When the clock strikes twelve on New Year's Eve in the upper chamber of the Room of Awakening, the first room in the House of Darkness in the east deep of the starmaze, a ghostly cavalcade of hooded pilgrims begins a year-long journey. Freed of the normal restrictions on movement, they pause at the entrance to the first passage and study the hexagram carved over the archway: Hexagram 3, "Difficulty at the Beginning."






The pilgrims note that lines 1, 3, 5, and 6 (counting from the bottom) are colored; these are "moving lines", lines in the process of changing into their opposite. They know that at the other end of the passage, this transformation will be complete, and the hexagram over that archway will be number 52, "Keeping Still, Mountain." From there, they will have to search among the other seven passages for the one other passage with hexagram 52 over its archway, a bridge that will lead them to the House of Desire. It will take them two hours and seven minutes to climb the steep ramp of the first passage; in solemn silence they begin.

This is how I imagine the Grand Passage Tour of the starmaze. To find their way, the pilgrims will have to study the hexagrams carved over each passageway in the starmaze. Because each of the 64 hexagrams comes in one 64 different forms depending on the moving lines, there are 4096 hexagrams in all, which, as it happens, is exactly the number of non-center passage openings in the starmaze. The pages of this Hexagram Concordance provide pilgrims a way of following the grand passage tour of hexagrams from beginning to end, and astrologers a way of finding the passage (and thus a date and time) associated with a given hexagram.

Lookup by date:

January April July October
February May August November
March June September December

Lookup by hexagram:

TRIGRAMS Ch´ien


 Chên


 K´an


 Kên


 K´un


 Sun


 Li


 Tui
UPPER
LOWER
Ch´ien



 1 34 5 26 11 9 14 43
Chên



 25 51 3 27 24 42 21 17
K´an



 6 40 29 4 7 59 64 47
Kên



 33 62 39 52 15 53 56 31
K´un



 12 16 8 23 2 20 35 45
Sun



 44 32 48 18 46 57 50 28
Li



 13 55 63 22 36 37 30 49
Tui



 10 54 60 41 19 61 38 58


The Grand Passage Tour

Pilgrims following the Grand Passage Tour spend a full year in the starmaze. They visit each room in the maze exactly four times and traverse each non-center passage once and only once. The normal one-way direction of passages is lifted during this tour, so in each room pilgrims entering through one passage always have seven exit passages to choose from.

Hexagrams carved over each passageway guide them on this journey, one over the exit (A moving to B) and another (B moving to A) over the entrance to the next room. Of the seven possible exits from this next room, the correct choice will always have a hexagram of the form "B moving to C". In the room after that, there will be another seven choices with one in the form "C moving to D". And so on. The chain of hexagrams is continuous and unbroken.

There are occasional complications. Pilgrims will sometimes encounter a room in which three of the passages have hexagrams in the same form (and one room with five similar hexagrams). They must choose one of these similarly marked passages to stay on the true path. There are fifty of these "crossroad" rooms, and since each choice is encountered twice (thrice in one case), there are 101 decisions in all. Pilgrims spend six months in the inner rooms of the maze, returning at last to the starting room. They then take the hidden central passage and spend another six months in the outer rooms.

The 12 month pages, starting with January, provide a list of the hexagrams encountered in the tour in order from beginning to end. Each entry includes links to the starmaze patten associated with each room and to the exact hexagram form carved over each archway. The word "CROSSROAD" appears at each of the 101 points at which a pilgrim faces a choice.

The 64 hexagram pages provide information for each of the 64 forms of that hexagram with the transition numbers that are associated with the hexagrams at the entrance and exit of each passage. You can click on any transition number to look up its time and date position within the grand passage tour. Each of the 4096 possible hexagrams is encountered only once on the journey.

Astrology and Divination

Just as the earth traverses the twelve houses of the zodiac each year, so do pilgrims traverse the sixteen houses of the starmaze during the course of a grand passage tour. By associating dates and times with passages of the maze, this concordance provides a powerful basis for a kind of starmaze astrology.

By consulting the concordance, an astrologer can determine the latest arrival or departure before a given date and time, typically a person's birthdate, and use that to calculate a precise position in the maze. The hexagram associated with the immediately preceding passage can then provide insights into the forces which created or influenced the situation or person of interest, the room and house of the maze can provide context for the current situation, and the next passage in the sequence can suggest future trends. Alternate passages can suggest alternate outcomes or strategies, and cycles can be explored to shed light on recurring patterns of behavior. The seasons, elements, and forms associated with each room can provide additional layers of meaning.

Those interested in using the I Ching for divination can use the Hexagram Concordance to further enhance their interpretation of any hexagram. They can cast yarrow sticks or toss coins in the usual way and then use the Hexagram Concordance to associate that hexagram with a starmaze pattern and a particular date and time.

Because they are both built on a system of associating simple, ever-changing patterns with the beauty of binary numbers, the starmaze and the hexagrams of the I Ching are in deep harmony. In a sense, the starmaze can be seen as a nine-dimensional extension of the I Ching. This hexagram concordance provides the link joining these two systems.