50 The Pot - The I Ching
The Pot is the origin of prosperity.
Lines
1
The Pot’s legs are up. Clean it out. Taking a Concubine for her Son.
2
My Pot is full of food. My enemy is full of hate, but they can’t get to me.
3
The Pot’s handles are changed. The path is blocked. The fat pheasant is not eaten. Rain brings relief.
4
The Pot’s leg breaks and the Prince’s food spills out. They are executed.
5
The Pot has gold rings and yellow handles.
6
The Pot has jade rings.
Qabalah
Hod to Tiphereth: the Path of Ayin. The Devil.The intellect of Hod feeds the beautiful fire of Tiphereth.Mercury to the Sun.
In this hexagram we find the image of cooking, fire over wood. The ideogram shows a Ding, a pot or cauldron used for both cooking and ritual sacrifice of humans and animals in Ancient China. Notably, they were often written on, the names of ancestors sustained through sacrifices, laws, and more. Like 49, the Image is significant here: Sages straighten standards and freeze fate.
The changes of the Revolution we see in 49s are made permanent here, laws are written, and structures are built.
The Judgment: Food is our most basic need. From it, everything follows. The world is kept from chaos by keeping the people fed. The ritual and ceremonial elements of the Ding here also have a role, feeding the Gods and ancestors makes us prosperous.
1 As in Revolution, things are upturned and cleansed. Dirty dishes are washed. This is a necessity with all ritual objects, which easily accrue psychic filth. The concubine provides what the wife cannot: an heir. Similar to making a dirty dish clean, the concubine is made high by her son.
2 Think of the phrase “Comparison is the thief of joy”. We must be wary of those who envy our good fortune. Consider Caesar’s warning on Cassius in Shakespeare: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look, He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.”
3 The change here is the same character as revolution. This is the initial hardship which follows upheaval, disruption of the norm often leads to mass starvation and death. Resources are wasted, and things don’t progress. With time, all of this is washed away.
4 A simple but symbolic mistake is met with death. This is the Reign of Terror and “campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries”. While this would seem to target only external enemies, it is often the internal ones, such as one serving the prince’s food, who are killed. As Pierre Vergniaud says: “The Revolution, like Saturn, will devour all its children.”
5 No longer in chaos, this is the “pot of gold” at the end of the rainbow, the wealth that comes with increasing power. The struggle for power is in fact called 問鼎 in Chinese, translating to “Ask of the Dings”, from a story in the Zuo Zhuan where a rival asks the King the weight and size of the Nine Dings, his symbol of absolute authority. His way of saying he’s going to possess them.
6 Here power is complete, while gold is soft and symbolic, jade is both hard and beautiful. Authority is solidified. There is an ancient Chinese proverb: 金有价, 玉无价. “Gold has a price, Jade is priceless.” As such it takes the highest line in the hexagram.
When asked to write the foreword to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the I Ching, Jung asked the book itself what it thought about being shared with the Western world, he received this hexagram as the answer. “A ritual vessel with cooked food.” He read this as "I contain (spiritual) nourishment.", and the lines showed the restoration of it through this translation.
The practice of asking the I Ching questions directly would pass from Jung to Philip K. Dick. He admits he co-wrote his most successful book, “The Man in the High Castle” directly with the I Ching.
A few months before the Tarot articles on Tetragrammaton were first published, I had a dream: The articles were published and I had a Chinese meal to celebrate. It was a very large grey thing, like an ashy stone, I was trying to get at the meat which was in the very center of it.
That dream relates to this hexagram. Finding the nourishment within a strange tradition.