Gate 41 · Contraction

Meaning

Gate 41 is the gate of Contraction. Human Design reads it as the pressure of imagination: the daydream of another life or a long journey. That fantasy is not an escape. It is a seed, often the first step towards trying something new.

The gate is where the wheel begins. When the Sun reaches it each year, at 2° Aquarius, Human Design starts its year. Gate 41 is therefore read as a beginning, a pressure that opens cycles of experience.

It sits in the Root centre, the bodygraph’s pressure centre, which the tradition associates with the adrenal glands. It belongs to the Sensing circuit of the Collective circuitry, the circuit of learning by living. Gate 41 gives the first push: the wish for an experience not yet had.

In practice

• Personality or Design. A Personality planet (in ink on Ulune’s bodygraph) makes the rich inner life known and enjoyed. A Design planet (in red) may show it as a restlessness others notice before it has a picture. In both layers, the theme is doubly present. See Personality and Design.
• Hanging. Coloured without gate 30, gate 41 is a hanging gate: the imagination lacks a steady desire to carry it. Someone with gate 30 can complete it for a while, turning a shared dream into a wish to act.
• With gate 30, it makes the channel of Recognition, joining the Root to the Solar Plexus. It gives steady pressure to imagine new experiences and to desire them strongly.
• That channel defines the Solar Plexus, so the authority is emotional. Letting feelings settle helps tell a lasting desire from a passing fantasy. With this channel alone, a chart would be a Projector.

Across traditions

• The I Ching: hexagram 41, sǔn, is Mountain (gen) above Lake (dui): the lake below gives of itself to the mountain. Wilhelm calls it Decrease. Legge’s judgment notes that, with sincerity, even “two baskets of grain” make a fit offering.
• Astrology: the gate begins two degrees into Aquarius, a sign read as vision and the future. In most years the Sun crosses it from about 22 to 27 January.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune’s gate wheel starts here, at 2°00′00″ Aquarius (302° of tropical longitude). The other 63 gates follow in the order of the Rave I Ching, each 5°37′30″ (5.625°) wide. Gate 41 is the 1st on the wheel: gate 60 closes the circle before it, and gate 19 comes next. It spans 2°00′00″ to 7°37′30″ Aquarius (302° to 307.625°).

Its six lines are 0°56′15″ each. Line 1 starts at 2°00′00″ Aquarius, line 2 at 2°56′15″ and line 3 at 3°52′30″. Line 4 starts at 4°48′45″, line 5 at 5°45′00″ and line 6 at 6°41′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 41.

Correspondences