Cosmological Construction and Rational Essence of the Original Functions of the *Book of Changes* Based on Divination Tracing

Section 4.1: From "Severing Communication Between Heaven and Earth" to "Divergence of Shamans and Historians" — The Transformation of Knowledge Power

To understand the original function of the Zhouyi, we must shift our focus back to the ancient shamanic-historical tradition, even earlier than the Zhou Dynasty.

The Guoyu, "Chuyu Xia," records an extremely important ancient historical narrative—"Severing Communication Between Heaven and Earth" (绝地天通):

"When Shao Hao's (少皞) reign declined, the Jiuli (九黎) tribes disrupted virtue, and people and spirits mingled, making distinctions impossible. Each household offered sacrifices, and each family acted as shaman or historian, without proper standards. The people were depleted in sacrifices and did not know their blessings. The incessant offerings were without measure, and people and spirits occupied the same positions. Zhuanxu (颛顼) received this mandate, and accordingly ordered Nan Zheng Zhong (南正重) to be in charge of Heaven to connect with spirits, and ordered Huo Zheng Li (火正黎) to be in charge of Earth to connect with people. This was to restore the old order, without mutual transgression. This is called the Severing of Communication Between Heaven and Earth." (及少皞之衰也，九黎乱德，民神杂糅，不可方物。夫人作享，家为巫史，无有要质。民匮于祀而不知其福。烝享无度，民神同位。颛顼受之，乃命南正重司天以属神，命火正黎司地以属民。使复旧常，无相侵渎，是谓绝地天通。)

This passage describes a major reform in ancient society: after the decline of Shao Hao's reign, "people and spirits mingled"—everyone could communicate with spirits, and every family had shamans, leading to great disorder in social order. Emperor Zhuanxu then carried out a "restructuring of knowledge power"—ordering "Zhong" to be solely in charge of heavenly affairs and "Li" to be solely in charge of earthly affairs, thus transforming communication between Heaven and humanity from a freely accessible act for everyone into a specialized, institutionalized, and ordered knowledge system.

This is "Severing Communication Between Heaven and Earth"—cutting off direct channels of communication between ordinary people and the heavens, concentrating the power of "communicating with Heaven" in the hands of professional religious personnel.

Why recount this ancient history$32 Because the Zhouyi is likely a product of the transformation of the shamanic-historical tradition towards rationalization after the "Severing of Communication Between Heaven and Earth."

Before the "Severing of Communication Between Heaven and Earth," shamans communicated with spirits through ecstasy, possession, and intuition—a direct, irrational mode of cognition. After the "Severing of Communication Between Heaven and Earth," communication between Heaven and humanity was brought into an institutionalized framework, and the previously intuitive shamanic cognition began to transform towards systematic image-number cognition. The system of Eight Trigrams, sixty-four hexagrams, and Yin-Yang lines is precisely the crystallization of this transformation—it transformed the vague spiritual intuitions of shamans into a operable, teachable, and verifiable symbolic system.

In other words, the birth of the Zhouyi was not the development of divination techniques, but the rational sublimation of the ancient shamanic-historical tradition—a leap from "communicating with spirits" to "thoroughly investigating principles."