Grid line 4-5-6

Meaning

The line 4-5-6 is the centre column of the birth grid in David A. Phillips’s layout. It climbs from 4 on the plane of the body, through 5 at the centre, to 6 on the plane of the mind. It joins method and steady work, freedom and change, care and responsibility.

When all three cells hold a digit, the line is full. Phillips names it the arrow of the will, with the 6 at its head. The tradition reads strong willpower: once a course is chosen, it is held, through effort and setbacks. The same force can turn into stubbornness. The gift is at its best when the will listens, too, and bends where bending costs little.

When all three cells are empty, Phillips speaks of the arrow of frustration. Read kindly, it describes a gap between hopes and what life offers, felt more sharply than most. The tradition’s advice is to set aims that can be reached, to notice what does go well, and to move one step at a time. It is a theme to work with, not a sentence.

A partial line, with one or two of its digits, says little alone.

The year’s first two digits, 19 or 20, never supply a 4, a 5 or a 6. The line depends on the day, the month and the year’s last two digits, so its odds are the same in both centuries. Run over every day, Ulune’s code finds it full on about 2% of dates from 1900 to 2099, and empty on about 26%. A full line 4-5-6 is among the rarest in the grid.

In practice

Take a made-up birth date, 4 May 1996. Its digits are 1 4 5 6 9 9. The centre column holds a 4, a 5 and a 6: the line 4-5-6 is full, and Ulune lists it as “full: an arrow”. The 1, the 5 and the 9s also fill the diagonal 1-5-9.

Now take 3 November 1978, with the digits 1 1 1 3 7 8 9. No 4, no 5, no 6: the centre column is empty, and Ulune lists the line as “empty: what is missing”. The same date fills the right column, 7-8-9.

Across traditions

The Lo Shu square is laid out 4 9 2 / 3 5 7 / 8 1 6. There, the digits 4, 5 and 6 form a diagonal, from the top left through the centre to the bottom right. The line is the same in both layouts, only turned. Its digits add up to 15, like every line of the Lo Shu. Ulune lists it as 4-5-6 in both views, full or empty on the same dates.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune counts the digits of the local date of birth, day, month and year, with the zeros set aside. The line 4-5-6 is full when the date holds at least one 4, one 5 and one 6. It is empty when the date holds none of them, and partial otherwise, shown with a dash. A repeated digit counts once. The line is the centre column of Phillips’s layout and a diagonal of the Lo Shu, and its state is the same in both.

Correspondences