Robert Comber | The Lost Octave of the I Ching: Star Lore, Number, & The Cosmic Language Pattern
Mathemagician and author Robert Comber joins InnerVerse to discuss his upcoming book, The Lost Octave: Our Story in the Stars. After a spontaneous and jarring spiritual awakening, Robert began a Sirius study of various branches of metaphysics, culminating in a string of epiphanies that demonstrate a universal law of octaves, including an expansion of the I Ching from 64 to 72. In this episode you'll learn about the origins of the I Ching, the linguistic framework of the cosmos, numbers as qualities, and much more.
In the Plus+ Extension, Robert articulates the math and geometry behind his I Ching discovery, and we discuss astrological correspondences to hexagrams, how the Book of Changes itself is changing, the human story in star lore, Selfeggio frequencies, and how to make sense of conflicting esoteric systems of correspondence.
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In this episode
Core themes
The Law Of Octaves As A Cosmic Principle
Robert Comber describes the organizing idea behind his forthcoming 400 plus page book, The Lost Octave, as what he calls the lore of octaves: on a piano the eighth note ends one octave and begins the next, so the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. He argues this makes consciousness spherical rather than linear, and that recognizing it in advance lets a person relax into their journey instead of endlessly seeking. Comber ties it to the final two I Ching hexagrams, before completion and after completion, and to the dark night of the soul he says he passed through twice.
Where Comber Says The I Ching Actually Started
Comber traces the I Ching to a post cataclysm world roughly 8,000 years ago, well earlier than the conventional dating he acknowledges he is contradicting. He describes it beginning as bigrams, only eight possible combinations of two lines, used to read seasons, rains, wind and thunder. Royalty later turned it toward divination with yarrow sticks and then coins, and only around the King Wen period, four to five thousand years ago, did it become six line hexagrams, with Lao Tzu and Confucius layering philosophy on top. He also points to African priests casting shells and drawing lines in sand as a parallel binary code, citing physicist Dr James Gates.
The Lion's Gate Map That Turned 64 Into 72
Comber says the whole system arrived on the 8/8 Lion's Gate while he was studying a human design year wheel and felt a gap in it. Using clock mathematics, since 60 seconds and 60 minutes govern a 360 degree circle, he placed hexagrams 1 through 60 around the rim and set 61 through 64 at the four cardinal directions in the center. Twelve lines drawn from center for the twelve constellations left eight open positions, giving 72. He links that to the Hebrew sacred name of God, to Venus starting her synodic cycle in Leo, and to the eight pointed star of Ishtar and Inanna, doubled into a hypercube.
Master Gates, A Seventh Line, And 432
Comber contends the original written first hexagram carried a seventh line, and that this seventh line is how the system moves into a fourth dimensional plane. He claims his eight new gates each landed on a different zodiac sign with no repeats, producing twelve master gates, one per sign, which he believes was once a verbal transmission passed master to student and then lost. He notes 64 hexagrams times six lines gives 384 archetypes, while 72 times six gives 432, the number he ties to harmonic tuning and the Giza measurements. He frames the shift as binary code moving into ternary code, and two strand DNA toward three strand.
Star Lore, Correspondences, And Trusting Your Own Ear
Comber prefers the term star lore, spelled l o r e, to astro theology, calling it the spoken story of the stars from which he says myths, fairy tales and Bible episodes derive. He reads the eclipse as the stone of the tomb, the moon that rolls away, noting three days is 72 hours. With Robert Edward Grant he says petroglyphs in the King's Chamber mapped to constellations and the precession of the equinoxes, which he tunes to the note G. Chance Garton adds the Chiron and Pons Brooks synchronicities around the 2024 eclipses. Both land on the same advice: drop the labels and test the frequency yourself.
Quotes
“The beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. That is literally the key sentence of the law of octaves.”
“Every piece of evidence that you can observe in the entire cosmos is pointing at the fact that that's not the end of you, it's the beginning of you.”
“It's not that there's ones and zeros, it's just that the simulation we're in can be described as ones and zeros.”
“There's no opposites, there's just degrees of one thing. There's no such thing as cold, there's just heat and less heat. No such thing as dark, there's just light or less light.”
“If you knew this at the beginning, then why would you study anything else, because you could just study these 12 master gates and know all 72 hexagrams.”
“The book of changes is changing, so it itself is changing, it's evolving because we're evolving.”
“People know about the know thyself part of the inscription, but very less frequently does somebody say the other part, which is certainty brings ruin.”
“The stars are really the grand gallery in the sky, they are the free movie that you can watch.”
“It all plays out as if orchestrated by some divine plan. This is the level of weirdness that you get to open up to when you start looking at things mystically.”
“Although it is new and it kind of is for our time in a way, it was there all along, we just couldn't perceive it.”
“I'm giving you all of the tools and patterns that I've found and said figure it out, find for yourself, go and experience, see if what I've said is true for you.”
“Divination is very powerful, very magical. The wrong thing never happens, and that means that the wrong card is never drawn.”
Robert Comber, self-described as a 'mathemagician,' is the author of 'The Lost Octave: Our Story in the Stars,' researching a proposed universal law of octaves, an expansion of the I Ching from 64 to 72 hexagrams, and connections between number, astrology, and solfeggio frequencies.
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