Page 108 - The Irony Board

Into the Cosmos

Each time the sticks are thrown,
A new pattern is formed;
But many see only
A mystical number.

While Gluckman perceived some validity in astrology, to him
other “occult sciences” are clearly based on impossible assumptions.
Divination, by whatever means (including predictions according to
academically-approved scientific “laws”), simply can’t be done;
violation of the spacetime continuum is implicit both in
prognostication and in all types of sympathetic magic. Jung tried to
provide an omnibus justification for mystical knowledge in a
principle of simultaneity: all things occurring at the same instant in
time are linked; one need only discover how to read the signs in one
part of nature to apprehend the significance of the whole.
Unfortunately, this theory was based on Newtonian time, a physical
constant already rejected by Einstein.
An internationally-popular method of divination uses the Chinese
Book of Change, the I Ching. Yarrow stalks are tossed on the
ground, landing in groups translatable into one of the sixty-four
hexagrams described in the text. Coincidence is elevated to symbolic
certainty in the interpretation of that text relative to the situation in
the diviner’s mind at the moment the sticks were thrown. Like
reading tea leaves or cracks in a baked ovine scapula, this search for
omens requires the agency, at minimum, of that invalid principle of
simultaneity. But it goes further: unlike those purely analogical
organic microcosms, I Ching is a six-bit binary code. It slices the
universe of possibility into a limited range of cases, denying the
necessary uniqueness of all events. “Number” has two meanings in
the epigram: first, as the integer coaxed from a jumble of twigs;
second, as the finite quantity of such integers.

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