From the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, various French esoteric writers developed an alternative knowledge about the Yijing and Chinese religions distinct from the discourses of the once-predominant missionaries as well as the emerging sciences of Sinology and Religious Studies. At that time, the Yijing caught the imagination of a number of French personalities, including some of the most original thinkers of their time, such as Eliphas Lévi (1810–1875), Albert de Pouvourville (1861–1939), and René Guénon (1886–1951). The difficulties of accessing its meaning—the Yijing was considered the most obscure of the Chinese classics—matched the esotericists’ elitist idea of closure and mystery which reserved specialized knowledge for the few. However, despite such restrictive stance, esotericists played a role in the assimilation of the Yijing within a broader intellectual and religious realm. Unlike many Sinologists of the time who denigrated the Yijing’s opacity as insignificant, esotericists’ discourses on the Yijing integrated its esoteric traditions into a broader global synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. In the long history of the reception of the Yijing in France, the esotericists’ interest in the Yijing marked a transition between the Jesuits’ Figurist conceptions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and later Jungian and New Age interpretations in the 1970s.