#and wikipedia says that this painting and other from this cycle are often interpreted to be lesbian couples

[boycannibal]

im so obsessed with this painting (”dans le lit”/”in bed” by henri toulouse-lautrec)

[art-now-italy]

I Ching, Polina Ogiy

I Ching From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia "The Book of Changes" redirects here. For other uses, see The Book of Changes (disambiguation). For other uses of "I Ching" or "Yijing", see I Ching (disambiguation) and Yijing (disambiguation). I Ching (Yijing) I Ching Song Dynasty print.jpg Title page of a Song dynasty (c. 1100) edition of the I Ching Original title 易[1] Country Zhou dynasty (China) Genre Divination, cosmology Published late 9th century BC I Ching Classic of Changes I Ching (Chinese characters).svg "I (Ching)" in seal script (top),[1] Traditional (middle), and Simplified (bottom) Chinese characters Traditional Chinese 易經 Simplified Chinese 易经 Hanyu Pinyin Yìjīng Literal meaning "Classic of Changes" [show]Transcriptions The I Ching ([î tɕíŋ] in Mandarin), also known as Classic of Changes or Book of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text and the oldest of the Chinese classics. Possessing a history of more than two and a half millennia of commentary and interpretation, the I Ching is an influential text read throughout the world, providing inspiration to the worlds of religion, psychoanalysis, business, literature, and art. Originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC), over the course of the Warring States period and early imperial period (500–200 BC) it was transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the "Ten Wings."[2] After becoming part of the Five Classics in the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the subject of scholarly commentary and the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East, and eventually took on an influential role in Western understanding of Eastern thought. The I Ching uses a type of divination called cleromancy, which produces apparently random numbers. Six numbers between 6 and 9 are turned into a hexagram, which can then be looked up in the I Ching book, arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching is a matter of centuries of debate, and many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision making as informed by Taoism and Confucianism. The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing. The divination text: Zhou yi[edit] The core of the I Ching is a Western Zhou divination text called the Changes of Zhou (周易 Zhōu yì).[3] Various modern scholars suggest dates ranging between the 10th and 4th centuries BC for the assembly of the text in approximately its current form.[4] Based on a comparison of the language of the Zhou yi with dated bronze inscriptions, the American sinologist Edward Shaughnessy dated its compilation in its current form to the early decades of the reign of King Xuan of Zhou, in the last quarter of the 9th century BC.[5] A copy of the text in the Shanghai Museum corpus of bamboo and wooden slips (recovered in 1994) shows that the Zhou yi was used throughout all levels of Chinese society in its current form by 300 BC, but still contained small variations as late as the Warring States period.[6] It is possible that other divination systems existed at this time; the Rites of Zhou name two other such systems, the Lianshan and the Guizang.[7] Name and origins[edit] The name Zhou yi literally means the "changes" (Chinese: 易; pinyin: Yì) of the Zhou dynasty. The "changes" involved have been interpreted as the transformations of hexagrams, of their lines, or of the numbers obtained from the divination.[8] Feng Youlan proposed that the word for "changes" originally meant "easy", as in a form of divination easier than the oracle bones, but there is little evidence for this. There is also an ancient folk etymology that sees the character for "changes" as containing the sun and moon, the cycle of the day. Modern Sinologists believe the character to be derived either from an image of the sun emerging from clouds, or from the content of a vessel being changed into another.[9] The Zhou yi was traditionally ascribed to the Zhou cultural heroes King Wen of Zhou and the Duke of Zhou, and was also associated with the legendary world ruler Fu Xi.[10] According to the canonical Great Commentary, Fu Xi observed the patterns of the world and created the eight trigrams (Chinese: 八卦; pinyin: bāguà), "in order to become thoroughly conversant with the numinous and bright and to classify the myriad things." The Zhou yi itself does not contain this legend and indeed says nothing about its own origins.[11] The Rites of Zhou, however, also claims that the hexagrams of the Zhou yi were derived from an initial set of eight trigrams.[12] During the Han dynasty there were various opinions about the historical relationship between the trigrams and the hexagrams.[13] Eventually, a consensus formed around 2nd century AD scholar Ma Rong's attribution of the text to the joint work of Fu Xi, King Wen of Zhou, the Duke of Zhou, and Confucius, but this traditional attribution is no longer generally accepted.[14] Hexagrams[edit] Main articles: Hexagram (I Ching) and List of hexagrams of the I Ching In the canonical I Ching, the hexagrams are arranged in an order dubbed the King Wen sequence after King Wen of Zhou, who founded the Zhou dynasty and supposedly reformed the method of interpretation. The sequence generally pairs hexagrams with their upside-down equivalents, although in eight cases hexagrams are paired with their inversion.[51] Another order, found at Mawangdui in 1973, arranges the hexagrams into eight groups sharing the same upper trigram. But the oldest known manuscript, found in 1987 and now held by the Shanghai Library, was almost certainly arranged in the King Wen sequence, and it has even been proposed that a pottery paddle from the Western Zhou period contains four hexagrams in the King Wen sequence.[52] Whichever of these arrangements is older, it is not evident that the order of the hexagrams was of interest to the original authors of the Zhou yi. The assignment of numbers, binary or decimal, to specific hexagrams is a modern invention.[53] The following table numbers the hexagrams in King Wen order.

https://www.saatchiart.com/art/Painting-I-Ching/826122/3930142/view

[cubreporter51-blog]

The Making of Maledicti

My most recent story on Amazon is Maledicti, a short story that invokes a local legend about a real historical figure. If you haven't read the story and really want to, everything that comes after this point will be a spoiler. You can get the book here.

This story really hit me like a flash, the idea came together quickly once I had read about the legend. My brain had started on one of its random journeys, pondering the fate of Pontius Pilate as the Easter holiday quickly approached. I must confess, as a person that has attended church most of my life, I always found Pilate to be a sympathetic figure, driven by political forces to do something that he thought was wrong.

The part that always gets a little hazy when reading the gospel retelling of the story is the fact that the Jews were not politically capable of executing someone in Roman fashion, by crucifixion. In fact, they would have been hard-pressed to execute anyone without the Romans intervening. The area at the time was simply too volatile, and they did not have the autonomy to summarily execute Jesus. Doing so would have essentially been murder in the eyes of almost everyone.

The religious authorities needed complicity from Pilate in order to have Jesus executed by the Romans. Pilate did his part to play along, and I'm always left to wonder whether some of his actions were stage acting, specifically his "protests" against executing Jesus. The bottom line is that Jesus was crucified on his authority alone. He ordered it to be so, whether or not he claimed it was under duress.

And that brings me to where I was the other day, pondering what happened to Pilate after the fact. I turned to Wikipedia, which offers surprisingly little in substance about Pilate's life. It focuses mainly on whether he actually existed and governed. It eventually makes a small offering that no one is really sure about what happened to him.

The mountain in Switzerland is clearly named after him, as one of the places that may be his final resting place. And there is a local legend that his spirit attempts to wash its hands each Good Friday, a reference to Pilate's act declaring himself innocent of Jesus' death recounted in the Bible where he publicly washes his hands. His agenda for doing this is only clearly known by Pilate himself. 

Contemporary accounts of Pilate's time ruling the Holy Land portray him as a man who was culturally insensitive at best and downright antagonistic at worst toward the Jews. My personal opinion, and the basis for most of my story, is that God punished him not for fulfilling his role in the Easter narrative, but for pretending like he had nothing to do with it.

As I started to think about this legend and how it might manifest itself, I started to imagine a tortured spirit who only realized after death what he had done. Since I did not read any explicit account of the legend or its origins (something I was actually careful to avoid), I felt free to offer this interpretation. I also consider that the punishment might not be from God but from Satan, furious with a man who could have changed religion forever but instead followed his own personal agenda during the events leading up to Jesus' death. It's not much of a stretch to say that neither could be all that pleased with him.

But then I thought about placing this tale in the modern world. I tried to imagine who would go looking for him based on this legend, and what type of person might actually encounter him. Reality shows about the supernatural always tend to make me laugh, so much can happen during the production of these shows to edit in sounds and images that they truly cannot be believed in my mind. So that was out as a vehicle, though it could have been interesting to write it that way. I could imagine the producers thinking "we're going to make this ambiguous on purpose", then getting the shock of their lives when he actually does show up. I chose to go in a different direction in the end, mostly for the sake of length of the story. I would have had to write a lot of backstory, introduce more characters and give them things to do, before getting to the meat of the story, the legend itself. For that reason, I chose to make it about an American ecotourist. 

My choice for a female protagonist was largely based on the idea that the situation might present a little more danger to an otherwise idealistic coed. Yes, it is stereotypical, but there is a reality that the young tend to not think about the perils of things such as traveling alone in a foreign country. Encountering a murderer in the woods just seemed like a better fit for a female lead, given my planned interactions between the spirit and the main character.

I wanted to implement the modern into the story by incorporating the idea of shooting cell phone video, something that surely would happen if this situation were to play out in real life. Even in situations of danger, people take videos of it. It could cost them their life, or someone else's life, but if it doesn't, internet fame awaits. I feel like this attitude is pervasive in today's society. Personally, I don't think I would take video of it if I really thought I was witnessing the aftermath of a murder, but I think I'm in the minority.

One of the challenges I faced in writing this, however, was the decision to keep Pilate in character and not break into English. I don't know Latin, and I was pretty much forced to trust that Google Translation did a good job on what he was saying. It was a tough choice to leave out the translations for what he said from the story, but two things kept from doing so.

First was the idea that if the main character knew what he was saying, she might have figured out who he was. That would have spoiled the tension in the story and the surprise ending. I needed to convey that the main character toiled in ignorance throughout the encounter, and leaving Pilate's words in Latin was part of painting that picture.

The second thing was semantics. I had no real mechanism for why Pilate would know English or why the main character would know Latin, at least in a spoken form. I could have (and did contemplate) the idea that she was Catholic, but they haven't done masses in Latin for quite awhile now, so that was a stretch. Pilate could have picked up English, I suppose, but I feel like spirits are not particularly capable of learning things, otherwise they would be able to atone and break the cycle. The bottom line is that this would have taken me down a rabbit hole that would have detracted from the story.

In the end, I decided to leave the reader in the shoes of the main character, only able to try to infer the words from body language. While Pilate says things like "blood" or "hands", he also asks for help and says that it isn't his fault. This is part of the curse, that he cannot be helped or absolved by anyone in contemporary age, he speaks a language that essentially died a long time ago.

Once I got through that, I had to figure out how to wrap it all up. It did seem a bit contrived to have a local give out the information, but I didn't feel like I had many options given the narrative up to that point, so my readers probably saw that one coming. I figured most readers wouldn't have known the actual legend, and at least found the ending modestly surprising.

One of the things that I like to do in my writing is clearly reflected in the way I ended the story. I like to let my readers imagine out what comes next. In this case, I hoped to evoke a reaction of "what if that happened to me?" or something alone those lines. I felt like spelling out her reaction to the explanation would deaden its impact, so I chose to leave the story right in that spot. In this era of sequels, prequels and reboots, it probably makes sense to leave open the door and not tell all of the story, but I really wasn't angling for that. I wanted the reader to imagine the rest of the story.

All in all, I felt that it made a nice little stand-alone short. I really enjoy this genre for a host of different reasons, I think the most appealing is being able to see a story through from beginning to end given my constraints on how often I get to write creatively. 

I hope you enjoyed the story and liked getting some of the insights into what went into it.