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The Decades and the Ritual World of Change

 

The Decades, repeating units of ten sequential hexagrams represent an archaic shaping principle used to sculpt the deepest layers of the Classic of Change.  Each Decade represents a birth, death and re-birth ordeal that is simultaneously a personal narrative, a reorganization of the central nervous system, an evolution of culture and an experience of the continuous act of creation. 

 

Themes of the Decades

A Decade portrays a “chapter” in the ritual course of the Symbolic Life. Each Decade has a basic developmental task or theme associated with it.

 

First Half of Life: The Hero’s Journey

 

First Decade (1-10, childhood) is an intensely self-contained time when the child seeks to imagine a world in which to discover an identity.

Second Decade (11-20, the Teens) is a series of struggles with the relation between group and individual identity, sexuality and an emerging personal destiny or mission.

Third Decade (21-30, the 20’s) contains the first great Male and Female Initiations where our adult Name and identity are first roused and fixed. It begins the search for an image of the deeper Self.

 

Second Half of Life: Facing the Gods

 

Fourth Decade (31-40, the 30’s) consists of the heroic struggles to found a dwelling, family and career. It is a grueling stage with little transcendental help or relief, a sort of dark night of the soul that pulls up past experiences and links them with future transitions,

Fifth Decade (41-50, the 40’s) represents the emergence from the wilderness into higher levels of culture and empowerment in society, conferring new ritual status and power on the now fully individualized being.

The Sixth Decade (51-60, the 50’s) confronts the proper exercise of power and our responsibilities to the human community, releasing and fulfilling our potential for present good and re-orienting us towards the great passage across the river of life and death.

The Crossings (61-64) are a coda and a linking of cycles. They represent a birth into the life of the spirit, the passage across the River of Life and Death and a link to the new generations to come.

 

 

Structure of a Decade

There are five Pairs of hexagrams within each Decade. Each different Pair occupies one of five numerical Positions that have thematic meanings of their own.

 

The Axis and Gate: 1:2 Position changes the energy level of the psyche and provides key images of a new configuration of the world of the Four Directions. It is like a set of doors swinging open and closed through which we emerge from liminality and are oriented to a new stage of life.

 

The Approach 3:4 Position is a place where identity is re-organized and personal energies mobilized, a continual process that alternates between rousing and limiting, containment and breakthrough, protection and challenge.

 

The Royal Center 5:6 Position represents the experience of the numinous attraction and power of the King and High Culture. It is the Decade’s centralizing power, a place where we seek audience, are recognized and charged with a Mission.

 

The Mission 7:8 Position represents a mandate from the Center that can lead to a change of state. It is a struggle, an ordeal that must be faced or a challenge that must be confronted.

 

The Transition or Liminal Zone 9:10 Position is a passage between stages that opens the world of the ghosts and spirits. It dissolves an old identity after it has served its purpose and releases the unformed yet numinous potential of the new.

 

Each Decade portrays a chapter in the course of the Symbolic Life as a sequence of experiences: Emergence through the Gates, an Approach to, an Experience of and Mission from the numinous Royal Center of Power and High Culture and the dissolution of  old identity and Liminal Passage to a new Stage of Life. The Decades as a whole set the stage on which the ritual education that develops individual identity and relates it to the Ancestral foundation of life takes place. They structure the process of accumulating De or actualizing power, the “power and virtue” that stabilizes the heart-mind and lets an individual become who they are truly mean to be, the spiralling steps of the process that Jung called individuation.

 

 

The Hidden Dynamic of the Decades

However, if we look at the Decades as a Xiang or Symbol they reveal another more mysterious dynamic, a continual making, dissolution and re-making characteristic of a Strange Attractor.

  

Understanding the dynamics of a Decade as a Symbol or Xiang depends on seeing the Pair Positions not just as forms or themes but as “markers or agents that do work”.  They continually project and re-gather themselves in time and space as dynamic dance between Inspiration, the power of the Sun and the Dragon whose Inspiring vertical Force loops through boundaries, projects pathways and activates ancestral energies and Realization, the cycling Moon and the Dark Animal Goddess or Horse Mother who roams the wide horizontal Field of Earth, carrying the “symbols of the spirit” to her children to bring them “safety and security”. Each step in the dance is punctuated by a return of and to the dark rushing Ghost River that dissolves old form and gathers the beings back into the fertile womb of chaos that runs beneath all. 

 

This process is reflected in the old Daoist metaphysical image:

 

The Way gives birth to the One;
The One gives birth to the Two;
The Two gives birth to the Three;
The Three gives birth to the Ten Thousand Things.

 

 

The Way gives birth to the One

 

Mythically, this is the Great Mountain at the archaic edge of things. It emerges directly from the Way as the One Alone that contains both Primal Powers. It stands at the borders of existence, both inside and outside the world in potential like a set of great monumental doors that open hidden energy pathways that energize the life to come.

In the linear narrative we experience this position as a sudden opening to a new level of experience where we emerge from liminality and are oriented to a new stage of life by the images of new possibilities and challenges.

 

 

The One gives birth to the Two

The Mountain of the One becomes the Two by mirroring and projecting itself as a River at the opposite extreme of the Decade. Thus the 1:2 Position enters time as the Beginning by producing a dark double of itself, a Liminal Transition Zone, and projecting it as the End of each cycle.

 

 

This 9:10 Position represents an inversion of the energy of the 1:2 Position, a dark mirror that reverses the polarity of the Gates and draws things down into the chaos that lies beneath and around the entire process. This is the dark, rushing Ghost River where everything dissolves into its constituent parts and returns to the chaos from which it emerged. In the linear narrative we experience this as a night-sea journey where Hidden Spirit Operators “do work” that dissolves an old identity and releases the spark, the unformed yet numinous potential of the new.

 

 

The Two gives birth to the Three

Just as the distant Rivers and Mountains were doubled into the Earth Altar in the Royal Palace, so the two Positions that form the limits of a Decade unite to project the 5:6 Position as Royal Center.

 

 

The 5:6 Position is the high centralizing place in each Decade where numinous things are revealed. It draws, collects, centralizes and intensifies the power of the limits and sets it moving into the world. In the linear narrative we experience this as a place where we seek audience, are recognized and charged with a numinous mission or mandate (ming) to fulfil. 

 

 

The Three gives birth to the Ten Thousand Things

The Royal Center then splits its Inspiring and Realizing components to establish flanking positions or wings that surround the central position like the mirrored slopes of a mountain. These are the places where the iterating work, the work of the Three is done, a continual re-doubling that produces change.

 

Approach 3:4 Position This is a place where identity is re-organized and personal energies mobilized, a continual process that alternates between rousing and limiting, containment and breakthrough, protection and challenge.

 

The image of the 3:4 Position is a container and a sharp instrument that penetrates or punctures it. It is a continual alternation between rousing and limiting, containment and breakthrough, protection and challenge. In the linear narrative we experience this flank as the journey up the Mountain towards the summit. Here the Hidden Spirit Operators “do work” that will enable us to be charged with a higher level of energy.

 

Mission 7:8 Position This represents a mandate from the Center that can lead to a change of state. It is a struggle, an ordeal that must be faced or a challenge that must be confronted.

 

The 7:8 Position evokes danger, death, harvest, marriages. It suggests armies, generals in the field, invasion of barbarian territory, fighting at the borders, facing and dealing with angry old ghosts and the corruption of the past.  In the linear narrative we experience this flank as the journey down the Mountain carrying the mandate towards enactment. Here the Hidden Spirit Operators “do work” to release stored energy into action that can effect change in the world.

 

Though the linear story line runs through each Decade, its hidden inner process is continually doubling back on itself to point at a mysterious center “whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere”. A Decade is, to quote W.B. Yeats again, like “a Great Egg that turns itself inside out without breaking its shell.”