Title: The I Ching Oracle
Author: Johanna and Timothy Dowdle
Publisher: O-Books
Pages: 264
Publication Date: October 1st, 2021
The I Ching Oracle - A guide through the human maze is designed to help the reader find a way through the complexities and challenges of everyday life. Timothy and Johanna Dowdle show the reader how to consult the I Ching oracle and receive clear answers to important questions. They explain the methods used for consulting the oracle and how the oracle responds to the reader's questions. The authors also provide a series of examples from their own consultations to illustrate how the I Ching has guided them through many difficult situations. All of the descriptions of the I Ching hexagrams are based on the authors' lives. These autobiographical narratives can help and support everyone who is living through similar experiences. For those who are familiar with the I Ching and have been consulting the oracle, this book offers new methods for interpreting hexagrams with multiple moving lines and static hexagrams. These methods have proven to give consistently clear and accurate answers to the authors' questions over many years of consultations. Timothy and Johanna Dowdle are an Anglo-Dutch couple who have lived and worked in many different countries and are currently living in the Netherlands. Over the years the authors have studied and practised the art of divination, using divination as a tool for making important decisions. A red thread running through their lives together has been The I Ching or Book of Changes. Their aim is to share the knowledge and wisdom of the I Ching and make it accessible to everyone.
| Review by Assistant Meghan A watered down interpretation of a complex ancient oracle system The I Ching Oracle by Timothy and Johanna Dowdle is written as a reference guide for the I Ching, or Book of Changes. The I Ching is an oracle system invented thousands of years ago by the Chinese and has been the foundation of many of their philosophical, political, and spiritual achievements. The Book of Changes, whether used for divination or taken from a philosophical standpoint, provides the reader with provocative text from the 64 hexagrams to invoke deep thinking and guidance through the challenges and successes of our lives. Spirituality and Philosophy have shaped the history of ancient China and it's no surprise that the I Ching has also been influenced by the ancient systems of Confucianism and Daoism, to name just a few. In Dowdle's version of the I Ching, the richness of Chinese's folklore and history is practically erased from the hexagram's passages. Although they've included a brief timeline of the history of the oracle, the authors fail to cover any cultural context of the book of changes. In other translations you will find the Chinese names of the 64 hexagrams, some notes on cultural or historical context. However, the Dowdle's version fails to give us any reference to the culture the oracle comes from and reading the text feels like you're reading any guidebook to some new age oracle deck. The interpretations of the hexagrams themselves are lacking in textual richness and meaning. The meanings of the hexagrams in other translations are more thought-provoking and poetic. In Dowdle's version, the hexagram interpretations are pretty straight forward and watered down, almost to the point of misinterpretation. An example of this would be the text entry for Hexagram 21, Shih Ho. From the Dowdle's guide it translates the hexagram's name to "Making a Judgment", where as a more accurate and accepted translation is "Biting Through". Overall, this hexagram is discussing a period where a difficult decision needs to be made, but instead of taking immediate action the reader should wait and analyze the situation before taking action. Most translations will include a paragraph about the hexagram while being ambiguous to the situation at hand. The changing lines, which are determined by the coin toss, clarify the situation at hand if needed. While reading the Dowdle's interpretation of the I Ching, my main issue with the text was the long winded explanations of each hexagram and the simplified language. Instead of leaving the reader with a message to dive into and interpret they make their passages of the hexagrams self-explanatory. From a personal standpoint, it is also concerning to me that the couple who wrote the guidebook seems to only be interested in the I Ching as a divination tool, as stated in their author biography. In their section 1.2, Our Relationship with the I Ching, the couple had stated of being baffled by the interpretations of the I Ching when they first began to use the system, and relied many on translations before gaining their own understanding of the oracle "through personal experience". To me, this reads as a red flag because the couple is stating they have decided to alter the meanings of the hexagrams based on their own experiences. While personal experiences can give you a better understanding of the oracle, it is also irresponsible to not acknowledge the historical and cultural significance and meanings of the oracle in question. This would be like stating the Sun card in the tarot deck signifies motherly love; one may feel a joyful connection towards their mother and associate those feelings with the Sun, but that definition does not apply to everyone or the traditional meaning of the Sun card. Overall, this guidebook is extremely basic and dare I say "white-washed". For those who wish to study the I Ching, I would recommend books by Brian Browne Walker or Ming-Dao Deng. |
About the Author
Timothy and Johanna Dowdle are an Anglo-Dutch couple who have lived and worked in many different countries and are currently living in the Netherlands. Over the years the authors have studied and practiced the art of divination, using divination as a tool for making important decisions. A red thread running through their lives together has been the I Ching or Book of Changes. They first began consulting the I Ching oracle in 1988 and for more than thirty years the I Ching has guided them through many changes, often coaching them through very challenging situations. After returning to the Netherlands in 2011 from a year of intensive social work in the USA the authors decided the time had come to write an I Ching oracle book based upon their own real life experiences. Their aim is to share the knowledge and wisdom of the I Ching and make it accessible to everyone.
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