I Ching

The I Ching or "Yì Jīng" (pinyin), also known as the Classic of Changes, Book of Changes and Zhouyi, is one of the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. The book contains a divination system comparable to Western geomancy or the West African Ifá system; in Western cultures and modern East Asia, it is still widely used for this purpose. Traditionally, the I Ching and its hexagrams were thought to pre-date recorded history, and based on traditional Chinese accounts, its origins trace back to the 3rd to the 2nd millennium BC. Modern scholarship suggests that the earliest layer of the text may date from the end of the 2nd millennium BC, but place doubts on the mythological aspects in the traditional accounts. Some consider the I Ching' as the oldest extant book of divination, dating from 1,000 BC and before.

In television fiction, the precepts of the I Ching played a major role in several storylines from the 1966-1971 daytime Gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows. By arrangin a series of I Ching wands into a specific pattern, a learned individual can literally open the doorways to time and space and send themselves forwards or backwards through time. It was through this process that Barnabas Collins was able to travel from the present year of 1969 to the year 1897.