51 Thunder - The I Ching

In this hexagram we see Thunder doubled. The ideogram shows rain above  a tilling tool, the upset from thunder and lightning. The lines show both at play; the frightening sound of thunder and the violent shock of lightning. The ancients did not see a difference in the two, to them it was a singular phenomena.

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Judgment: Thunder storms are a cause of great terror to children and animals, the natural calm being disrupted. This is a primal fear, for while it is rare we can be struck dead by lightning. As we grow older, we lose this fear and some even begin to enjoy storms and seek them out. The enlightened position is to be entirely unaffected, to not drop what you’re doing, as in the case of the line, presiding over ritual liquor.

1 As with the judgment, we begin life afraid of storms, but come to see that (usually) they are “all bark and no bite”.

2 Here the bite comes. Lightning strikes and we lose it all. Countless lives and structures have been lost due to lightning strikes and the fires they cause but here, it is just money. Then we are given counterintuitive advice to climb nine hills. In several shamanistic traditions, one climbs a mountain amid a storm and learns to speak with the thunder gods and direct the storm. Consider Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment, which proved lightning was an electrical phenomena. Through mastery, all that is lost returns without effort.

3 Lightning, or rather electricity, does in fact revive. Luigi Galvani discovered that the muscles of a dead frog could be made to move when given an electrical jolt, giving us the word “galvanize”. The 1935 film Frankenstein shows the monster brought to live through this process. Today we use defibrillation machines to shock someone in cardiac arrest. The ancient Chinese believed thunder woke the insects and animals which had hibernated through the winter.

Qabalistically, we can read the lightning flash as the path of the divine descending into matter.

4 The lightning flash is the name for the descent from the highest sphere in the sephiroth, Kether, down to the lowest, Malkuth. Malkuth is the material world, the one we come into inter urinas et faeces nascimur, in the words of St.Augustine . This is the path of Satan’s fall, as described in Luke 10:18 “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from Heaven”.

5 Here we make it unscathed through the storm that bankrupted us in line 2. Through seeing the ephemeral nature of the phenomena, its comings and goings, we are able to let it pass.

6 Lightning does in fact seek the closest thing, be it a tree, a house, or as the line shows, a person. Lightning strikes the neighbor for unknowable reasons or because, like Satan, he held himself too high and was made low. The wives, like Job’s three friends, may seek to explain why one was struck and not the other.

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In the ancient past it was well understood that the Gods would give life and take it in the same breath. Storm gods were some of the most important because of their imminent danger and overwhelming power. Man would make sacrifices in order to appease these Gods and avoid the terrible bolt. 

In the past 200 years we have, as Nostradamus predicted, mastered electricity.

Quand l'animal à l'homme domestique.
Apres grand peine & sauts viendra parler :
Le foudre à vierge sera si malefique.
De terre prinse & suspenduë en l'air.

When the animal tamed by man
After great pains and leaps starts to speak:
The lightning so wicked to the virgin
Will be seized from the Earth and suspended in the air

Let us be grateful that we can now laugh and go on with what we are doing, rather than tremble in fear at the roaring thunder of the gods.