Mystical systems
Yarrow Stalk Method
Direct answer
Yarrow Stalk Method: The yarrow stalk method is the traditional way of casting an I Ching hexagram, by dividing and counting a bundle of fifty dried stalks to find each of the six lines.
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At a glance
- Also called
- yarrow stalks i ching, yarrow stalk divination, i ching yarrow method, fifty yarrow stalks
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- I Ching, I Ching Hexagram, Bagua, Cleromancy
The yarrow stalk method is the traditional way of casting an I Ching hexagram, by dividing and counting a bundle of fifty dried stalks to find each of the six lines.
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How many yarrow stalks are used for the I Ching?
In the yarrow stalk method the person consulting the I Ching takes fifty thin stalks, sets one aside and works with forty-nine. The bundle is split at random into two heaps, one stalk is held out, and each heap is counted off by fours until a remainder is left. Doing this three times gives one of four numbers: six, seven, eight or nine. That number fixes one line, whole or broken, changing or at rest.
Six lines make a hexagram, so the whole cast takes eighteen divisions and something like a quarter of an hour. The slowness is part of the practice. Tossing three coins, the later shortcut, takes a minute, and the two methods do not give the four kinds of line with the same frequency.
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What sets Yarrow Stalk Method apart
The method is a small piece of arithmetic done by hand. Each division of the stalks leaves a remainder, the remainders of three divisions are combined, and what is left in the hand, counted in fours, comes to six, seven, eight or nine. Because the first division behaves differently from the next two, the four totals are not equally likely: a still broken line is the commonest result and a changing broken line the rarest. That built-in lopsidedness is what the coin toss loses.
- Stalks: fifty taken up, one set aside, forty-nine counted
- Divisions: three for each line, eighteen for a whole hexagram
- Line values: six and nine are changing lines; seven and eight are at rest
- Odds in sixteen: six, one; nine, three; seven, five; eight, seven
- Textual source: the Great Treatise, one of the Ten Wings of the I Ching
- Reconstruction followed: that of Zhu Xi, twelfth century
Often mistaken for something else: Three coins give a changing whole line and a changing broken line equal odds of two in sixteen each; the stalks make the changing whole line three times as likely as the changing broken one.
The story behind Yarrow Stalk Method
Stalk divination stood beside the older reading of cracks in heated bone and shell in Zhou China. The count is outlined briefly in the Great Treatise, one of the commentaries attached to the I Ching and known as the Ten Wings. The outline leaves steps unclear, and the procedure followed today is the reconstruction given by the philosopher Zhu Xi in the twelfth century. Casting with three coins is a later shortcut.
Why Yarrow Stalk Method matters
Yarrow Stalk Method is the procedure the oldest commentaries assume, and it explains why the lines carry the numbers six to nine.
How to read Yarrow Stalk Method
People who keep to it value the time it takes: the counting gives the question a slow, attentive quarter of an hour that three coins do not.
Yarrow Stalk Method in practice: an example
Someone with a hard choice to make spends fifteen quiet minutes counting stalks, and finds the question has grown clearer before the hexagram is even looked up.
Where readings of Yarrow Stalk Method go wrong
The stalks produce numbers by chance. What the answer is taken to mean comes from the text and the person reading it.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- yarrow stalks i ching, yarrow stalk divination, i ching yarrow method, fifty yarrow stalks, milfoil stalks i ching
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
See Yarrow Stalk Method in your personal almanac
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Common questions
How many yarrow stalks are used for the I Ching?
Fifty are taken up and one is put aside at once, so forty-nine are divided and counted. Bamboo skewers or any thin sticks serve when yarrow is not to hand.
Are the yarrow stalks and the coins equally likely to give each line?
No. With three coins a changing broken line and a changing whole line each come up one time in eight. With the stalks the changing broken line comes up one time in sixteen and the changing whole line three times in sixteen.
Why is yarrow used for the I Ching?
Early Chinese texts treat yarrow, also called milfoil, as a plant fit for consulting the spirits, and do not say why. Its straight, light stalks are also easy to handle in a bundle.
