---
number: 19
title: The Periodic Table of 64 — every element read off its six lines
date: 2026-07-18
summary: All sixty-four elements on one page, each fully determined by its hexagram — the upper trigram its face, the lower its body — with names, readings, uses and two computed stats, filterable by face and by body. The direct ancestor of the element table the game runs on. A backdated entry, added 2026-09-13.
epic: element-table
status: delivered
artifacts: ["docs/historic/lor-periodic-table.html"]
cta: [object Object]
---

<div class="embed-frame">
  <iframe
    src="/experiments/periodic-table/index.html"
    title="LOR — The Periodic Table of 64: filter by face (upper trigram) and body (lower trigram)"
    loading="lazy"
  ></iframe>
</div>

*Interactive. Filter the sixty-four by face (the upper trigram) and by body (the lower). Backdated: added to the log on 2026-09-13 for a thing made on 2026-07-18. The original is `docs/historic/lor-periodic-table.html`; what is embedded is a verbatim copy.*

## What it was

The first time all sixty-four were laid out and looked at together. The rule of the page is in
its first line: nothing here is hand-set. The upper trigram is the face — how an element meets
the world, what it radiates, absorbs, seals or conducts — and the lower trigram is the body —
what it stores and how it holds together. The names, descriptions and uses were written as
interpretive readings of that structure, and two experimental stats were computed from it:
permeability, read off the face, and reactivity, a count of the strained lines from zero
(Balance-stone, 63) to six (Volatile Flux, 64).

## What carried through

The table itself. Today's game is built on a sixty-four-row element table — a name, a colour,
a description and a use for every hexagram, keyed by its King Wen number, authored in the card
editor and compiled into the game — and that table is this page's descendant. The lower trigram
as the body became the lower trigram as the ground: every hexagram is also a kind of ground a
cell can be made of, and the lower trigram decides whether it is flat, liquid or mountain.
Balance-stone and Volatile Flux still sit at the two ends of the list.

## What did not

The computed stats. Permeability and reactivity depended on the field physics that was set
aside a day later, so the table the game uses carries authored properties instead. The
descriptions were the part worth keeping, and most of them were.