HuangDiNeiJing

Hello! I have a question regarding the Dragon and the Tiger. The Azure-Wood-Dragon of the East and the White-Metal-Tiger of the West are associated with the LEFT and the RIGHT of the body, respectively. However, In the same way that Li/Fire is on the "left side" of the Preheaven Bagua and Kan/Water is on the "right", I wonder is there is intentional hermetic sealing of the information encoded in these diagrams.* *Grimoires and occult literature is notoriously loaded with purposeful misinformation. NOTE the intentional switching of the Swords and Wands elemental association of the Tarot by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the early 20th century. This was to test initiates to see if they know the true association, rather than just taking it for granted. If you think about it - Swords would obviously correspond to Fire and Wands obviously to Air, rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, through the remainder of the 20th and into the 21st centuries we have fallen for the HOTGD's trick. It has occurred to me that the mirror is a recurrent motif in Daoist alchemy (The "Mirror for Compounding the Medicine", etc.). Could it be - as I believe - that we are not to read the Bagua as "facing" away from us, but "facing" towards us? Putting Li on our RIGHT sides and Kan on our LEFT? Yes, the Dragon constellation is in the East and the Tiger in the West. But what does this explicitly have to do with the body? The East (Dragon) is on your LEFT only if you are FACING SOUTH. If you are facing NORTH then the Dragon is on your RIGHT. The Dragon being Yang, I feel, should correspond with the RIGHT and not with the LEFT. We are used to North/South and Heaven/Earth being flipped in our alchemical cosmology... why not Left and Right? All this was spurred on by trying to find a banishing ritual that roughly matches the HOTGD's Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. In my searching I came across this: https://freakassesoterica.wordpress.com/2017/04/08/taoist-banishing-ritual/ While I found this compelling, I also can't help but think for myself. I looked in Benebell Wen's Tao of Craft for an answer and it seems to lack left/right correspondences. Looking forward to your thoughts!! (P.S. This is my first post here. Go easy on me. )

Hello! I'm new here but I've been a student of Daoism since I was little. I just graduated with my Masters Degree in Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine and will soon have my license in to practice Chinese medicine in my state. I have a blog where I write about Daoist alchemy, biophysics, and energywork. www.MakingTheMedicine.com My primary interests right now are in the Yijing, Daoist alchemy, and qigong practice. Currently reading the Cantong Qi and other works by Fabrizio Pregadio and trying to piece together my knowledge of Daoist alchemy by following the Yijing. Cheers to you all. Looking forward to taking part in these discussions!

Wands seem to me to invoke the intellectual and mental nature of magick more than the Sword. Swords seem to me to invoke destruction and transformation/breaking things apart than the Wand. Also, "fire" and "sword" are often mentioned together in the Bible and are referenced in the Gospel of Thomas as well. This seems far more intuitive than the Wand's association with the will and the Sword's association with evocation. This being said, the sword in Daoist magick has more of a universal function, if I understand correctly. So you're right about these things being culturally and geographically situated.

I tend to be of the mind that speculative metaphysics is a valid and fruitful process - and that our rational intuitions about nature can guide us to the truth. That nature is "carved at it's joints", etc. My conclusions are, as I said, that the Yang side should perhaps be on the right rather than the left. In Western esoterica the Solar side is the right. There seems to be a discrepancy there that I was trying to reconcile by invoking the concept of the mirror in regards to the Bagua, etc. Very interesting! So while the GODS are facing South, WE are facing North. The East is on THEIR left side and the East is on OUR right side? This would reconcile this difference, UNLESS we are performing the alchemical reversal and modeling ourselves on the Gods - which I am sympathetic to as a magician and a Westerner (Genesis 1:27). The 1=Yin=Water=Ren Mai being on the front (and vice versa) makes sense from a Chinese medicine perspective. The front side is the yin side, the back side is yang. Why then... do we FACE the North but flip the associations for East and West when it comes to our right and left limbs? Do you understand my confusion? Is this given an explicit reason in the Daoist literature that you're aware of? It's almost as though I detect some purposeful occult misinformation. Or perhaps that's just my conspiratorial nature. Perhaps the alchemical trick is that it doesn't matter. Perhaps the alchemist realizes, in uniting Tiger and Dragon, that left and right are the same. Further thoughts?

That's some good tuina! But I really don't get the blowing thing or whatever he's doing. Do you know what this is about? It's kinda creepy.

Hello! I have a slack account already, but using a different email address. I would like to sign up for the slack here. Can someone PM me about putting in my email address? Thank you.