...life can be translucent

Stephen Karcher (from the blog)

hilary

Administrator
Joined
Apr 8, 1970
Messages
21,178
Reaction score
4,643
Stephen Karcher

1746119622389.png

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.’



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.

1746137509149.png

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.’
 

surnevs

visitor
Joined
Apr 25, 2021
Messages
837
Reaction score
457
In 2007, I wrote a letter to Dr. Ph.d. Stephen Karcher, who had lived in Copenhagen with his Danish wife until then. His book The I Ching—Plain and Simple (copyrighted 1997) was translated into Danish in 2005. On the back of this book, it was mentioned that he was living with his Danish wife in Copenhagen.
Well, I started reading it and found a passage that could - I can see today - be translated wrong. It concerned an example with a woman where Hex. 40.4 was given, around the fourth section in the Danish translation. Later in the translation, 9 in the fourth place was directly associated with hexagram 9 ! (Ouuu :eek: )
I did not get a reply. My first thought was that I had written the letter to him in Danish, but no. Later, it showed that he had left Denmark and was living in the USA at the time I wrote it.
Besides mainly being a superb Diviner, he was, as stated in the Danish translation, a respected psychologist.
When wanting to address him with my question, I looked up his name in the Danish phone book.

vstbr.jpg
- and found where to forward my letter. (Google Street View, entrance to the right, Number 166)

(After some grammar editing, I recognised the word "Superb" and checked it to be sure, but it isn't in use in English, I found out. In Denmark, we use this word in the meaning: 'couldn't be better', )
 
Last edited:

hilary

Administrator
Joined
Apr 8, 1970
Messages
21,178
Reaction score
4,643
It's a shame you missed him! He was great fun to know.
 

ChrisLef

visitor
Joined
May 26, 2023
Messages
82
Reaction score
71
I was going to write 'what sad news' but he left so much for us to remember him by. I am particularly indebted to him for his 'Myths for Change' book because being at heart a Jungian, it has fed me, and feeds me still, endless symbolic material on hexagrams, as well as creating a whole ancient Chinese world for my mind to inhabit while thinking things through. It really is a masterful work. Thank-you indeed Mr Karcher!
 

Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom

Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).

Back
Top
What's new