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Xia divination method

lienshan

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When kids me and my brother had a tortoise as pet. That's why this looks very familiar to me:

http://www.hypervision.com.au/aquarium/topics/creatures/tortoises/diagrams.htm

The tortoise counting system in the Chinese Calendar is the Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branch. The Heavenly Stems
are the 10 fields on top of the carapace and the 12 Earthly Branches are the 12 fields on the bottom of the plastron.

Heavenly Stems: 1. jia 2. yi 3. bing 4. ding 5. wu 6. ji 7. geng 8. xin 9. ren 10. gui
Earthly Branches: 1. zi (rat) 2. chou (ox) 3. yin (tiger) 4. mao (rabbit) 5. chen (dragon) 6. si (snake) 7. wu (horse)
8. wei (sheep) 9. shen (monkey) 10. you (rooster) 11. xu (dog) 12. hai (pig)

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 01 02

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 08 9 10 11 12
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 02 03 0 4

1 2 3 4 5 06 7 8 9 10 11 12
5 6 7 8 9 10 1 2 3 04 05 06

1 2 3 04 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
7 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 06 07 08

1 02 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 etc.
9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 08 09 10 1 etc. (the 60 days cycle begins with day jia-zi)

But the tortuise carapace was also used to count the 8 phases of the moon. The 3 outer headfields were trigram "water" and the 4 outer anal fields were trigram "fire". The other 6x3 outerfields were the other 6 trigrams. A tortoise carapace is this way 8 trigrams and the earliest 8x8=64 trigram scheme is found in a Dawenkou grave. Eight sets of tortoise shells were placed above the skeletal remains of a man whose head was missing:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2956925.stm

I have described the layout of the 64 coloured trigrams in thread "Lien Shan". But the 64 trigrams on the carapaces
were too 64 hexagrams painted on the plastrons with these symbols:

http://www.upf.edu/materials/huma/central/historia/eo/imatges/prehist/tortuga.htm

Today it's hard to say which divination method the Xia diviners used, when counting their 50 yarrowstalks? I think,
that they did it the easy way and that's how I count the 49 yarrowstalks. First I divide them into two stacks. Then
from the left stack I remove four stalks at a time until I reach one of these four possibilities:

3 yarrowstalks = changing whole line
2 yarrowstalks = changing broken line
1 yarrowstalks = steady whole line
0 yarrowstalks = steady broken line

This very easy divination method works too with Yi Jing, if You try to divide your bunch of 49 yarrowstalks as equal
as possible, because the odds of the ten most common results are 6/10 to steady lines and 4/10 to changing lines.
 

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