Gate 39 · Provocation

Meaning

Gate 39 is the gate of Provocation. Human Design reads it as the pressure to provoke a reaction that shows what someone really feels. It shows as teasing, a challenging question, a remark that tests where people stand. Used with care, it wakes people up; used carelessly, it simply picks fights.

It sits in the Root centre, the bodygraph’s pressure centre and one of its four motors, which the tradition associates with the adrenal glands. In gate 39, the push is aimed at feeling: it presses until something real comes out.

It belongs to the Knowing circuit of the Individual circuitry, the circuitry of what is new and different. The provocation serves that newness: it unsettles a mood so that a truer one can emerge.

In practice

• Personality or Design. A Personality planet (in ink on Ulune’s bodygraph) makes the urge to provoke known, so its timing can be chosen. A Design planet (in red) lets it act unnoticed, and others may feel provoked without it being meant. In both layers, the theme is doubly present. See Personality and Design.
• Hanging. Coloured without gate 55, gate 39 is a hanging gate: the provocation looks for a feeling to meet. Someone with gate 55 can complete it for a while, and strong moods may follow.
• With gate 55, it makes the channel of Emoting, joining the Root to the Solar Plexus. It gives a rich emotional life with marked moods, often feeding music, writing or art.
• That channel defines the Solar Plexus, so the authority is emotional: big decisions go better over several days. With this channel alone, a chart would be a Projector.

Across traditions

• The I Ching: hexagram 39, jiǎn, is Water (kan) above Mountain (gen): a steep mountain ahead, a deep gorge beyond. Wilhelm calls it Obstruction. Legge’s judgment ends hopefully: “with firmness and correctness, there will be good fortune”.
• Astrology: the gate falls in the first half of Cancer, a sign read as feeling kept behind a protective shell. In most years the Sun crosses it from about 1 to 7 July.

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 39 is the 29th on the wheel, between gates 52 and 53. It spans 9°30′00″ to 15°07′30″ Cancer (99.5° to 105.125°).

Its six lines are 0°56′15″ each. Line 1 starts at 9°30′00″ Cancer, 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 39.

Correspondences