Hexagram 16: Enthusiasm

Sunlight filters through chestnut leaves onto dancing couples crowding the Moulin de la Galette's outdoor garden. Renoir painted this Sunday afternoon in Montmartre in 1876, capturing Parisians gathered for music, wine, and movement. The accordion player sits at right, providing rhythm. The dancers spin through dappled light, their faces flushed, their bodies pressed close in the whirl of the waltz. No formal occasion demanded this assembly—just the weekend, just the weather, just the accordion's invitation to dance. People came because the music moved them, because enthusiasm spreads like sunlight through leaves, because joy calls and bodies answer.

This is Yù (豫), the Chinese hexagram meaning "enthusiasm" or "harmony." Ancient diviners saw this configuration when Thunder (Zhèn) sits above Earth (Kūn): arousing movement above, receptive stillness below, like music that moves people to dance, like rhythm that enters the body and becomes motion. The Moulin's crowd embodies this responsive harmony—individuals hearing the same beat, bodies finding the same tempo, separate people becoming one flowing pattern. In Zhou Dynasty court practice, this hexagram appeared when music accompanied ritual, when armies marched in coordinated formation, when collective action emerged not from command but from shared feeling that aligned individual impulses toward common purpose.

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The Judgment text describes enthusiasm's organizing power: "It furthers one to install helpers and to set armies marching." Not through coercion but through harmony that makes people want to move together. Renoir's dancers need no instruction—the music provides direction, their enthusiasm provides energy, and the pattern emerges organically. The painting shows working-class Parisians alongside artists and bohemians, class distinctions temporarily dissolved in shared movement. Tang Dynasty generals understood this hexagram as the moment when troops fought with unified spirit, when musicians played in perfect ensemble, when the group achieved flow state where individual and collective intention merged.

The Image Text explains how enthusiasm manifests: "Thunder comes resounding out of the earth: the image of enthusiasm. Thus the ancient kings made music in order to honor merit, and offered it with splendor to the Supreme Deity, inviting their ancestors to be present." Movement and music create sacred space. Renoir treats this common dance hall with the same reverent attention Renaissance painters gave to religious scenes—the light becomes divine, the dancers become celebrants, the ordinary afternoon transforms into something worthy of preservation. In the I-Ching's sequence, Yù follows Modesty: when humility creates stable ground, enthusiasm can safely arise. The next hexagram is Following—what begins as spontaneous joy becomes structured movement, what starts as dance becomes direction. But first this Sunday afternoon, this accordion, this light through leaves.