Archetypal Situation

Jung’s reading of the I Ching as archetypal takes a specific form: the sixty-four hexagrams are not predictions but patterns. “Now the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are the instrument by which the meaning of sixty-four different yet typical situations can be determined” (Jung, Psychology and Religion: West and East, ¶974). The hexagram names the kind of moment the querent stands within — Conflict, Return, Waiting, Obstruction, Break-Through — and furnishes an image of the appropriate orientation.

This reading reframes prediction as pattern-recognition. A typical situation is not fate; it is the form of a moment. The question “What am I to do?” — which, according to R. Wilhelm, King Wen first put to the book — transforms the oracle from soothsaying into wisdom literature (R. Wilhelm, I Ching, Introduction). Wang Bi’s commentary formalizes the reading: the lines of a hexagram represent “different kinds of people in different positions and different situations” (Wang Bi / Lynn, Classic of Changes). The querent’s task is to locate themselves within the pattern and act from that location.

The I Ching’s sixty-four situations thus function in the Jungian reading much as the gods function in Hillman’s archetypal-psychology-charter: they are structures of psychic life, not literary characters. The hexagram is an image of the moment under which the moment can be thought.

Relationships

• hexagram
• synchronicity
• archetype
• junzi

Primary sources

• jung-psychology-religion-west (Jung 1958, ¶974)
• classic-of-changes-wang-bi (Wang Bi / Lynn 1994)
• i-ching-wilhelm-baynes (R. Wilhelm / Baynes 1950, Introduction)