Gate 38 · The Fighter

Meaning

Gate 38 is the gate of The Fighter. Human Design reads it as the pressure to struggle for what gives life meaning. It is the person who takes on a bureaucracy for a neighbour, or will not drop a cause that matters. The gate is happiest when the fight is chosen for a purpose, not kept up from stubbornness.

It sits in the Root centre, the bodygraph’s pressure centre and one of its four motors. The tradition reads the Root as the push to get things moving, and associates it with the adrenal glands. In gate 38, that pressure becomes resistance to what feels empty.

It belongs to the Knowing circuit, the main circuit of the Individual circuitry. The tradition reads this circuitry as the source of what is new and different. Here, the difference is a refusal to settle for a life without meaning.

In practice

• Personality or Design. A Personality planet (in ink on Ulune’s bodygraph) makes the fighting spirit conscious: people know what they stand for. A Design planet (in red) shows it first in a body that will not give in. In both layers, the theme is doubly present. See Personality and Design.
• Hanging. Coloured without gate 28, gate 38 is a hanging gate: the pressure to struggle lacks a steady sense of what is worth it. Someone with gate 28 can complete it for a while.
• With gate 28, it makes the channel of Struggle, joining the Root to the Spleen. It gives a consistent drive to fight for a meaningful life, through hard causes or long training.
• That channel defines the Spleen, so without a defined Solar Plexus or Sacral the authority is splenic. With this channel alone, a chart would be a Projector.

Across traditions

• The I Ching: hexagram 38, kuí, is Fire (li) above Lake (dui): fire rises, water sinks, and the two move apart. Wilhelm calls it Opposition. Legge’s judgment still promises good success “in small matters”.
• Astrology: the gate falls in the first half of Capricorn, a sign read as endurance and the will to climb. In most years the Sun crosses it from about 31 December to 5 January.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune’s gate wheel starts at gate 41, at 2°00′00″ Aquarius (302° of tropical longitude). The other gates follow in the order of the Rave I Ching, each 5°37′30″ (5.625°) wide. Gate 38 is the 61st on the wheel, between gates 58 and 54. It spans 9°30′00″ to 15°07′30″ Capricorn (279.5° to 285.125°).

Its six lines are 0°56′15″ each. Line 1 starts at 9°30′00″ Capricorn, line 2 at 10°26′15″ and line 3 at 11°22′30″. Line 4 starts at 12°18′45″, line 5 at 13°15′00″ and line 6 at 14°11′15″. A longitude exactly on a boundary belongs to the gate or line that begins there.

Ulune places thirteen bodies twice: at birth for the Personality, and for the Design when the Sun stood exactly 88° of longitude earlier. They are the Sun, the Earth opposite it, the Moon, the true Nodes and Mercury to Pluto. Any of them in this span colours gate 38.

Correspondences