Everything Changes

A Thought Experiment on an Alternate History of the West

The thing about history is that it turns on absurdities. In our world, Constantine supposedly saw a cross in the sky before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 CE, and Christianity became the state religion of Rome. But what if the silk merchant who arrived in Antioch in 45 BCE hadn’t died of fever three days after landing? What if he’d made it to Rome with his cargo intact, including the peculiar book of hexagrams his Han Dynasty patron had pressed into his hands as a gift for the Roman Senate?

The Yijing (westerners like to call it I Ching) would have arrived in Rome at exactly the moment when Roman intellectuals were most disgusted with their own religious traditions. The late Republic was a period of profound spiritual crisis: the old gods had failed to prevent civil war, the priestly colleges were obviously corrupt, and educated Romans were already importing Greek philosophy wholesale to fill the gap. Cicero was writing treatises questioning whether the gods cared about human affairs at all. The ground was prepared for something new.

But here’s what would have made the I Ching stick where other imports failed: It had no jealous gods demanding exclusive worship, no priesthood claiming special access to truth, no mythology that contradicted what Romans already believed about their own history. It was a tool, a method, a way of thinking about a problem that plagued every Roman from senator to slave — how do you make decisions when the world keeps changing faster than you can understand it?

The Romans were practical people. They'd already stolen every useful thing they could from the Greeks, the Etruscans and the Egyptians. The hexagrams would have appealed to the same instinct that made them excellent engineers. Here was a system that claimed you could map all possible situations in life into sixty-four categories, understand their internal dynamics, and know what came next. Compared to reading sheep livers or watching bird flights, the I Ching offered something that looked more like a logical system: clear categories, explicit transformation rules, and a method that could be learned and debated. For pragmatic Romans, a structured approach to uncertainty was more valuable than the chaotic and often contradictory pronouncements of traditional augury.

Let’s imagine it’s 20 CE now, seventy-five years after the I Ching reached Rome. By this point, casting hexagrams would have become common among the equestrian class and above, the way therapy is common among educated Americans now. You’d see it creeping into literature: Ovid’s Metamorphoses would have explicitly referenced hexagram transformations as examples of the poetry of change. Seneca would have written a treatise reconciling Stoicism with the concept of cyclical transformation, arguing that the wise man doesn’t resist change but understands its patterns.

The genius of this thought experiment is realising that the I Ching wouldn’t have replaced Roman religion immediately. Instead, it would have existed alongside it for generations, the way Buddhism coexisted with Chinese folk religion, gradually displacing it in function if not in form. People would still have made offerings to Jupiter, but when they needed to decide whether to invest in a grain shipment or which of their sons to groom for the Senate, they’d have cast the coins.

Marcus Aurelius, writing his Meditations in the 170s CE, would have produced something very different in this timeline. Instead of that profound Stoic resignation to fate, you’d have gotten a more dynamic text: the philosopher-emperor trying to understand what hexagram the empire itself was in, whether its current troubles were the beginning of disintegration or just part of a natural cycle that would swing back to stability. His private divinations would have become public documents, the way Churchill’s wartime speeches are studied now, and every subsequent European leader would have been judged partly on the quality of their hexagram interpretation.

The real transformation would have come with Constantine, but not the way you’d expect. Constantine didn’t choose Christianity because of a vision — historians have debated that story for centuries. He chose it because he needed to unify an empire fragmenting along every possible fault line, and Christianity offered something the old Roman cults couldn’t: an organisational structure that crossed provincial boundaries, a literate clergy, and a theology that could be standardised. The I Ching, if it had become dominant by the fourth century, would have given him the same tools but with different implications.

Picture the Council of Nicaea, except it’s the Council of Byzantium, and instead of bishops arguing about the nature of Christ, you have rival schools of I Ching interpretation arguing about whether divination is deterministic or probabilistic, whether the hexagrams describe external reality or internal psychological states, whether there’s a cosmic intelligence behind the patterns or just patterns all the way down. Constantine, being Constantine, would have imposed an official orthodoxy not because he cared about metaphysics but because he needed his bureaucracy to make consistent decisions. The “Constantinopolitan Synthesis” would have become the baseline interpretation, with heretical schools driven to the margins.

Here’s where it gets really interesting. Medieval Christianity created a civilisation obsessed with sin, redemption, and the linear arrow of history from Creation to Apocalypse. Medieval I Ching culture would have had completely different obsessions.

Imagine a monastery, but instead of monks copying gospels, they’re producing commentaries on commentaries on the hexagrams, debating whether hexagram 11 (Peace) is ontologically superior to hexagram 12 (Standstill) or whether that’s a category error, since the whole point is that everything transforms into everything else. Scholasticism would have developed anyway because medieval people loved elaborate intellectual systems, but it would have been applied to questions of timing, appropriateness, and pattern recognition rather than to the nature of God and the problem of evil.

The Crusades wouldn’t have happened, at least not the way they did in our timeline. Holy war made sense in a tradition where God demanded the conquest of sacred space. In an I Ching-dominated Europe, conflict would have been justified differently, probably in terms of restoring proper cyclical balance or responding appropriately to hexagram conditions that indicated the time for military action. You’d still have gotten medieval violence, because humans are humans, but the ideological framework would have been completely different. Wars would have ended when court diviners on both sides agreed that the hexagram had shifted to one requiring peace. This sounds insane until you remember that wars in our timeline ended because of equally arbitrary and ritualised consultations, just with different symbolic systems.

The universities would have taught the trivium and quadrivium, but with hexagram studies as the foundation. Every subject would have been organised according to how it related to patterns of change. Medicine would have developed a sophisticated system of diagnosis based on identifying which hexagram a patient’s condition corresponded to, then treating them according to what the next transformation should be. This sounds like pure mysticism until you remember that medieval medicine in our timeline was based on the four humours, which were just as mystical but less systematically organised. The I Ching version would have gotten some things very wrong, but they might have been better at recognising cyclical patterns in epidemics, seasonal variations in illness, and the importance of timing in treatment.

The Scientific Revolution would have been the weirdest divergence point. In our timeline, the breakthrough was partly about rejecting Aristotelian teleology and embracing the idea that you could describe nature with universal, timeless laws. But if your foundational text tells you that everything is transformational and context-dependent, you can’t have a Scientific Revolution based on universal laws.

What you’d get instead would be something like what actually happened in China: extremely sophisticated empirical observation and pattern recognition without the conceptual framework of universal laws. Newton’s equivalent would have spent his life trying to describe planetary motion in terms of hexagram progressions, searching for the deep grammar that determined which configurations transformed into which others. He would have succeeded in making accurate predictions, but the underlying ontology would have been completely different.

The really strange thing is that this might have made some scientific developments happen faster. If your basic model of reality is cyclical rather than linear, you're predisposed to look for cyclical patterns, which means you might discover pendulum motion, wave behaviour, and orbital mechanics more intuitively. On the other hand, you'd struggle with anything that required thinking about absolute quantities or universal constants. Thermodynamics would have developed differently. While cyclical processes like heat engines would have been intuitive (the I Ching framework actually fits well with cycles of expansion and compression), the revolutionary insight of entropy and irreversibility would have been harder to accept. The challenge wouldn't be discovering that heat flows from hot to cold, but accepting that this represents a fundamental asymmetry in time rather than just another phase in a cycle. Scientists in this timeline might have spent decades trying to find the "return hexagram" that completes the thermodynamic cycle, delaying but not preventing the eventual acceptance of entropy's one-way arrow.

Darwin would still have happened, because evolution doesn't require Christian assumptions, but it would have been framed entirely differently and faced different resistance. Instead of "descent with modification" and "natural selection," you'd have gotten something like "transformation according to environmental hexagrams," with species moving through phases of development as their conditions changed. However, this framing would have created its own problems. The I Ching framework implies pattern, order, and predictable transformation, but evolution's core insight is fundamentally about randomness, accident, and non-teleological change. The real controversy wouldn't have been about whether humans descended from apes (cyclical transformation makes that easier to accept), but about whether evolution follows any pattern at all. I Ching-trained scholars would have struggled with the idea that mutations are random rather than following hexagram logic, and that natural selection has no goal or direction. The theory might have gained initial acceptance for the wrong reasons, then faced a deeper crisis when scientists realised that biological change doesn't follow the orderly transformations the hexagrams suggest. Eventually, this could have forced a productive crisis in I Ching interpretation itself — a recognition that not all change follows predictable patterns.

By the time you get to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the alternative timeline would be almost unrecognisably different from ours. The whole edifice of modernity in our world rests on assumptions that came from Christianity: linear progress, individual salvation, universal moral law, and the idea that history is going somewhere. Take those away and you have to rebuild everything from scratch.

Industrialisation would have happened, the material preconditions were the same, but it would have been understood completely differently. Instead of progress narratives about mankind’s conquest of nature, you’d have gotten elaborate theories about how industrial society represented a new hexagram that human civilisation was transforming into, with all the anxiety focused on whether this transformation was appropriately timed or premature. Luddites wouldn’t have been anti-technology; they’d have been people arguing that the collective divination was being performed incorrectly, that society was forcing a transformation before the necessary preconditions were in place.

Marxism’s equivalent would have been hexagrammatic materialism: the idea that societies move through sixty-four distinct modes of production in a predictable cycle, with revolution happening at the transformation points. This would have been simultaneously more and less radical than actual Marxism. More radical because it wouldn’t have required a teleological end state (communism), so revolutionary violence could be justified more easily as just part of the natural cycle. Less radical because it would have lacked Marxism’s moral urgency — if everything is cyclical, there’s no final victory, just endless transformation.

The World Wars would have happened for similar material reasons: nationalism, industrial capacity for mass killing, alliance systems, but the ideological framing would have been completely different. Fascism’s equivalent would have been something like “Forced Hexagram Theory,” the idea that a strong leader with a correct understanding could impose the appropriate hexagram on society through will and violence, skipping the natural progression. Democracy’s defenders would have argued that distributed divination, millions of people casting hexagrams and comparing interpretations, produced better collective decisions than any dictator could.

The atomic bomb would have created the same existential crisis it did in our world, but framed differently. Not “we have become death, destroyer of worlds” but something like “we have created a transformation that has no corresponding hexagram, a change so absolute that it breaks the cycle.” The Cold War would have been fought between those who believed in synchronised collective transformation (the Communist equivalent) and those who believed in emergent, decentralised pattern-following (the West).

By 2025 in this alternative timeline, you’d have a civilisation that thought about time, causation, and human agency in profoundly different ways. Climate change would be understood not as a crisis of human hubris but as humanity forcing an inappropriate hexagram transformation on the planet — the language would be different, but the urgency might actually be greater, because cyclical thinking makes you acutely aware that bad patterns can lock in and repeat.

Mental health would probably be in better shape. If your culture expects everyone to cycle through different psychological states and treats this as natural rather than pathological, you don’t get the same stigma around depression or anxiety. Therapy would have developed earlier and been less medicalised, more focused on helping people understand which hexagram they were in and what came next. On the other hand, you’d have less urgency about treating severe mental illness, because the framework doesn’t give you concepts like “chemical imbalance” or “neurological disease,” just different phases of transformation.

Social justice movements would have struggled in strange ways. The language of universal human rights comes from Christian concepts of the soul and natural law. In an I Ching world, you’d need to argue that certain social arrangements were in harmony with correct hexagram patterns and others weren’t. This is possible: you can build an egalitarian politics out of almost any metaphysical foundation, but it’s a different kind of argument, probably less powerful because it’s more contextual, more about appropriateness than absolute moral law.

Science would be simultaneously more advanced and more limited. Better at systems thinking, pattern recognition, ecology, and anything that requires understanding dynamic relationships. Worse at reductionism, fundamental particles, and anything that requires believing in timeless laws. The computer revolution might have happened earlier, because binary logic maps so perfectly onto broken and unbroken lines, but artificial intelligence would be conceived completely differently—not as calculation but as pattern matching, which ironically might be closer to how it actually works.

And the biggest difference would be in how people experience their own lives. In a Christian civilisation, even a secular one, you carry around assumptions about progress, purpose, moral absolutes, the idea that your life is a story with meaning. In an I Ching civilisation, you’d understand your life as a series of phases, each with its own appropriate responses, none intrinsically better than others, all part of a larger pattern you can perceive but not control. This could be either liberating or crushing, depending on your temperament: freedom from the burden of linear progress, or loss of the hope that things are building toward something better.

I think about that silk merchant sometimes, the one who died of fever in Antioch in 45 BCE in our timeline, three days before he could have changed the course of Western civilisation. In the parallel world where he survived, there’s maybe someone like me, a writer, sitting in a tea house in a city whose streets are named after hexagrams instead of saints, drinking tea while thinking about what the world would have been like if Constantine had chosen I Ching instead of standardising the Christianity.

Would they envy our sense of moral clarity, our conviction that history has direction and meaning? Or would they pity us for not understanding that everything is transformation, that clinging to permanence causes suffering, that wisdom lies in recognising patterns and moving with them rather than against them?

The question has no answer, which is itself revealing. We ask “which is better?” because we’re trained to think in terms of progress and optimisation. They’d ask “which hexagram are we in?” and accept that each world is simply the one that emerged from the particular changes that preceded it.

Somewhere in the space between possible worlds, the coins are still falling, the yarrow stalks are still being divided, and the answer is always the same: everything changes, and what matters is not whether you chose the right path but whether you understood the path you were on.