram’, the ‘sea in which the primary figure swims’. Stephen wasn’t the first or only diviner to notice that this second hexagram was not rigidly ‘The Outcome’, of course, but he might have been the first to write and teach this. This was because he wasn’t primarily a translator or academic – though he was both of those – but a diviner. He did readings, for himself and other people, and this experience is the foundation for his books. He had conversations with Change, and was hugely invested in introducing people to the oracle so they could do the same, and ways to transformation would open.

I reached out to Stephen, and was lucky enough to meet him a couple of times. In person he was tremendously energetic, brimming with ideas and creativity – think Laozi meets Tigger. After he’d given a long, lively talk out in Cowley, and answered questions afterwards, I imagined we’d take the bus back to the centre of Oxford – not a chance. We walked (or I walked, and he bounced).

He was also unstintingly generous with his ideas and his support. Of course I found it immensely encouraging that he was already making the Yijing his life’s work: it could be done! And he offered me personal encouragement, especially to get started offering readings in conversation instead of just by email.

I was thoroughly apprehensive about this: what if people asked questions I couldn’t answer, and I couldn’t think of anything to say? As part of persuading me to give it a go, Stephen read for me by phone. It was about a business relationship that wasn’t working, and the primary hexagram was 23, Stripping Away. I couldn’t see the wood for the bushes I was beating around, looking for subtle things this might be referring to; Stephen told me completely directly that the relationship was at an end. (It really was.) He also responded to my anxieties with the best advice any diviner could receive: ‘Trust the Oracle.’

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I asked Yi to talk to me about Stephen – something I often do when someone I know dies. It responded with Hexagram 14, Great Possession, with no changing lines.

There’s not much to add to that, is there? I think this makes a lot of sense – naturally – as part of the Pair with Hexagram 13, People in Harmony. Stephen was a tremendous synthesiser of Yijing ideas and research, joining many sources into a Great Possession of divinatory tools.

I came to think of him as a kind of Yijing alchemist. Everything he learned went into the crucible – Jung, etymology, myth and legend, insights into the sequence and structure of the Yi… – and every new insight or tool he cooked up, he wanted to see shared and used, explored and developed in live readings, where we could discover how they worked.

I tried to make a list of what’s found its way from that alchemist’s laboratory into my own readings. Right at the foundation, there’s the concept of a relating hexagram. Then there’s the habit of paying attention to Xugua and Zagua, and of thinking of hexagrams as one half of a pair. There are trigrams as ‘spirit helpers’; there are steps of change and (with LiSe) line pathways. There are patterns of change, or ‘change operators’ as he called them later on – first the yin pattern, which I think was part of that brilliant introduction to How to Use the I Ching, and then yin and yang together. There are ideal and shadow hexagrams – the ‘shadow hexagram’, as far as I know, is a Karcher original, something that emerged from Scott Davis’ insights into the Sequence.

There’s also a whole lot more I never quite wrapped my head around – something that would not have perturbed him in the slightest. What he leaves us is –

‘Great Possession.
From the source, creating success.’

Hexagram 14 has the first two of the ‘big four’ words – yuan heng, ‘from the source success’, a ‘primal offering’ – but not the third and fourth – li zhen, ‘constancy bears fruit’, ‘fruitful divination’. We’re left, not with a well-polished, monolithic system, with everything said that he would have wanted to say, but with a great profusion of ideas and approaches to try, a gift waiting to be used. The absence of a relating hexagram seems to emphasise that open-ended quality of the hexagram, leaving the ‘fruitful divination’ part up to us.

I wish I could have quoted Total I Ching in this post, but sadly my copy is tucked away in storage. You can find Karcher on Hexagram 14 at the ‘Mothering Change’ website, though. An excerpt:

‘Circle of Meanings
A great idea, a great leader, a great person, great power to realise; great results, great achievements; an inner concentration of the will around a central idea that brings wealth and abundance.’

I Ching Community discussion