Gate

Meaning

A gate is one of the 64 places on the bodygraph where a theme lives. Each gate belongs to one of the nine centres and sits at one end of a channel, the line that can join it to a gate in another centre. Human Design gives every gate a name and a theme: Gate 1 · Self-Expression is a style genuinely one’s own, Gate 11 · Ideas a stream of ideas meant to be shared.

The gates are not shared evenly. The Throat holds 11, the Sacral and the Root 9 each, the G centre 8, the Solar Plexus and the Spleen 7 each, the Ajna 6, the Heart 4 and the Head 3. Most gates belong to a single channel. Four, gates 10, 20, 34 and 57, belong to three each, and four of the channels between them make the Integration channels.

A gate is coloured, or activated, when a planet stood in its slice of the zodiac at one of two moments. A gate that is not coloured still belongs to the chart. Human Design reads it as a theme met through other people and circumstances rather than carried in a steady way.

In practice

• Personality: a planet in the gate at the moment of birth. Drawn in ink, this layer is read as what a person knows of themselves.
• Design: a planet in the gate when the Sun stood 88° earlier, about three months before birth. Drawn in red, this layer is read as the body’s side, often clearer to others; see Personality and Design. A gate can be coloured by both layers.
• Alone: a coloured gate whose partner across the channel is not coloured is a hanging gate. Someone with the other gate can complete the channel while they are together.
• Completed: when both ends of a channel are coloured, by the same layer or one by each, the channel is defined, and so are the two centres it joins. This is how a chart’s definition, and from it the type and authority, is built.
• Lines: each gate is divided into six lines, written after it: 34.2 is gate 34, line 2. The lines of the two Suns make the profile, and the gates of the Suns and Earths make the incarnation cross.

Across traditions

• The I Ching: the Chinese Book of Changes has 64 hexagrams, figures of six whole or broken lines, each made of two trigrams of three lines. Every gate takes the number of a hexagram in the classical order and keeps its six lines. Human Design’s names and line readings are its own, so Ulune’s gate pages give the hexagram’s title after Wilhelm (1924) and Legge (1882) beside them.
• Astrology: the wheel of gates is the zodiac divided into 64 instead of 12. Each gate covers 5°37′30″, so a sign holds five gates and a third, and several gates straddle the border between two signs.

Origin and history

Human Design was taught by Ra Uru Hu from 1987. It combines the I Ching, astrology, the Kabbalah and the Hindu chakra system, and its wheel of hexagrams around the zodiac does not run from 1 to 64: the wheel starts with gate 41 and goes on with 19, 13, 49, 30 and so on.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune starts the wheel with Gate 41 · Contraction at 302° of tropical longitude, 2°00′00″ Aquarius, and gives each gate 5.625°, or 5°37′30″, in the wheel’s order. Each line is a sixth of that, 0.9375° or 0°56′15″.

To place a body, Ulune subtracts 302° from its longitude and brings the result back between 0° and 360°. Dividing by 5.625° gives the position on the wheel, and so the gate; the remainder divided by 0.9375° gives the line. A Sun at 225° gives 283°, the 51st position, which is gate 1, and a remainder of 1.75°, which is line 2: gate 1.2. A body exactly on a boundary belongs to the gate or line that begins there.

Ulune places thirteen bodies at birth and again at the Design moment, 26 activations in all: the Sun and the Earth opposite it, the Moon, the true North Node and the South Node opposite it, and Mercury to Pluto. The Design moment is found where the Sun stood exactly 88° of longitude before its birth position. Without a birth time the chart is cast at noon, the day is cast again every hour, and any gate or line that could differ is marked.

Correspondences