Using Playing Cards to Consult the I Ching

Use a regular 52-card deck of playing cards.  Shuffle, then lay down 6 cards, face down, in a column from bottom to top.

Turn each card over.  Black cards (spades, clubs) are yin lines; red (hearts, diamonds) are yang.  Face cards (jack, queen, king) are moving lines.

The approximate probabilities are in line with the yarrow stalk and coin methods:

The probabilities are more accurate if you select each card from the entire deck, returning it to the deck and shuffling before selecting the next.

If you remove two red and two black pip cards (non-face cards) from the deck, the probabilities match those of the traditional coin method.  To match the yarrow stalks is more complicated:  remove four black face cards, 6 black pip cards, and 10 red pip cards.

The cards to the right generate the first of the two hexagrams illustrated above.

[Note added 10/17/09—I thought I was the first person to think of this, until I read a similar method described in The Laws of Change by Jack M. Balkin.  Oh, well.  I still think my way is simpler.]

Use this method at your own discretion.  When I used it to ask about this method itself, I got 776878, which does not sound too promising.  In Richter, hexagram 60 and line 3 read:

This may have to do with what I associate playing cards with in my own mind.  The inverted and reversed hexagrams all have to do with danger and safety, such as hexagram 59:4 which ends with:

I may try this some more with a “friendlier” deck which does not distract me so much with mental images of a casino, such as my Grateful Dead playing cards.

Of course, one could also use 49 cards to mimic the use of yarrow stalks.  Cut the deck, set one card aside, then count through each pile by fours and set aside the remainders in the usual way . . . .