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It would be nice to come back to some of the more recent and innovative translations after I feel I have a bit more familiarity with the text, it’s components and interpretation.
I think the I Ching is kind of bottomless in this sense, there is so much stuff to assimilate. Best way through is perhaps to find a way which works for you, I guess.
I suppose what I’d like is an I Ching scholar’s opinion on Crowley’s interpretation. Is this stuff genius, or merely speculation?
You might be interested in the fifth issue of Thelemic journal Red Flame – “Yi King: A Beastly Book of Changes”, which is a compilation of Crowley’s work and notes on the subject. I have this copy if you fancy a look. Once again all I do is link to Biroco reviews ...oh to have some original thoughts of my own….*sigh*
Review here
Anyway, attempting that ... firstly, I’d say that Crowley deserves a degree of respect for being one of the first – if not the first – Westerner to engage with Eastern esoteric ideas, as a student of their mysteries, rather than as a Xtian biased scholarly dismisser. His understanding of the Tao crop up a lot in his writings, and he divined with the Yi throughout his life.
However, as noted on here in discussions of his yoga, things have moved on since he wrote his work. A lot more work has been done since with regards to the I Ching, which Crowly was unaware of. He seems to have slipped passed Wilhelm's translation, for instance - though it was available in German from 1923, it wasn't available in Enlgih unti after his death.
Crowley produced his own version of the text, but he didn’t translate from the original Chinese. He mostly relied on James Legge’s translation for his own “Yi King”, as this was the only one available in English at the time. He was very critical of Legge though, Legge being something of a Victorian prig. Apparently, Crowley’s re-inscribes his name as Wood N Legge in his own edition!
Crowley rewoked Legge’s translation, and incorporated an elemental system he derived from the Qabalah, mapping the four elements and Phallus/Ktesis and Sun/Moon onto the eight trigrams. He then reworks the judgement texts, according to Legge’s work, plus his own understandings (I assume some of this understanding was derived from divination, something Legge never lowered himself to). Incidentally, Crowley also makes the texts rhyme. From reading Red Flame, it’s clear that Crowley “put in the hours” here, and was seriously committed to the study and use of the Yi as part of his magick. However, he did suborn it to his own system/synthesis, rather than valuing and understanding it on it’s own terms. One can’t really blame him here - this would be an impossible task short of going to China as Wilhlem did, there being virtually no materials available in the West at the time.
I think here Crowley was going for the grand “Rosetta Stone” vision of magick, with all things meditated through the Tree of Life, as shown in his 777. While it was pretty revolutionary in the first part of the 20th Century, I don’t think this works, as it misses all the fine points of cultural difference that don’t fit into this map.
I don’t think a Yi scholar would dismiss it out of hand, but it doesn’t really have a lot to do with the insights of modern scholarship. For instance, it’s now known that the trigrams are a later invention, and that early versions of the text didn’t use them at all. As Crowley’s version rests on trigrams + Western magical symbolism, I think the divergence is obvious. I’d see Crowley’s work here as more his own fascinating synthesis, part of his life’s work. I wouldn’t dismiss it, and if I were more into his tarot perhaps I’d even use it myself - but it’s more a product of his extraordinary creativity, than something to “true” to the source text. |
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