Five questions, in order
Everything you need before a first cast, in about three minutes.
What is the I Ching?
A Chinese book about three thousand years old — the Book of Changes. It describes sixty-four kinds of situation: beginnings, obstructions, gatherings, retreats, returns. Each one says how that kind of time tends to move and how a person moves well inside it. You consult it by asking a question and casting, which selects one situation as the answer. Part oracle, part philosophy; it has been read both ways for its whole history.
What is a hexagram?
Six stacked lines, read from the bottom up. Each line is either solid — yang, the firm — or broken — yin, the yielding. Six lines with two states each make sixty-four figures, and every figure has a name, a number and a chapter. Try it: tap the lines and watch the figure change its name.
What happens when you cast?
Fifty yarrow stalks are divided and counted away, four at a time, until six lines have been built from the ground up. Some come up "moving" — at their extreme, about to become their opposite — and flipping those shows a second figure, where things are tending. The methodsets out the whole count, and why its slowness is part of the answer.
Does it work? What is it actually doing?
Honestly: the stalks do not know your future, and this site will not pretend otherwise. What the cast does is pair your question, at random, with one of sixty-four unusually well-made descriptions of human situations — and then you do the real work, asking where that picture touches your actual circumstance. That question is worth asking almost regardless of how the picture was chosen. Jung called it synchronicity; a plainer account is that the Book is a mirror with three thousand years of polish. Either way, what you get out is a slower, wider look at your own situation.
What now?
Three good ways in. Ask something real and cast on it — the guided path explains each part of the reading as it arrives. Or read one chapter first to get the taste; Keeping Still is a good door. Or wander: every chapter page draws the ones it sits among, and one carries you to the next.