In the “After the Storm” chapter, Elias Dorn performs a bone casting. It was inspired by a Ka Ta See session for my wife Joanne in Galisteo, New Mexico, conducted by Kay Cordell Whitaker, who tossed bones and other objects onto a cloth on the floor. I witnessed the ceremony, and years later it gave me the inspiration for Dorn’s bone casting at the river.
In the I Ching (Book of Changes, the ancient Chinese divination text), yarrow sticks or coins are thrown six times. Each throw results in either a yin (broken) or yang (solid) line. Three throws make a trigram, and the two trigrams combine to make one of 64 possible hexagrams, each with its own reading.
The wording of Dorn’s casting was from the I Ching that I threw just before writing that chapter. It consists of three broken lines, a solid, a broken, and a solid, creating a hexagram that translates to #36, “Darkening of the Light”:
“Here the sun has sunk under the earth and is therefore darkened. The name of the hexagram means literally wounding of the bright; hence the individual lines contain frequent references to wounding. A man of dark nature is in a position of authority and brings harm to the wise and able man.”
It’s chilling how it aligned with what I was about to write. Read from the bottom to the top, each of the six rows has meaning, all of which contributes to the full reading. The last (top) is:
“Climax of the darkening is reached. Dark power wounds all on the side of good and of light. In the end, it perishes of its own darkness, for evil must fall at the very moment when it has wholly overcome the good, and thus consume the energy to which it owed its duration.”