Meaning
Fire burns upward and heaven is above, so the two trigrams share a direction: the hexagram is people in fellowship. Its Judgment sets that union "in the (remote districts of the) country", in Legge's English: out in the open, not behind closed doors, with progress and success. The Image gives a lesson about kinds: the superior man distinguishes things according to their classes and groups. The tradition reads the hexagram as a union of people that is open to all and still knows who is who.
Human Design places gate 13 from 13°15′ to 18°52′30″ Aquarius, third on the wheel after 41 and 19, in the G centre, which the system ties to identity and direction. Its channel, which the school names The Prodigal, runs to gate 33 in the Throat; the pair is in the Sensing circuit of the Collective group.
The engine names the gate The Listener. Read with its hexagram, we take it in our own words as the receptive side of fellowship: what gathers people is the willingness to hear them. At the channel's other end gate 33 carries the hexagram of retreat, the withdrawal that keeps one's own counsel. The two can be read together as listening, holding what was heard, and stepping back before it is told again. The hexagram adds a caution: a fellowship that stays inside its own clan, in the second line, is cause for regret.
Opposite gate 13 on the wheel is gate 7, the army, the hexagram of organised strength under a leader. Fellowship and command face each other. The school names a cross from each of the four positions of its Sun and Earth, and gate 13's Right Angle cross is the same as gate 7's, the Sphinx, read from the other side.
On the wheel
Gate 13 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 13°15′ to 18°52′30″ Aquarius, the 3rd gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 2 February to 7 February, and within a day of those dates in other years. Each of its six lines covers 56′15″:
- Line 1: 13°15′ to 14°11′15″ Aquarius
- Line 2: 14°11′15″ to 15°07′30″ Aquarius
- Line 3: 15°07′30″ to 16°03′45″ Aquarius
- Line 4: 16°03′45″ to 17°00′ Aquarius
- Line 5: 17°00′ to 17°56′15″ Aquarius
- Line 6: 17°56′15″ to 18°52′30″ Aquarius
In a chart the gate is active when any of the 26 positions falls in it, and the channel The Prodigal is defined only when gate 33 is active too, by either set.
When the Personality Sun is in this gate, the school's table names the cross by the angle of the profile: the Right Angle Cross of the Sphinx (13/7 | 1/2), the Juxtaposition Cross of Listening (13/7 | 43/23) or the Left Angle Cross of the Masks (13/7 | 43/23). The four numbers are the Personality Sun and Earth, then the Design Sun and Earth. We give the names only.
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 (the I Ching)
- 13 同人 Tóng Rén ䷌: Fire below, Heaven above; Legge (1882) spells it Thung Zăn sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 13°15′ to 18°52′30″ Aquarius, 313.25° to 318.875° of the tropical zodiac: a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Centre (the system's association)
- G: the system ties it to identity and direction. A name and an association, not anatomy sourced
- Channel and circuit
- 13-33 The Prodigal, to gate 33 in the Throat: Sensing circuit, Collective group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 7, The Role of the Self, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of the Sphinx (13/7 | 1/2); Juxtaposition Cross of Listening (13/7 | 43/23); Left Angle Cross of the Masks (13/7 | 43/23) sourced
- Gate name
- The Listener: the name the engine prints, the same as the Definitive Book's title as the pyhd tables record it. A name, not the hexagram's sourced
- Gene Keys (Richard Rudd, 2009)
- Key 13, from the same hexagram at the same place on the wheel; our Gene Keys Profile page for it gives our own words sourced
- Our reading
- Fellowship that begins with hearing others out: read as a place where what people confide is kept, and later, perhaps, retold. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “Thung Zăn (or 'Union of men') appears here (as we find it) in the (remote districts of the) country, indicating progress and success.”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate The Listener and sets it in the G centre, at one end of the channel The Prodigal. Its descriptions of the gate and its six lines are in Ra Uru Hu's books, in copyright; we do not quote or paraphrase them.
- The independent schools
- Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler, Chetan Parkyn, Karen Curry Parker and later teachers compute the same gate at the same place, and read it in their own words.
- EsoTerrier
- Fellowship that begins with hearing others out: read as a place where what people confide is kept, and later, perhaps, retold.
Claims about it
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Gate 13's place on the zodiac, 13°15′ to 18°52′30″ Aquarius, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 13.
falseWhat the record shows: The wheel is Ra Uru Hu's arrangement: Shao Yong's 11th-century circle of the 64, rotated so that hexagram 41 starts at 2° Aquarius. No Chinese source ties a hexagram to degrees of the zodiac.
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The G centre, where gate 13 sits, is an organ or gland, and the gate tells something about the body.
unverifiedWhat the record shows: The centre's name is a name. The schools' pairing of the centres with organs and glands, taken from the chakra books of the 1920s, has no physiological correspondence that anyone has shown, and we never read a gate or a centre as the body or its health.
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Gate 13 is one of the 64 codons of the genetic code, so it marks something in a person's genes.
falseWhat the record shows: Both sets have 64 members because both are built from a small alphabet in groups: two kinds of line in six places, four bases in three. Nothing beyond the count matches.
