16 Excitement - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel February 21, 2026
Judgment
Excitement makes princes move armies.
Lines
1
The sound of excitement.
2
Always hard as a rock.
3
Wide eyed excitement blinds, regrets come too late.
4
The cause for excitement is great. Gather friends like a hairpin gathers hair.
5
Always sick, never dying.
6
Dark excitement comes and spills out.
Qabalah
Binah to Gevurah: The Path of Cheth. The Chariot.
The energy of Gevurah excites the stable Binah.
This hexagram depicts excitement as lightning striking the earth, the calm excited by the storm. The ideogram is a “giving elephant”, the animal’s great thunderous crashes and trumpeting. In man, this is enthusiasm and arousal: the forces that get us up and moving.
The Judgment shows the general idea of the hexagram - excitement is that which emboldens leaders and rallies forces.
1 We can read this literally As the hexagram directly relates to music, this is Wagnerian opera emboldening the aristocracy and the war drum that keeps troops marching.
2 An innuendo for an excited man or animal. The muscles tense as energy readies itself to be unleashed.
3 One can think of the bad decisions made while sexually aroused, or enraged. It is when we are operating on our base natural drives that we make the worst decisions. Our passions override our reason.
4 With a good cause it’s very easy to excite people, exciting language and aesthetics energize.
5 While our drives can often kill us, they can also keep us going far past our reasonable time. Think of an elderly person kept alive by anger and bitterness. Similarly, bats maintain an unusually high body temperature, which allows them to go unharmed by the countless viruses they can be infected with while still able to infect others..
6 When enough excitement builds up, it is bound to release itself and explode. Yeats describes it perfectly in the Second Coming:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This is the case of the hexagram - arousal and passion build up, moving from a part of the body, to the individual, and then the crowd. As Nietzsche puts it:
“Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.”
While excitement inevitably spreads, the key is to control it. To not be overtaken with it, but to use it. While many have recognized the likeness between a rock star and a dictator, one whose words and songs move crowds to outrageous action, music can be a good “release valve” for this sort of collective Dionysian madness, a controlled mass insanity.
This controlling of the energies is precisely the subject of the Tarot card given to this hexagram’s path of Cheth, the Chariot. Cheth itself is the fence or barriers, literally a tool for containing excitement. The Charioteer also controls and directs the energy of his beasts to further himself.
Let us then develop our excitement consciously, move ourselves toward aims we truly desire, and not be moved by the energies swirling around us.
