Hexagram 23, Splitting Apart

This is the hexagram of something that looked permanent coming undone. It is one of the hard ones, and I will say so plainly.

The figure

Earth sits in the lower place and Mountain sits above it. Earth is the mother, receptive and yielding. Mountain is the youngest son, keeping still, the mass that does not move.

Together the picture is a mountain standing on the earth, and the earth beneath it is giving way. Look at the lines. Five broken lines and one solid line at the very top. The whole structure is being eaten from the bottom and only the peak is still standing. Think of a sea cliff worked at the base for years. The top looks as it always did until the day it does not.

The name carries the sense of peeling, the outer layer coming off. Something that was whole is being stripped back, and pushing against it will not do much.

Splitting Apart is paired with Hexagram 24, Return, which is the same single solid line reappearing at the bottom of the figure after this one has fallen. The sequence puts them side by side on purpose.

When it comes up in a reading

When Splitting Apart comes up for a question I say the plain thing first. Something is coming apart and it is not a good time to act. The tradition is clear on this. This is a time to hold still, to keep your head down, and to let what is falling finish falling. You cannot shore up a cliff from the top.

The second thing I say is that the falling is not always the disaster it feels like. Sometimes what is splitting apart was rotten through and had been propped up far past its time. A relationship that ended years ago in all but name. A job that had been hollow for a long while. A certainty you had outgrown. The hexagram asks only that you stop holding it up and notice what the collapse clears.

The third thing is about company. The one solid line is alone at the top with five broken lines under it. In plain words, the forces around you are not on your side just now, and the wise move is to go quiet, keep your own counsel, and wait. Generosity still counts here. Grasping does not.

So I would ask: what are you still propping up that has already fallen? Take your hands off it. See what is left standing when the dust settles.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you in casts, you know dissolution from the inside. Your life has included, or will include, the experience of something that seemed permanent breaking apart. A relationship, a career, a certainty, a body you trusted. Some of these have come undone in ways that remade you.

You can live through endings. That is rarer than it sounds. You can watch something fall without falling with it, and the watching has given you a particular kind of wisdom. You also understand that some collapses are necessary. The rotten structure that falls shows everyone what needed renewing, and what looked like catastrophe turns out to have been a clearing.

People like you often work with endings directly. Grief, palliative care, crisis work, the quiet dismantling of what has stopped serving. Having seen things fall, you hold new things more lightly than most, and that lightness is a kind of freedom.

The gift is that you can sit with other people in their own dissolutions. They find in you someone who can hold the hard material without flinching, because you have held your own.

The shadow is cynicism. Having watched things fall can harden into a belief that nothing lasts and nothing is worth building, and that belief is its own slow collapse. The other shadow is making loss into an identity. If you have become the survivor and nothing else, you may keep finding hardship because without it you are not sure who you are.

At maturity, the person who carries Splitting Apart has lived through real endings and come out with real wisdom about impermanence. What came apart became, through grief properly done and patient rebuilding, the ground something new could grow in.

If a line moves

When a line moves in Splitting Apart, the bottom two lines speak to the beginning of the matter, the first signs that the foundation is going. The middle lines are its heart, where the damage reaches toward what you care about most and the question is what you hold and what you release. The top lines are its end, where the last of the structure falls and the ground is cleared for whatever comes next. The changed line gives the second hexagram, the direction the situation is heading, and the How to Cast a Hexagram page shows you how to find it.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page describes Earth and Mountain and the family the eight belong to. The Chinese Astrology section covers yin and yang, the two forces every line is built from. In my own tarot work I set Splitting Apart beside The Tower, the structure struck and falling so that something truer can stand, though that is my association and no older than me.

What in your life is being stripped back right now, and what might be waiting underneath it?

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