Fire, Shell, and Stalk

A History of Chinese Divination

Before there were books of divination, there was fire. This essay follows the whole stratigraphy of Chinese divination: the oracle bones of the Shang kings, where Chinese writing began as a record of questions put to the fire; the Zhouyi, the only Bronze Age divination manual still in working use; its lost sisters the Lianshan and Guicang, one of them recovered from a sealed Qin tomb; the cosmic boards and the daybooks; the moment the sky became personal; the temple floor where moon blocks and hundred-stick cylinders still answer nightly; and the two-way river that carried these arts to Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Tibet, and eventually to Leibniz.

The essay closes with the two traditions this house is translating next: the Hundred Sticks, the Song temple set of a hundred oracle poems still shaken daily at Senso-ji, and the Spirit Chess, twelve tokens and a hundred and twenty-five Dunhuang-witnessed verses. Old paper and living breath.

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Fire, Shell, and Stalk: the full essay with its chronology chart and transmission map.