30 Fire (The Phoenix) - The I Ching
The Phoenix is pure gain. Raise a cow.
Lines
1
Walking the wrong way is right.
2
Yellow sunlight.
3
The setting sun. If you don’t play with pots and pans, you’ll make your grandfather sigh.
4
His arrival is so sudden. Like burning. Like dying. Like being cast out.
5
Crying a river and sighing in sorrow.
6
The King goes on a journey. Having greatness, he breaks the Rebels and catches the shameful ones.
Qabalah
Tiphereth, the Beauty of God. The Sun. The Six of Wands and the Six of Swords.
*and the Prince of Wands and Prince of Swords
In this hexagram, we see fire doubled, while the ideogram depicts a legendary bird., Together, they create the image of the Phoenix, the bird that burns itself to death and is born again. This is the embodied journey of the Sun, setting and dying, only to rise again from the darkness.
Judgment Knowledge without a material anchor is worthless, insight simply burns out and dies like a “flash in the pan.” When one dedicates their energy to a long term project, such as the raising of a cow, it can be maintained.
1 Beginning to to exist is the beginning of pain, yet it is necessary for the progress of any soul. The sun rises, fighting against universal entropy. It is “wrong” to go against the grain of nonexistence, yet this is how all things come to be, in spite of that paradox.
2 Here the Sun shines brightly upon the world. Beckett says it well: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”
3 The Sun sets. This corresponds to the aging of people, who must occupy themselves with the joy of youth or fall into the lamentation of their age. This is making peace with one’s natural station in life, not seeking more than one ought.
4 This is the Fall of Satan, the bright, fiery angel, cast out. The arrival in question is his arrival to what is below.
Ezekiel 28:17 Thine heart was lifted up because of thy beauty, thou hast corrupted thy wisdom by reason of thy brightness: I will cast thee to the ground, I will lay thee before kings, that they may behold thee.
18 Thou hast defiled thy sanctuaries by the multitude of thine iniquities, by the iniquity of thy traffick; therefore will I bring forth a fire from the midst of thee, it shall devour thee, and I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee.
5 Here Satan laments his fall. Consider the weeping Lucifer of Alexandre Cabanel’s “Fallen Angel”. In Paradise Lost Milton describes the Hell the rebel angels fall into as:
A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round
As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d onely to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
6 Here, we reach the end of it all, the Apocalyptic war, when at last God puts down the rebellion. Yet, like the Phoenix, it is here when all things are made new. Lucifer is the mirror image to Christ, both are the “Morning Star”, solar figures who rise, fall, and rise again. In ancient religions, they were a single figure: called Apollo by the Greeks, and Horus to Egyptians. They also both qabalistically mapped to the very sephiroth this hexagram represents, Tiphereth, the Beauty of God. This is by no means an “evil” hexagram.
Traditionally the I Ching was divided in two “canons”, the Upper Canon, or Tao of Heaven, spanned from 1-30, while the Lower Canon, or Tao of Man, spanned from 31-64. They are uneven. This hexagram is the end of the Upper Canon, because it is the Fall from Heaven. While hexagram 12 describes the Fallen World, 30 shows the Fall of Satan himself. We must not get so caught in the moral and religious dimension as to miss the practical understanding.
This is sudden inspiration, bursts of energy and power, and the cycles that these forces follow. We cannot be inspired and energized all the time, we must, like the sun, settle down in the night, and rise again in the morning.