Probably the two most widely used oracles today are the I Ching and the Tarot. The English translation from the German of Wilhelm's I Ching came out in 1950 with a famous foreword by Jung, describing how he used it, and explaining the principle of synchronicity. Since then many other versions have been produced in English. Some by Chinese Taoist scholars.

But since 1950 I have used it in one form or another as an oracle whenever reason and knowledge failed to cast light on a problem. It has never failed.

I Ching is the oldest book in the world, in the region of 5000 years old. Its name means basically "The Book of Changes." The Old Chinese mystics who studied natural phenomena as a pattern of continuous changes hit upon a way of relating any present time circumstance to where it stood in the cycle of change.

All readers of this article are familiar with Cardinal, Fixed and Mutable, as expressions of the threefold law of manifestation in astrology. The same laws have been expressed by Start, Change, Stop; Create, Sustain, Destroy; or Birth, Life, Death.

Every living thing, or association of living things follows this threefold path. But the Chinese or their mentors, managed to go deeper. They found 64 steps in every evolutionary process instead of three. And each of those 64 steps involved six parts that could produce further refinement of the oracle by what has been called the first application of hypertext.

As a good example of common synchronicity we could mention the way in which scientific discoveries are often simultaneously made by different people in different places. The great mathematical genius Gottfried Leibniz discovered, or invented differential calculus at the same time as Sir Isaac Newton; a discovery that has changed the world. And another piece of cosmic coincidence occurred when Leibniz thought up the system of counting in binary, with 2 as the counting base instead of 10. This is now the basis of everything done by your computer. Then it was a great discovery.

Leibniz excitedly shared his new brainchild with a friend in China, a Jesuit named Joachim Bouvet. He responded by sending Leibniz a copy of the I Ching, and Leibniz found that his "new" arithmetic was 5000 years old. His code was used throughout the I Ching. But I Ching doesn't call them 0's and 1's, it calls them yin lines and yang lines.

Leibniz studied I Ching and in 1713,wrote a book called Two Letters on the Binary Number System and the Chinese Philosophy. Major and world class intellects of East and West have been studying I Ching for centuries. It isn't a discovery of New Age yuppies.

These yang and yin lines, taken six at a time produce 64 patterns called kua by some, and hexagrams by others. And the patterns that you can produce, by the standard three methods: casting three coins, using 16 pebbles, or 50 plant stalks, correspond in a quite eerie fashion to whatever is going on in your life at the very moment you question the oracle.

And everyone who has investigated the I Ching, from computer scientists, geneticists, pure mathematicians, occultists, magicians, and psychologists, has had to agree that things work out the way it says they will work out. Just bear in mind then that the Chinese sages found a way by which ANY changing situation could be represented using one or more of 64 different, but related patterns.

Tarot is another device, which like the I Ching is also an old book, in this case with 78 pages, that can also be used, like I Ching, as a book of Wisdom, or as an oracle, foretelling probable outcomes in a given situation. The most important cards in the various Tarot decks are the 22 Trumps, Major Arcana, Keys, Honors, or Atu, as they are variously called. And the Tarot works too. It is not as specific or detailed as I Ching when used for divination, but there is no doubt that it works.

There is a fundamental connection between the 22 Trumps and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet in the old Tarots. The sacred 22 also represents the number of paths on the Tree of Life of the Hebrew mystics who used the Qabalah as their blueprint of the energies of the universe.

Since there is an occult axiom that Truth is indivisible, and since both these systems were used by extraordinary people to represent the current and changing state of the universe, there should be some connection somewhere with the world that is the province of scientific discoveries in the same areas. And this is very true.

Recent work on chaos theory, genetics and the double helix of the DNA has produced some amazing correlations. The left brainers are just catching up with the right brainers in a few areas, and this is one of them.

About fifteen years ago, when I was a custom knife maker, I went to a Buchanan family reunion in Missouri. One of the relatives there was working on his PhD in business and he was having trouble with the mathematics of the changing futures markets.

As an ex-mathematician I was interested. We talked mathematics and futures for a while, and I suggested that he look into chaos theory, a recent branch of mathematics that deals with apparent disorder and chance. He hadn't thought of that, and his left brained style of linear thinking just didn't work where everything depends on everything else, and there is no way that single variables can be isolated as prime causes. Sounds like life doesn't it? He got into chaos theory and got his PhD. When asked how he came to use chaos theory he says that he got the idea from a knife-maker in the Chicago area. It's a family joke.

I Ching and Tarot can both deal with multiple variables, chance, and synchronicity, and now it looks as if the reason they can is because their apparently mystically based structures are actually clones of the structure of all living things.

Marie Louis von Franz, the associate of Jung, first noticed the connection between the 64 I Ching symbols and the 64 codons of the DNA material. Let's explain the codon thing. There are four nucleic acids in the DNA, usually named uracil, cytosine, adenine, and guanine.

In the genetic material these are glued together in threes by hydrogen atoms. Using the initial letters we could write down all their combinations: UUU,UUC, UUA and so on down to GGG, GGU, and so on. There are 64 such triplets. These are the codons.

It is the combination of these that eventually make all the amino acids and proteins of the body, and the double spiral of the DNA. The way in which the amino acids are formed, and the chemistry of energy production proceeds are well mapped out. The series of I Ching symbols follow exactly the same patterns. It is the chemistry of the DNA and RNA that make up our physical reality, and the I Ching reflects it perfectly. Which seems to explain why it seems to be able to deal with any problem involving change.

But that isn't quite all. There are four nucleic acids from which come all the chemistry of life forms. The old Kabbalists used the 4 letters of the name of God as the basis for their blueprint of the universe. Some of the old stories of the Rabbis even show them using the Holy Name to create living creatures called golems.

Those who have studied the Kabbalah paths of the Tree of Life know that they are represented by the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the 22 Trumps of the Tarot.. Each path represents the flow of some form of energy from the subtle world of spirit into the grosser world of matter.

Well, in the March 1995 issue of the Scientific American there is an article called "Talking Trash." In that article the scientists claim to have found "word" patterns in the "junk" of the DNA of humans. It seems clear now that the part of the DNA that does not encode instructions for the production of proteins, ( originally called junk because the arrogant scientists couldn’t see a reason for it being there), shows the same statistical patterns as are found in written languages.

The structure of the DNA was found in the mid 50's, and scientists have been using the language metaphor to illustrate how many of the codons combine to form amino acids, and how two of them 'start' and 'stop' the processes like punctuation marks in a sentence. It now looks as if the language used in the coding of the genetic material might be a form of proto-Hebrew. Some associate this proto Hebrew with the language in which Yahweh instructed Moses when discussing the original commandments and then the final ten.

The Sefer Yetzirah is the earliest known book of Hebrew magical thought. It explains in some detail how God made the universe using the numbers 1-10 and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. God's creative orders are described as the combining of letters into words and words into sentences. His speech was not sound but the molding of units together as a sculptor molds clay. Those who knew the words that made something and how to say them could make it themselves. This is one of the concepts behind the magic word idea. Know the inner name of anything and you have power over it.

The Hindu mystics did the same thing when they encountered the inner essence of things in deep meditation and brought back the sounds of their names as mantras in the Sanskrit language.

The 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet were the major units used in the sentences that made all creatures. Well, funnily enough, not only do the 64 I Ching symbols correlate with the 64 codons of the genetic material, but the 22 Tarot Trumps and the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet correlate perfectly with the 20 amino acids found in all living things, and the two 'stop/go' codons that control their production under DNA orders.

So two of the oldest, major oracles of the current generations correlate scientifically with the 64 cycles of change and the 22 things from which all flesh is made.

People have been working VERY hard on this for some years now. The Internet contains several full length manuscripts by scientists that deal with these matters, and books by chemists and clinical psychologists, archeologists, and others are coming out in numbers as the I Ching and the Tarot are being used by these people to throw light on the scientific material and vice versa.

As a side note to Tarot folks: The scientific people doing most of the work on how the attributes of the Tarot correlate with the genetic material have generally used Crowley's deck, The Book of Thoth, as their basis because of Crowley's associations with some scientific work, particularly his students at Cal Tech, where one of them, a magician called Jack Parsons invented the fuel that we use for space rockets. Crowley used the secret order of the minor trumps and also did foundational work on the I Ching which has become part of the investigations. He was an amazing scholar in magickal matters.

But the same chemistry material can easily be correlated with older and more orthodox Tarots such as the Universal Waite and the B.O.T.A deck. Any deck based on the Kabbalah, rather than an artistic whimsy, or the desire to fulfil an apparent need of some New Age grouping, contains within it this inner wisdom of the chemistry of the universe, and therefore the behavior of those comprised of these chemicals..

Just knowing this will make it easier for you to learn or use the Tarot and I Ching.  Happy Trails,  Douglas