One whole Age ago, there was a game of such perfect proportions that it captured the very language of creation itself. It was the common source of its people’s sport, spirituality, and art. With it, the future was foretold and the past memorialized forever. With it, the coming generations were already cared for and the generations past were always advising the living. With it, civilization flowered as spontaneously as a bloom and its citizens governed themselves. With it, the grand cycles of making and unmaking were understood and the pursuits of its people were timed to expand during the one and to contract during the other. With it, the natural and the supernatural met on the playing field of its people. With it, art and science and religion were all one thing.
Its original name can no longer be recalled but its meaning translated as The Pattern of Order and Chance—so named because it captured the code of life and mind that underlies the language of creation itself: its originators stood at the very dawn of consciousness, witnesses first-hand to the pattern of perception awakening within them.
Every player since then has been heir to their saying: Because our mind is made from the same fabric as the rest of nature, our pattern of perception is identical to the pattern of what we perceive. All this was long ago, when the world was new and young and whole, when a game of perfect proportions lay at the very heart of that wholeness. But the wholeness did not last. Division set in and ruled all things. And so the world changed and dark times fell on the game of light. But its players were prepared, for the Game had foretold the manner and the moment of its own departing: in accordance with its will, its players divided the game into two parts and carried them far away from each other—far enough that each might survive apart where they both would have surely perished together. To the West they carried its body, where it came to be called Chess. To the East they carried its spirit, where it came to be called I Ching. By this ruse the two have been nurtured until the day they could again be one. Until that time, long ago foretold by the Game, for the reunion of its two halves. Until this time.
