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The genesis of Chinese writing and of the I Ching overlap in the melting pot of origins. Recent archaeological discoveries reveal that the I Ching has inherited from shamanic oracles engraved on bones, with about thirty pictographic signs named jiaguwen.
Some ancient oracular sentences, writen in former pictographic symbols (jiaguwen), are still present in the actual text.
This invalidates the myth of the Yellow Emperor as inventor of agriculture and writing.
Reading of the book is sequencial or analogic, continuous or interractive, dictated by an oracular drawinging or by a rational modelisation of a process.
The six lines of each particular hexagram condense a situation juts like does an hologram for a tridimentional structure. They represent the core of an arborescent (tree style) hypertext, with three levels of text : Jugment, Symbols, and Lines, wich commentaries spread meaning like japanese flowers. More than a simple canvas, the I Ching synopsis is autoreferent and opened ; isomorph to natural processes and therefore able to modelise them : paradox af two different logic levels intermelted, crossing-over, and overlapping : an internal logic based on the mutual interaction of hexagrams, and a descriptive logic opened to external reality.
The I ching is a kind of very powerful index federating knowledge. The ancestral roots of its synopsis situate its "absolute structure" in an intertextual dimension, a constellation of sense who preludes to the first intervention of the Chinese writing, accompanying and ending the evolution of the I Ching text itself...
In the Chinese agrarian civilization of the bronze age men used to offer sacrifices of domestic animals to ancestral spirits. These sacrifices, though expensive, were consided as accepted only if fully consumed of fire. This acceptance was supposed depending on the will of the tutelar gods and ancestors.
For an efficient sacrifice at a lower cost, it was important to exactly know the auspicious moment, in previously testing the will of tutelar ancestors, with the mini sacrifice of a turtle shell or of a sheep scapula, and examining on it the craks provoked by the fire.
The answer was judged favorable or unfavorable according to the straight or oblique aspect of these cracks, the prototype of Yin and Yang categories.
The technique was perfected in order to select non-ambiguous interpretations, until it reached a high dedree of sophistication (Cf Vandermesh), as broadening to more profane questions.
The jugment of diviner came to be cut in the bone close to the cracks, with the related questions and even the name of the diviner.
Questions were often meteorological : will it rain ? Won't it rain ?
Other important or vital questions were concerning timing for war or hunting...
These oracle bones, considered as sacred, were carefully archived in thousands, during more than three milleniums in some hiding places underground. Discovered a century ago and still exhumed today, these jiaguwens are now dispached in many museums in china and around the world, and carefully studied.
A cultural relic linked with this supreme ancient origin were recently discovered. Archeological excavations on the site of Mawangdui in the 80's unhearthed a manuscript on silk of the earliest version of I Ching ( among unknown or lost texts ) in the tomb of the marquise of Daļ, buried with its library .
Research showed that jiaguwens include specific formulas of the Mawangdui I Ching...
Positive and rational thinking are still usefull, thanks God, but excessive self-confidence in our segmented vision of the world inherited of aristotelician exclusive, univoque, disjonctive and dogmatic logic, conjugated to the demagogy of our leaders to whom mankind is an epiphenomenon of economy, creates a damageable hiatus with reality, and arouses the Nemesis' revenge ; ecologic and human disasters...
The I Ching, by its exotism and its perfect alterity, may represent the auspicious exoreference to open our system of thinking. Naturally ecosystemic, familiar with the notions of crisis, transition, opposition, complementarity, interdependence, interaction in nature, culture, social, economic, and politic orders, it could permit getting round the obstacle of complexity.
Since the worldwide crisis seems coupled to our excessively narrow, frozen and dogmatic thought, the circular revolution of Changes could help to promote the ideal of the Enlightments, an humanism without totalitarism, an education opening to the understanding of our own cultural inheritance as a way of freedom.