Hexagram 13, Fellowship

The figure

Fire below, the middle daughter, light and clarity, flame reaching upward. Heaven above, the father, the wide open sky. Fire rises and the sky receives it. Five solid lines and a single broken one in the second place, the one soft line in the middle of the lower trigram, which the tradition reads as the one who holds the group together from inside it.

The picture is a fire lit under the open sky, and people gathered round it. Everyone can see everyone. Nothing is hidden because the light is in the middle of the circle. That is the fellowship the book means. People held together by something they share and can all see, out in the open.

Fellowship is paired with Hexagram 14, Great Possession, which is the same six lines turned over so the fire sits on top of the sky.

When it comes up in a reading

When I cast Fellowship I take it as a question about who you are standing with and why. The hexagram is warm but it is particular. It is in favour of people coming together around something real, a purpose, a principle, a piece of work, and it is quietly suspicious of people coming together because they happen to live on the same street or dislike the same person.

The guidance is to find the thing you share and name it out loud. Groups that know what they are for last. Groups that only know who they are against fall apart the moment the enemy goes away.

It also says keep the fire in the open. The old picture is a gathering under the sky, with nothing done in a back room. Fellowship held together by secrets is a different hexagram entirely and a much less pleasant one.

If the question was about a friendship or a partnership, Fellowship says the bond is sound where it rests on shared values and shaky where it rests on habit. If it was about a team or a cause, it says the group can do far more than the sum of its people, provided the door stays open to anyone who shares the purpose, including the ones who disagree with you about the method.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you build communities with a spine. The groups you form have a reason to exist beyond pleasant company. A cause, an ideal, a shared commitment, something that everyone round the fire can point to.

You attract kindred spirits without trying. The people who share your values seem to find you, and the reason is simple enough. What you are draws what matches you. You believe what you say and people can feel that, and belief like that catches.

You also manage a trick most group builders never learn. You can hold an ideal firmly and still leave room for people who see it differently. Difference of opinion inside a shared purpose does not frighten you. In my experience that is the single thing that decides whether a community lasts five years or fifty.

Your gift is meaningful community in a world full of thin connection. The friendships that deepened because they had work to do together, the causes that got served, the things that needed a coherent group and got one. Those carry your signature.

The shadow is tribalism. The warm circle round the fire can turn into a club that is pleased with itself and sneers at everyone outside. When that happens the fellowship has eaten its own purpose. The other shadow is loving the ideal more than the actual humans in the room. The people deserve your attention as much as the principle does, and sometimes more.

At maturity you have built things that lasted, groups bound by something real whose work together made a difference. The friendships are deep, the causes were served, and the fire is still lit.

If a line moves

When one of the six lines is moving, I read where it sits before I read anything else. The two lower lines are the beginning of the matter, the first coming together, and the early temptation to form a faction inside the group. The two middle lines are the heart of it, where the group is tested and where mistrust and open quarrel are most likely to break out between people who were meant to be allies. The two upper lines are the end of it, where the reunion comes after the difficulty, and where the warning is about going too far out, standing at the edge of the circle with nobody left to share the fire. The moving line changes to its opposite and gives a second hexagram, where the matter is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page walks through it with a worked example.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives you Heaven and Fire on their own. The Chinese Astrology section has the yin and yang this whole book is built on. In the tarot I set Fellowship beside the Three of Cups, three people with their cups raised and the harvest at their feet. That pairing is my own and I hold it lightly.

Who are the people round your fire, and could every one of them say what the fire is for?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.