Where Jung’s interest began
Jung’s own account, dictated late in life for Memories, Dreams, Reflections, puts the start in the summer of 1920. He had the standard English version of the day, James Legge’s translation of 1882, and no yarrow stalks, so he cut a bundle of reeds to serve instead and spent the holiday in his garden at Küsnacht putting question after question to the book. What he was testing was not whether it could predict anything. It was whether the answers were coherent: whether a hexagram, read against the question it was cast for, made the kind of sense a reply from an intelligent person makes.
He came away convinced that the fit was too good to dismiss, and unable to say why. That gap — between an answer that plainly fits and an explanation that plainly does not exist — is where the whole of his later thinking about the oracle sits. He did not stop consulting it. Nearly thirty years on, when he wrote his foreword, he still described the method with the caution of someone who had never quite settled the question he asked under the pear tree.
Richard Wilhelm and the translation Jung used
The translation that changed things was not Legge’s. Richard Wilhelm was a German pastor who went out to the German concession at Qingdao in 1899, stayed for more than twenty years, and is said to have been proud that he never baptised a single convert. Instead he learned classical Chinese well enough to spend years working through the I Ching with Lao Naixuan, a scholar of the old school, translating and then reading the translation back until the Chinese and the German agreed. The result appeared in Jena in 1924. Jung had met Wilhelm in the early 1920s at Count Hermann Keyserling’s School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, and in 1923 invited him to lecture on the I Ching at the Psychological Club in Zurich.
They made one book together. In 1928 Jung had just finished painting a mandala with a golden castle at its centre when Wilhelm’s manuscript of a Taoist meditation text arrived in the post; Jung treated the timing as a case in point, and the text appeared in 1929 as The Secret of the Golden Flower, Wilhelm’s translation with a long commentary by Jung. Wilhelm died on 1 March 1930, at fifty-six. Jung gave the memorial address in Munich that May, and it is there, in a speech about a friend, that the word synchronicity was said in public for the first time — as a name for the principle on which, Jung argued, the oracle’s method rested. The friendship mattered for the argument: Wilhelm gave Jung a text he could trust, and a Western mind that had lived inside the Chinese one long enough to carry over its habits of thought, not only its words.
Jung and the I Ching: the dates
Read the right-hand column first. Three of these rows rest on Jung’s memory of events decades earlier, recorded in his eighties; the rest rest on books and addresses with a date on them. A page about meaningful coincidence had better be careful about which is which.
| Year | What happened | Kind of record |
|---|---|---|
| 1920 | By his own later account, Jung spends a summer testing the oracle in his garden at Küsnacht with Legge's 1882 English version and a bundle of reeds cut to stand in for yarrow stalks. | Jung's own recollection |
| 1923 | Richard Wilhelm, whom Jung had met at Count Keyserling's School of Wisdom in Darmstadt, lectures on the I Ching at the Psychological Club in Zurich at Jung's invitation. | Jung's own recollection |
| 1924 | Wilhelm's German translation, worked out in Qingdao with the scholar Lao Naixuan, is published in Jena — the version Jung consults for the rest of his life. | Dated publication |
| 1929 | The Secret of the Golden Flower appears: Wilhelm's translation of a Taoist meditation text with a psychological commentary by Jung, the one book they made together. | Dated publication |
| 1930 | Wilhelm dies on 1 March. On 10 May, in his memorial address in Munich, Jung says the word synchronicity in public for the first time. | Dated public address |
| 1949 | Jung writes his foreword to Cary F. Baynes's English rendering of Wilhelm's translation, casting two hexagrams to ask the book about the undertaking; the edition appears in 1950 as Bollingen Series XIX. | Dated publication |
| 1951 | At the Eranos conference in Ascona, Jung gives a short lecture titled On Synchronicity, the first public statement of the idea as a principle rather than an aside. | Dated public address |
| 1952 | Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle is published in one volume with an essay on Kepler by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung's correspondent since 1932. | Dated publication |
| 1962 | Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé, appears a year after Jung's death with his own account of the reed experiment and the friendship with Wilhelm. | Jung's own recollection |
| 1980 | Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung's closest collaborator, publishes On Divination and Synchronicity, the lectures that carried his reading of the oracle to the next generation. | Dated publication |
Notice the shape: thirty years between the first experiment and the foreword, twenty-two between the word being spoken at a memorial and the essay that finally argued for it. Jung was in no hurry with this idea.
What synchronicity means
Strip the word back to Jung’s definition and it is narrower than its afterlife. Synchronicity is a meaningful coincidence: an inner event — a dream, an image, a question held in mind — and an outer event that correspond closely, at or near the same time, where neither can have caused the other. The connection is in the meaning the two share, which is why the 1952 essay calls it an acausal connecting principle. Jung was not claiming that thoughts move objects. He was claiming that the pairing itself is a fact worth a name, and that a science built on cause and effect alone had no place to put it.
His best-known example is small. A patient, stuck in an analysis that had hardened into argument, was telling him a dream in which she was handed a golden scarab. Something tapped on the window behind him; he opened it and caught a beetle of the scarab family, the nearest thing to a golden scarab the Swiss climate provides, and handed it to her. The impasse broke. Jung reports it not as proof of anything but as the shape of the thing: an inner image, an outer event, no causal thread, and a meaning obvious to the person it happened to.
The idea was hammered out over two decades with an unlikely partner. Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist who would win the Nobel Prize in 1945, came to Jung with his dreams in 1932 and kept up a correspondence until 1958. Pauli’s letters pushed Jung to separate what he could argue from what he could only illustrate, and the finished statement appeared in 1952 in a single volume with Pauli’s own study of Kepler, a year after a shorter version was read at the Eranos meeting in Ascona. Jung also leaned on J. B. Rhine’s card-guessing experiments at Duke University as evidence that something outside causality could be measured; whether that evidence held up is a question for the critics below. What matters here is the claim’s size: not a force, not a law, but a principle of correspondence, proposed to sit beside causality rather than replace it.
The 1949 foreword: Jung asks the oracle about itself
When the Bollingen Foundation prepared an English edition of Wilhelm’s translation, rendered by Cary F. Baynes, it asked Jung for a foreword. He wrote it in 1949, and instead of describing the method from the outside he used it. He treated the book as a person he was about to introduce to strangers and asked what it thought of the introduction. That answer, and a second answer to a second question, are set out below, with each hexagram linked to its own page on this site.
| What Jung asked | Hexagram cast | Moving | Becomes |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the book made of his plan to introduce it to Western readers | Hexagram 50 — Cauldron | 2nd and 3rd lines | Hexagram 35 — Advance |
| What the undertaking meant for him, now that he had put the first question | Hexagram 29 — Water | 3rd line | Hexagram 48 — Village Well |
The first cast. The answer is the image of a bronze cooking vessel: something real is inside it, and those who resent it cannot get at it, but its handles have been changed so that it cannot be carried and the good meat goes uneaten until the weather turns. Jung read this as the book describing its own standing in the West — substance nobody had found a way to lift — and the resulting hexagram, whose theme is advance, as the answer to whether that would change.
The second cast. Water falling into a ravine, with the moving line describing a pit behind and a pit ahead, where every step forward is another drop and the only sound advice is to wait. The resulting hexagram is the well: the town around it changes, the well stays where it is, and the classic text mourns a well that has been cleaned and still goes undrunk. Jung took the pair as the oracle naming the risk of being misunderstood, and then picturing itself — a source anyone could draw from and almost nobody did.
Two things about the exercise are easy to miss. First, Jung read the moving lines and the resulting hexagram as one continuous statement, the way the tradition does: a cast is not a single symbol but a movement from one situation toward another. Second, he did not soften the second answer. An oracle that, asked how things stand, replies with danger and an unused well is not flattering its questioner, and that was his point: the replies read like those of a candid interlocutor, not like the reassurance a wish would produce. He claimed no proof. He offered the two casts as a demonstration of how the Chinese method looks from inside, and left the reader to decide whether the fit was chance.
How Jung read a hexagram
Jung’s use of the oracle is easiest to understand from what he refused to do with it. He did not read a hexagram as a forecast. The moment of the cast, in his account, is what the hexagram describes: the situation the questioner is standing in, with the question folded into it, drawn in the book’s ancient images. What comes next depends on what the questioner does with that picture. He did not claim the method works for everyone, and said plainly that it would not persuade anyone who wanted a mechanism first. And he refused to translate the book into psychology wholesale: the foreword offers a demonstration and a handful of principles, not a system.
What he did do was treat the consultation as a way of getting the unconscious to speak in a language the conscious mind could not have supplied. The reader brings a question and a state of mind; the cast supplies an image nobody chose; the meaning appears where the two meet. That is the same movement he described in dream work and in what he called active imagination, and it is why, for Jung, the I Ching belonged with psychology rather than with prophecy. A hexagram read as a verdict is a hexagram misread; its value lay in provoking a recognition, and a recognition cannot be delegated to a book. For the wider picture of what the text is and how it was put together, what the I Ching is and the history of how it was assembled each have a page of their own here.
What the critics say
The objections deserve a hearing because Jung gave most of them one himself. The first is statistical. Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller’s 1989 paper on coincidences set out how many striking correspondences an ordinary life must produce by chance alone, and how memory keeps the hits and quietly drops the misses; a golden scarab that failed to arrive would have made no story. On that view synchronicity names a bias, not a principle. The second is that the supporting evidence did not hold. Jung’s own experiment with the horoscopes of married couples, reported in the 1952 essay, gave figures he first read as significant and later conceded did not stand up, and Rhine’s results have not been reproduced under stricter controls. The third is philosophical: a principle that explains meaningful coincidences and equally explains their absence is not doing the work a principle should.
What survives the critics is smaller than the word’s reputation, and more useful. Jung’s psychological claim never depended on the coincidence being improbable. It depended on the reader’s response being real. A hexagram produced by chance, met by a person with a live question, can still bring something into view that the person had not let themselves see. That claim is testable by anyone with a question and a quiet half hour, and it is the claim this site is built on — the same reasoning as our answer on accuracy, which promises no rate of hits either.
What it means for a reading today
Here is what changes in practice if you take Jung’s reading of the oracle seriously. The question matters more than the method of casting, because the question is half of what the hexagram portrays; a vague question gets a vague portrait. The moment matters, so it is worth noticing when you ask, which is why the engine behind a reading on this site records the time of the cast and folds it into the calculation alongside the six lines you cast. The moving lines matter most, because the movement from the first hexagram to the second is where an answer’s direction lives; our guide to changing lines walks through how to read them. And the reading is finished by you, not by the book: the useful question after any cast is what you recognise in it.
None of this requires believing in an acausal principle. It requires only what Jung asked of his readers in 1949: a willingness to put a real question and to take the answer as addressed to you. All 64 hexagrams are here in the King Wen order, one page each, if you would rather read the images first. For a shared version of the same exercise, see today’s hexagram, the one everyone consulting this site meets on the same day. Or cast a reading now and see which of the sixty-four this moment produces.
Frequently asked questions
Did Carl Jung actually use the I Ching?
Yes, for roughly forty years. By his own account he first tested it in 1920 with Legge's English version and a bundle of reeds standing in for yarrow stalks, kept consulting it after Richard Wilhelm's German translation appeared in 1924, and in 1949 cast two hexagrams to ask the book about the foreword he was writing for it. He never presented it as a machine for telling the future, but as a way of putting a question to the unconscious and reading the answer as a picture of the moment.
What is synchronicity in plain words?
Jung's name for a meaningful coincidence: an inner state — a dream, a thought, a question — and an outer event that fit each other closely without either causing the other. He called it an acausal connecting principle, meaning the link lies in the meaning, not in cause and effect. His stock example is a patient describing a dream of a golden scarab at the moment a scarab-like beetle taps on the consulting-room window.
Which hexagrams did Jung get when he asked the I Ching about itself?
Two casts, both reported in the 1949 foreword. Asked what it made of being introduced to Western readers, the book gave hexagram 50, the image of a bronze vessel, with the second and third lines moving, which changes it into hexagram 35. Asked what the undertaking meant for Jung himself, it gave hexagram 29, water in a ravine, with the third line moving, which changes it into hexagram 48, the well.
How are synchronicity and the I Ching connected?
The I Ching is where the idea came from. Jung needed a word for what he thought a consultation does: the hexagram formed at the moment of asking is treated as a portrait of that moment, question included, rather than as something the question caused. He first said the word in public in 1930, in his memorial address for Richard Wilhelm, and gave the full argument in 1952.
Is synchronicity scientifically proven?
No, and Jung did not claim it was. He offered it as a hypothesis to stand beside causality, leaned on J. B. Rhine's card-guessing experiments for support, and conceded that his own statistical test with astrological data was inconclusive. Statisticians have since shown how often striking coincidences arise by chance alone. What survives is a psychological claim: a hexagram formed by chance can still be a useful mirror for a real question.
Where can I read Jung's foreword to the I Ching?
It opens the English translation by Cary F. Baynes, first published in 1950 as Bollingen Series XIX and still in print from Princeton University Press, and it is collected in volume 11 of Jung's Collected Works. The foreword is still in copyright, which is why this page summarises it instead of quoting it; the two hexagrams it reports are 50 and 29.
Did Jung and Wolfgang Pauli work together on the idea?
Yes. Pauli, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945, came to Jung with his dreams in 1932 and corresponded with him until 1958; the letters, published as Atom and Archetype, show the concept being argued out between a psychologist and a physicist, and the 1952 essay appeared in one volume with Pauli's study of Kepler. Pauli sharpened the physics and pushed Jung to state synchronicity as a principle rather than a collection of anecdotes.
Sources
- C. G. Jung, foreword to the I Ching, Bollingen Series XIX (written 1949) (1950) — the two consultations and Jung's framing of the method
- C. G. Jung, In Memory of Richard Wilhelm, memorial address, Munich (1930) — the first public use of the word synchronicity
- C. G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, published with Wolfgang Pauli's essay on Kepler (1952) — the definition, the scarab account and the Rhine and astrology evidence
- C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé (1962) — the 1920 reed experiment and the friendship with Wilhelm
- C. A. Meier (ed.), Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters 1932–1958 (2001) — the Pauli collaboration
- Marie-Louise von Franz, On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance (1980) — how Jung's reading of the oracle was carried forward
- Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, Methods for Studying Coincidences, Journal of the American Statistical Association 84 (1989) — the statistical case against meaningful coincidence
I am Gavin, and I built this site on my own. This page reports Jung’s published texts and the scholarship around them, not research of mine — more on the person behind this site.