Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Establishment, and the Risk of Dropping It

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Establishment, and the Risk of Dropping It

In reading practice hexagram 50 describes something being established: an institution, a household, a body of work, a new arrangement given a form that will hold it.

The favourable readings are strong. The judgement gives supreme good fortune and success, which is rare, and the fifth and sixth lines, golden rings, then jade rings, are among the most auspicious in the book. What is being described is nourishment properly organised: not the resource itself but the apparatus that makes it available to others, which is why the figure is often read for organisations and for work that will outlast the person doing it.

The warnings are structural. The fourth line, with the legs broken and the meal spilled, describes a container that has been overloaded or badly supported, and the traditional reading is of responsibility accepted beyond capacity. The second line has the vessel full and enemies envious, which is a plain observation about what happens to visible success.

The first line is the one most often useful: the cauldron is turned upside down to empty out what has gone stale, and the text calls this fortunate rather than shameful. Clearing out the old contents is presented as the ordinary preparation for use, not as a failure. Read alongside hexagram 49, the two figures give a complete argument about change, remove, then rebuild, and expect the rebuilding to be the longer and less exciting of the two tasks. Most of what is written about change concerns the first half; this hexagram is one of the few places in any divinatory system that takes the second half seriously.

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