In Legge's introduction to his translation of the I Ching he tries to make the Lo look like nothing but the 3x3 magic square. But obviously, it isn't! The numbers are differentiated into two groups, and in such a way as to suggest that they should retain that difference even when collected into sets of 3 (as the consistent sums of 15 suggest).
As shown, there's no need to stop at the given division into odd and even numbers either, others give us interesting distributions, too. Nor to select just one division, after all, Legge's flat representation contains all possible divisions superimposed.
Going from essences to recipies, tuning the distribution of rules to align ourselves with the raw material, like a generalized video vector scope that doesn't know yet what PAL or NTSC is, as it's tuned in it's demodulation and subsequent recombination, it's learning a national language. Or perhaps more like astrology, as it provides a variable basic machinery by which to demodulate the single number 'time' into essences which then we recombine, hoping to learn the national language enough to say hello, or goodbye.
looking now at balancing divisions of magic squares of eighth order. [have also recently discovered a way to treat nonweighted codes (Gray code, for example) as 'weighted' by multiplying coefficients]
references: Masamune Shirow's Orion, issue 3 of 6. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Comics, January 1993.