The artwork on this set is very well done and I had seen it in a catalog a long time ago and wanted it even back then.  I will not pretend I know anything about I Ching, however, and I thought I could learn it easily enough from the set.  This is a lot harder than it sounds.  The book that is enclosed with the set is a very nice little one with a good deal of information presented in a short piece of literature, but it makes no claims to being a complete guide to the I Ching.

In fact, the entire basis of the set is that it is an abbreviated and supposedly easier system to working with the I Ching.  I'm not sure that in this case a shortcut is a good idea.  I would say that someone with at least an elementary foundation in the I Ching would get more from this deck than say, a beginnner, like me.

There are no Major or Minor Arcana being that this is not a tarot deck.  There are, separate from the rest of the cards in the deck, a set of eight trigram cards.  The Little Book explains how the trigrams are made, each is a combination of yin and yang characteristics.  It is like an ancient Chinese binary code system.  I never could learn how to use binary code.

The cards in the rest of the deck (there are 64) show a fully illustrated picture from typical Chinese life.  It is hard to tell what period of Chinese life is depicted.  I believe this may have been done on purpose to give a more universal feel to the deck.  On the face of each card is a white circle with the appropriate hexagram on it.  There are also small white rectangles with Chinese characters on them; these are never explained, as it explicitly states in the book that there are no other characters or identifying marks on the cards.  There is no numbering or titling system in place.  You have to match each card up to the picture in the book in order to find out what page to read about it on.

Coming from a tarot perspective, I do have to say that a real lot of these cards are intuitive enough that you can glean their meaning from looking at them, without even looking in the book once.  I suspect one could use the deck to some purpose this way, without learning the I Ching, although purists will say that is not possible.

Personally I would recommend this deck for people who already have a foundation in the I Ching and who aren't necessarily just starting out with it.  The art is good enough that it will make a nice addition to a collection as well.

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Review Copyright 1998 by Gina M. Pace