Fu Hsi (about 4,000 BC)

Pinyin Fu Xi , formally (Wade-Giles romanization) T'ai Hao (Chinese: “The Great Bright One”) , also called Pao Hsi , or Mi Hsi first of China's mythical emperors. His miraculous birth, as a divine being with a serpent's body, is said to have occurred somewhere between the 40th and the 29th century BC. Some representations show him as a leaf-wreathed head growing out of a mountain or as a man clothed with animal skins.

Fu Hsi is the father of the Chinese Tai Chi Philosophy of yin and yang and, is said to have discovered the famous Chinese trigrams used in divination and thus to have contributed to the I Ching (Yi Ying).

He is the first in recorded history to have invented a theory of everything (physicists have the superstring theory). To him everything was a combination of trigrams ( like yin-yang-yin or yang-yin-yin). There are eight trigrams, which are also phases in a universal cycle.

For the first time, he symbolized yin as a broken line, yang as an unbroken line. These were observed to appear as vacated turtle shells cooked in a fire. Their appearance (It usually took three shells to get a reading) indicated the phase in the focus of attention. By the law of synchronicity, appearing symbols relate to the appearing world. Read a fascinating (partially fictional) biographical sketch of Fu Hsi in A Tale Of The I Ching by Wu Wei.