Between Scientificity and Esotericism: Vladimir Eremeev’s Reconstruction of the Yijing  in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Russian Thought

For centuries, the story of human knowledge has been told as a straight line running from ancient Greece through Europe to the modern world. In this familiar narrative, science and philosophy are seen as unique European inventions, while the complex systems of thought developed in China, India, and elsewhere are often dismissed as mystical or pre-scientific. This view creates a blind spot, ignoring how different cultures have organized their understanding of the universe, the human body, and society. The question of whether these non-Western traditions contain their own rigorous logic, and how they might reshape our global understanding of what counts as "science," remains a vital area of inquiry for historians and philosophers. It is not merely about adding more facts to a list, but about re-examining the very map of human intellectual history to see if the center of gravity has been placed in the wrong spot.

In this context, a recent study examines the work of Vladimir Eremeev, a Russian scholar who spent his career bridging the gap between Soviet-era engineering, the history of science, and the ancient Chinese Yijing, or Book of Changes. Eremeev, who lived from 1953 to 2011, operated during a time when the rigid boundaries between science, philosophy, and spiritual thought in Russia were beginning to blur. He was trained as an engineer and worked with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, yet he became fascinated by the idea that ancient Chinese thinkers had developed a unified system of knowledge that connected everything from music and medicine to the cosmos and the human psyche. His goal was not to prove that the Yijing was a modern computer program, but to show that its internal structure was so logical and systematic that it could be understood using the language of modern systems theory. He called this approach "arithmosemiotics," a term that simply means using numbers and signs as a universal code to translate ancient ideas into a form that modern science could recognize.

Eremeev's work emerged from a unique intellectual landscape where the strict Soviet demand for scientific rigor met a growing interest in esoteric traditions and the structural analysis of texts. He took the complex diagrams and numerical patterns found in the Yijing—which traditionally involve lines, shapes, and cycles used for divination and understanding change—and reinterpreted them as a formal system of codes. In his view, the ancient Chinese did not just see these patterns as symbols for fortune-telling; they saw them as a way to map the relationships between different parts of reality. Eremeev argued that these patterns could be translated into a language of variables and transformations, much like how a modern engineer might model a system. By doing this, he attempted to show that the Yijing was not a collection of vague myths, but a sophisticated "metamodel" that could describe the order of the universe, the human body, and society using the same set of rules.

The paper explains that Eremeev's project was an attempt to create a "lost universal science." He believed that early civilizations possessed a unified body of knowledge that modern disciplines had since broken apart into separate fields like physics, biology, and psychology. According to Eremeev, the Yijing preserved the fragments of this original, integrated science. He suggested that the same structural patterns found in Chinese medicine, music theory, and cosmology were not just coincidental similarities, but evidence of a single, underlying order that governed all things. This idea was supported by his use of concepts from cybernetics and systems theory, which were popular in the late Soviet Union. These fields focused on how information flows and how complex systems maintain balance, providing Eremeev with the vocabulary to describe ancient Chinese thought as a rational, systematic endeavor rather than a mystical one.

However, the study also highlights a significant tension in Eremeev's work. While he successfully used modern scientific language to make the Yijing look like a rigorous system, he sometimes went too far in claiming that this formal similarity proved a deep, historical connection. He argued that these systems were not just similar by chance, but were actually parts of a single knowledge system that had spread from ancient China to other parts of the world, including Greece and India. This theory, known as diffusionism, suggests that a unified system of knowledge existed in early Western Zhou China and then traveled along trade routes, influencing other civilizations. The paper notes that while Eremeev provided many examples of similar patterns across different cultures, he did not provide the hard historical evidence—such as specific texts, artifacts, or clear records of transmission—that would be needed to prove that one system actually caused the other. The similarities he found could just as easily be the result of independent human minds solving similar problems in different places.

The authors of the paper conclude that Eremeev's true legacy lies not in proving that a single universal science existed, but in how he used Chinese thought to challenge the idea that only European history matters. He showed that the Yijing could be a resource for rethinking what science and rationality mean, offering a different way to organize knowledge that does not rely on the traditional Western model. His work is described as a form of "Russian universalism," a strategy where Russian scholars used non-Western traditions to renegotiate their place in the global intellectual community. By treating the Yijing as a serious object of scientific study, Eremeev helped to break down the barrier that had long separated "scientific" Western thought from "mystical" Eastern thought.

Ultimately, the paper suggests that Eremeev's project was a bold experiment in connecting the past and the present, the East and the West. He did not succeed in proving that all human knowledge comes from a single ancient source, but he did succeed in showing that the boundaries we draw between science, philosophy, and spirituality are often arbitrary. His work invites us to look at the history of ideas with a wider lens, recognizing that different cultures have developed their own sophisticated ways of understanding the world. The value of his research is not in the final verdict on whether a lost universal science existed, but in the way it forces us to question who gets to decide what counts as knowledge and how we tell the story of human intellectual achievement.