The Lo Shu Diagram is the oldest known example of a "magical square" in the world, despite parallels to it in other places such as the Key of Saturn from ancient India and others. Briefly defined, a magical square is any squared arrangement of numbers that add to the same sum vertically, horizontally and diagonally. The Lo Shu Diagram dates back as far as 5600 years by some estimates and we apparently don't really know who actually discovered it. It comes down to us in the form of a myth, following several prominent versions, depicting the mysterious appearance of a tortoise from the river Lo which carried upon its back a curious set of markings, which, upon inspection, revealed a numerical super-symmetry, thus deemed magical for its unexpected qualities. In some versions of this story the credit is given to Fu Hsi (also Fu Xi) for its discovery though we have no actual reason to assign it to him in fact. What we do know is that Fu Hsi was so impressed with this magical arrangement of numbers that China itself was subsequently structured around its underscoring principle, with the heart of the empire seated at center surrounded on eight sides by powerful Lords and Houses, each representative of one of the eight primary trigrams flanking the outermost edges of the Lo Shu Diagram itself.

 

By all apparent accounts, the Lo Shu Diagram thus remained a series of numbers from 1-9 around which the eight trigrams were positioned according to one of of two principle arrangements, The Earlier Heaven arrangement which was numerically chronological and the Later Heaven arrangement which was not. Not until the time of Yang Hsiung in about 53 BC do we find an arrangement of bigrams associated to the Lo Shu directly, but the facts are not all in yet as to just how old his arrangement may actually be since, by his own accounting, he did not invent this system but only recovered it from archived historical records, already deemed ancient in his own time. It may be some time before we know the entire story, since, unfortunately, the only two scholastic treatments of this historical undertaking thus far have generally failed to establish anything particularly remarkable. In part this is due to the fact that Yang Hsiung's own life was tumultuous and beset with war and revolution so that we are lacking a completely solid academic grasp of his own work as well as any history leading up to it.

 

We are left in either case with an outline peppered with assorted logical holes, but one thing at least seems evident: the arrangement of bigrams and subsequent trigrams, tetragrams and hexagrams set forward in Yang Hsiung's Tai Hsuan Ching follows a different order than either The Earlier Heaven or Later Heaven arrangements of trigrams set forward in the I Ching. Yang Hsiung's arrangement is similar to the Earlier Heaven sequence in that it is a true chronological unfolding of structures that happens to run exactly backwards from the former, starting from the Yang in an above (or Heaven) relation, progressing to the Jen in a middle position and culminating at the Yin in a below (or Earth) relation. For our purposes with respect to Abrahadabra and the Tree of Life, this makes it the most suitable arrangement for us to follow...in part because it most closely parallels the way energy is seen to unfold within the Tree of Life itself. In the Earlier Heaven sequence of Fu Hsi, the first hexagram in succession is actually "The Receptive", comprised of 6 yin lines. In the Yang Hsiung arrangement, the first hexagram in succession is "The Creative", comprised of 6 Yang lines, progressing uniformly towards the "The Receptive" at the end. 

 

The Yang Hsiung arrangement treats bigrams as actual elemental components whereas the traditional I Ching arrangements do not. Exactly why they do not is a great bafflement to most occultists trained in western elemental thinking, since the the usual 4 binary bigrams exactly match in every respect the 4 primary elements of Fire, Air, Earth and Water. Yet the traditional Chinese convention is to disregard this rather obvious correlation and treat bigrams as "forces" rather than actual elements. Possibly because Yang Hsiung is having to equilibrate such a greater number higher structures, his own system treats the 9 principle bigrams as actual elemental components, even though they are typically defined as "portents" and have good luck and bad luck associations assigned etc. Nevertheless, we have the makings of a system that is well suited to conversion into western elemental assignments overall. As luck would have it, we also get a very neat division of elements into 4 parts comprising no Jen Line values (macrocosmic), 4 parts comprising one Jen Line value (microcosmic) and a remainder with no Yin or Yang values at all but only Jen in the above and the below, making it a perfect mathematical description of the "Spirit" element of western alchemical tradition. We will examine these relationships further on in this treatise.

 

As a matter of form, it cannot be asserted too strongly that the more knowledge you have assimilated regarding the classical hexagrams in general, the more readily you will be able to follow this part of this immediate thesis. There are so many excellent resources available at this point that I am not inclined to spend a huge amount of time filling in these gaps for each and every reader that happens by this website. I will not attempt to justify and prove every single particle of this thesis at this time but confine myself to the most pressing issues only. I get nothing for this work on a personal basis and it takes up a huge amount of time and energy so there is only so much ground I can possibly cover and still have any time left to address those elements deemed most vital to the actual visualization practice involved. It is finally that particular aspect of things that will prove to be the most remarkable feature of this immediate model, so I can only encourage readers to aggressively fill in whatever background detailing they may find necessary through supplemental study and reflection. This is a brand new application of ancient technologies that needs to go forward as expeditiously as possible.

 

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