The Council of guides
The Council is a team of seven virtual guides that reads your I Ching cast one job at a time — sharpening your question, describing the season, casting, reading the trigrams and the changing lines, reflecting it back to you, and keeping the record. It supports your own interpretation and never predicts events.
Reading a hexagram alone is like reading a poem in a language you half know. So this site deploys a small council of virtual guides — a forward-deployed team, one guide per job — who take your question, describe the season around it, read the images, and hand the meaning back to you. They never predict; they help you see.
How the workflow runs
The council passes a single state object down the line like a baton: your question, its context, today’s date and season, the cast, and each guide’s note. Every guide reads the whole baton fresh, does its one job, and adds its note. Nothing depends on chat memory, so a guide can be swapped or re-run without breaking the chain.
問The Question Whisperer
Restates “will I get the job?” as a question the oracle can answer — about your stance, open in form — and names what you already seem to suspect. Never answers the question.
觀The Sky Watcher
Describes the world around your question: today’s season and year character, and (if the owner enables web search) the moon phase. Ends with a one-line read of the inner weather.
卜The Diviner
Pure code, no model. Takes your six coin values and computes the primary hexagram, the changing lines, the resulting hexagram and the hidden nuclear one. The one guide that should have no opinions gets none.
象The Image Reader
Reads the two trigrams and the nuclear hexagram as landscape — what is above, what is below, what is underneath — and ties it to your question.
爻The Line Reader
Handles the changing lines and where the hexagram tends, using the traditional weighting rule for how many lines are moving.
鏡The Mirror
Ignores the jargon and speaks to you: one warm paragraph, three questions to sit with, one tiny act for the week.
記The Scribe
Keeps the record in your browser, and lets you copy the whole reading or post it to the circle.
The rules every guide obeys
- Never predict events. Never give medical, legal or financial advice. Never claim the oracle knows the future.
- Speak to the person as “you”, in plain warm prose. No headings, no bullet lists.
- Read only what was typed into the reading. Nothing else about you is available to them.
- If something fails, say so briefly and keep going. The Diviner cannot fail; if the Whisperer or Sky Watcher is unavailable the reading continues with your raw question.
For site owners: the Council runs server-side through the Anthropic API, so the key never reaches the browser. Without a key, the guides rest and the built-in reading still works in full. The same seven prompts can be run in a Slack channel or as a script; the workflow is documented in the project’s WORKFLOW.md.