Hexagram 31, Influence

The figure

Mountain is underneath, the youngest son, keeping still, firm and quiet. Lake sits on top of it, the youngest daughter, joyous, open water. A lake resting in the lap of a mountain. The mountain holds the water, and the water softens the mountain, and each is better for the other.

The tradition reads this as the youngest son and the youngest daughter, which is to say two young people noticing each other. It is the courtship hexagram, and the old name is sometimes given as Wooing. The second half of the book opens here, with attraction, after the first half closed on the great opposites of water and fire.

Influence is paired with Hexagram 32, Duration, which is the same figure turned upside down. Influence is the moment two things are drawn to each other. Duration is what happens if the drawing lasts.

When it comes up in a reading

This hexagram tells me there is a pull in the question, and the pull is real. Two people, or a person and an opportunity, or you and a path you keep looking at. Something is drawing something. The oracle is asking how you handle the drawing.

The first piece of guidance is that attraction works when it is mutual and held lightly. The mountain stays still and lets the lake come to it, and never once gets up to chase. If you are being asked whether to pursue someone or something hard, the figure says the opposite. Be still, be yourself, stay open, and see what comes toward you. What comes of its own accord tends to stay. What was chased down tends to run again.

The second is about where the pull is coming from in you. The old commentary follows the influence up through the body, from the feet to the heart and on to the mouth, and I take the sense of it plainly. An attraction felt in the feet makes you want to run toward something before you know what it is. One felt in the heart has thought about it. One that lives only in the mouth is all talk. Ask yourself where in your body this pull sits, and you will know how much to trust it.

The hexagram also asks you to keep your heart open while this is going on. You can only receive an influence if there is room in you for it. A full cup takes nothing.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, things that suit you tend to find you. People, partnerships, work, places. Look back at the big connections of your life and most of them arrived by chemistry, by recognition on both sides.

You are responsive. When someone reaches toward you, you meet the reach. Most people pull back a little by habit. You do not, and that one thing creates the mutuality the whole hexagram is about.

You bring out the best in those you connect with, because your openness gives them permission to put down whatever they were hiding behind.

The shadow is the pull for its own sake. Needing to feel the attraction constantly to feel alive, collecting responses the way some people collect stamps, starting connections for the pleasure of the spark and leaving before anything has to be built. Your work is making sure the attraction goes somewhere. A lake that never settles on a mountain is just rain.

The mature person who carries this figure has a life full of connections that lasted because they began in true recognition. Partnerships that held, friendships with deep roots. By the second half of life they are often the one others come to when they want to know whether a match is right, in their own lives or in the matches they help to make.

If a line moves

When you cast this hexagram with a moving line, notice where it sits. The two lower lines are the beginning of the matter, the first stirring of attraction and the urge to move before the time is right. The two middle lines are the heart of it, where the pull reaches the heart and the question becomes whether to follow it or to stay still and let it come. The two upper lines are the end of the matter and its going too far, the influence that has become words only, with nothing left behind them. The moving line changes to its opposite and gives a second hexagram, the one the situation is heading toward. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows the method.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page covers Mountain and Lake and the family each belongs to. The Yin and Yang page in the Chinese Astrology section covers the two kinds of line. My own association, and nothing stronger, is with The Lovers in the tarot, two people standing in the open with everything about to begin. The Lovers has its own page in The 78 Cards.

Who or what are you being drawn toward right now, and where in your body do you feel it?

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