Meaning
A lake lies at the foot of a mountain and its water rises as mist to feed the slope: the hexagram is decrease, what is taken from below to add to what is above. The tradition does not read loss as misfortune. Legge's Judgment says that with sincerity there will be "great good fortune", and it adds that even two small vessels of grain are enough for an offering, when the offering is sincere. The Image asks the superior man to restrain his anger and hold his desires in check: decrease as a discipline.
Human Design starts its wheel here. Gate 41 begins at 2°00′ Aquarius, 302 degrees of the tropical zodiac, and runs to 7°37′30″; every published table and every engine we checked agrees, except two open-source packages that start it at 0° Aries and are wrong. The gate is in the Root centre, one of the four motors, which the system ties to pressure and drive. Its channel, which the school names Recognition, runs to gate 30 in the Solar Plexus; the pair is in the Sensing circuit of the Collective group.
The engine names the gate Contraction. We read it, in our own words, as the narrowing before a start: a wish or an imagined experience pressing to begin, and held to less than it could be so that it can begin at all. The hexagram's offering of two small vessels is the model. At the channel's other end gate 30 carries fire doubled, feeling that burns bright, and the pair can be read as the pressure for an experience and the intensity of living it. The wheel starts here by Ra Uru Hu's arrangement, which turns Shao Yong's circle so that this hexagram stands at the end of January.
Opposite gate 41 on the wheel is gate 31, mutual influence, and the school names the Right Angle Cross of the Unexpected from 41 and 31 with 28 and 27.
On the wheel
Gate 41 covers 5°37′30″ of the zodiac, from 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Aquarius, the 1st gate counting from gate 41. In 2026 the Sun passes through it from 22 January to 27 January, and within a day of those dates in other years. Each of its six lines covers 56′15″:
- Line 1: 2°00′ to 2°56′15″ Aquarius
- Line 2: 2°56′15″ to 3°52′30″ Aquarius
- Line 3: 3°52′30″ to 4°48′45″ Aquarius
- Line 4: 4°48′45″ to 5°45′ Aquarius
- Line 5: 5°45′ to 6°41′15″ Aquarius
- Line 6: 6°41′15″ to 7°37′30″ Aquarius
In a chart the gate is active when any of the 26 positions falls in it, and the channel Recognition is defined only when gate 30 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 Unexpected (41/31 | 28/27), the Juxtaposition Cross of Fantasy (41/31 | 44/24) or the Left Angle Cross of the Alpha (41/31 | 44/24). 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)
- 41 損 Sǔn ䷨: Lake / marsh below, Mountain above; Legge (1882) spells it Sun sourced
- Wheel position (Ra Uru Hu's wheel)
- 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Aquarius, 302° to 307.625° of the tropical zodiac: a modern placing, not the I Ching's sourced
- Centre (the system's association)
- Root: the system ties it to pressure and drive. A name and an association, not anatomy sourced
- Channel and circuit
- 30-41 Recognition, to gate 30 in the Solar Plexus: Sensing circuit, Collective group sourced
- Gate opposite on the wheel
- Gate 31, Influence, 180° away; its hexagram has every line of this one flipped sourced
- Crosses named from this gate
- Right Angle Cross of the Unexpected (41/31 | 28/27); Juxtaposition Cross of Fantasy (41/31 | 44/24); Left Angle Cross of the Alpha (41/31 | 44/24) sourced
- Gate name
- Contraction: 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 41, 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
- Less now, for something more later: read as the pressure of an imagined experience, held back and narrowed until it can begin. our construction
How the schools read it
- The I Ching, in Legge's translation (1882)
- “In (what is denoted by) Sun, if there be sincerity (in him who employs it), there will be great good fortune …”
- Human Design (Ra Uru Hu; the school)
- Names the gate Contraction and sets it in the Root centre, at one end of the channel Recognition. 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
- Less now, for something more later: read as the pressure of an imagined experience, held back and narrowed until it can begin.
Claims about it
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Gate 41's place on the zodiac, 2°00′ to 7°37′30″ Aquarius, is where the I Ching itself puts hexagram 41.
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 Root centre, where gate 41 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 41 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.
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Gate 41 begins at 0° Aries.
falseWhat the record shows: It begins at 2° Aquarius, 302 degrees, in every published table and every engine we checked except two open-source packages, which are wrong.
