Cast a Hexagram from Any Text
Turn any sentence — a question, a journal entry, a message you never sent — into an I Ching hexagram through a deterministic SHA-256 pipeline. Same text, same hexagram, every time.
One sentence, one hexagram
A question. A journal paragraph. A message you never sent. A line of verse you keep returning to. Any text can be cast — and the cast is deterministic: the same sentence, cast today or next year or by someone else entirely, always lands on the same hexagram. Every piece of text has a fixed address in the space of 64.
The algorithm, with nothing hidden
The text becomes UTF-8 bytes, and the bytes a SHA-256 digest. The digest's first six bytes set the lines by parity — odd is yang, even is yin, stacked bottom to top. The seventh byte, mod 6, selects exactly one moving line, which flips to old yang or old yin. Every byte of this is shown in the result page's computation trace, so anyone can recompute it independently — which is precisely what separates this from black-box card-draw apps. Full derivations on the math page.
Why determinism is the interesting part
Traditional casting uses chance to draw the number of this moment; text casting is deterministic and draws the number of the text itself. That produces an experience the traditional methods can't: the sentence that matters most to you — a motto, a person's name, the line that changed your mind — has exactly one hexagram that is permanently its own. Change a single comma and the hexagram changes completely. That's not mysticism; it's the avalanche effect, a defining property of cryptographic digests.
How to use it
The most natural move: cast from the exact words of your question. Write “Should I accept this invitation?” and cast that sentence — the asking and the drawing collapse into one gesture, and the hexagram becomes a mirror held up to your own phrasing. Reading it works like any cast: the judgment for the situation, the moving line for the variable, the changed hexagram for the direction — see changing lines. If your text wants to keep its line breaks, there's a verse-shaped entry with the same pipeline underneath.
Privacy
Your text is used to compute the digest; the casting record keeps the hash and a short preview for verification — not a public display of the full original. Anonymous casting needs no account.