Meaning
The character 蠱 draws a vessel with worms in it, decay that has bred where nothing was moving. Wind blows at the foot of a mountain and is stopped there: air that no longer circulates. Yet the statement of the hexagram is hopeful: great success, good to cross the great river, with three days of thought before the turn and three after. Our gloss is decay to be repaired. For the text see the hexagram 18 page.
Most of its lines speak of setting right the errors of a father or a mother. We read them as the work of repairing anything handed down. Key 18 and key 17 are pair and opposite at once.
The three bands
The Shadow band, Neglect, is the fourth line, 裕父之蠱, 往見吝: tolerating the father's decay, going on like that brings regret. It is letting the rot continue because it came with the inheritance. The Gift band, Rectification, is the first line, 幹父之蠱: setting right what the father spoiled, which the text says ends well despite the danger. The Siddhi band, Revival, is the Image, 君子以振民育德: wind at the foot of the mountain, and the noble person stirs the people and nourishes virtue, what was spoiled made to live again.
The bands go from leaving things be, to the labour of repair, to renewal.
In a profile
Key 18 belongs to no particular row. It stands in a profile wherever one of the thirteen bodies stood between 3°52′30″ Libra and 9°30′ Libra at birth or at the design moment, and so it can fill any of the thirteen rows or the three further tags.
The Sun passes through it each year from about 27 September to 2 October. People born then have key 18 as their Life's Work and its opposite, key 17, as their Evolution, the Earth's place. For people born about three months later, from about 24 to 28 December, it is the Radiance, where the Sun stood at the design moment.
Each of its six lines is 56′15″ wide. A position from 3°52′30″ Libra is in line 1, read by our theme Foundation; one from 8°33′45″ Libra is in line 6, Overview. Every key's lines take the same six themes of ours, and the line of a fast body like the Moon depends on the birth time to the hour.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Hexagram and number
- 蠱 Gǔ, hexagram 18 in the received (King Wen) order of the Zhouyi; Legge (1882) writes the name Kû sourced
- Trigram images
- Wind / wood below, Mountain above, as the Shuo Gua names them sourced
- Our gloss
- decay to be repaired: EsoTerrier's own, the same in our I Ching chart, not a translator's title our construction
- Our words for the three bands
- Neglect, Rectification and Revival, written in October 2026 from the hexagram's own texts; none is one of Rudd's words our construction
- Opposite on the wheel
- Key 17, 180° round the wheel, with every line reversed; Rudd calls it the programming partner sourced
- Pair in the received order
- Key 17, which here is also the opposite: the received order pairs the two by reversing every line sourced
- Within and upside down
- Lines 2 to 5 give 54 歸妹 Guī Mèi; the figure turned upside down gives 17 隨 Suí sourced
- Codon ring (Rudd)
- Rudd groups this key in his Ring of Matter, which he ties to alanine: his grouping and his choice of amino acid, not a finding of genetics sourced
- Place on the wheel
- Gate 18 of Ra Uru Hu's wheel (1987 to 1989), 3°52′30″ Libra to 9°30′ Libra (183.875° to 189.5° of tropical longitude): a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
How the schools read it
- The Zhouyi, after Legge (1882)
- Great progress and success; advantage in crossing the great stream; weigh three days before the turning point and three days after. The text in full is on the hexagram 18 page.
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987 onward)
- Gate 18, in the Spleen centre. The parent system gives the gate its own name and reading, which are Jovian Archive's and which we do not give here.
- Richard Rudd, The Gene Keys (2009)
- Key 18, read at three bands he calls the Shadow, the Gift and the Siddhi, each with a word of his own, under a chapter title of his own; we reproduce neither. He names key 17 its programming partner.
- EsoTerrier
- Repair of what was left spoiled: it lets the decay go on because it was inherited, sets right what the past got wrong, and at its peak brings the spoiled thing back to life.
Claims about it
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Key 18 is a code held in the genes, and contemplating it changes how they are expressed.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: The central metaphor of Rudd's system, given by its author, not a finding. The profile is the positions of thirteen bodies at two moments, read on a 64-part wheel; no gene, codon or measurement of the body enters it.
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Key 18 belongs to the Ring of Matter, a chemical family in the body tied to alanine.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: Rudd's grouping. His ring sizes follow the real number of codons per amino acid in the genetic code, but which hexagram goes with which codon is his own choice, and nothing in genetics links a hexagram to an amino acid.
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The place of key 18 on the zodiac, 3°52′30″ Libra to 9°30′ Libra, is an old I Ching teaching.
falseWhat the record shows: The wheel is Ra Uru Hu's, fixed between 1987 and 1989 by turning Shao Yong's 11th-century circle of the hexagrams so that hexagram 41 begins at 2° Aquarius. No Chinese source we know ties the hexagrams to degrees of the zodiac.
