Hexagram 36, Darkening of the Light

The figure

Fire sits at the bottom and Earth lies over the top of it. The sun has gone under the horizon. The light is still there, still burning, but it is below the ground now and nobody up top can see it. Three broken lines across the top make a lid, and the fire keeps glowing under it.

This is the picture of a light that has to be hidden to survive. The fire is covered, and a covered fire is still a fire. The whole hexagram lives in that difference.

Darkening of the Light is paired with Hexagram 35, Progress, which is the same figure turned upside down with the sun coming up over the earth. Morning and evening, next to each other in the book.

When it comes up in a reading

When Darkening of the Light answers your question, the conditions around you are not friendly to what you have to offer. Your ability is as good as it ever was. Something in the situation, a boss, a family, a culture, a season of your own life, will punish brightness if you show it, and the guidance is to stop showing it for now.

That is hard advice for anyone who has worked to become good at something. I know. In a dark time the task is to get through the dark time with your light intact, and you do that by keeping it close, by fitting in outwardly while you stay yourself inwardly, by not giving the hostile room anything to aim at. Think of the people who kept a faith or a craft alive quietly for years while it was dangerous to hold it, and handed it on when the weather changed.

What this looks like day to day is patience and a kind of inner privacy. Do the job. Keep your opinions for the people who have earned them. Hold the thing you love where no one can trample it. In my experience the people who come through a season like this best are the ones who keep a small daily practice going, half an hour of meditation, a notebook, a walk, something that reminds them who they are when the outside world has stopped reflecting it back.

And keep one eye on the horizon. The sun that went down is coming up somewhere. Dark times end, and the point of all this careful hiding is to still have something to bring into the light when they do.

As a birth hexagram

If Darkening of the Light is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you have ability you have often been unable to show. Somewhere along the line, in a family or a workplace or a wider world, it was unsafe to be fully yourself, and you learned to carry your brightness underground.

You are patient with hostile conditions. You do not expect to be welcomed, and you adapt to a cold room without losing what is yours. That is your gift, and it is rarer than it sounds. A great many people lose themselves in a hostile environment. You kept the fire going under the earth, and when the season turned you were able to bring it up again with the flame still on it.

The shadow is coming to love the hiding. If concealment becomes who you are, you can miss the morning when it finally comes. The lid stays on out of habit long after the danger has gone, and I have met people living in a dark that ended twenty years ago. Your work is the discernment to know when the weather has actually changed and it is time to let the light out again.

At maturity you have survived your dark seasons without betraying yourself, you have brought forward what you kept safe, and you have become a quiet guide to other people who are living through their own darkening.

If a line moves

If your cast gives you a moving line in Darkening of the Light, look at where it sits first. The lower lines are the start of the matter, the light just beginning to dim and the first choice about whether to withdraw or press on. The middle lines are its heart, the deep of the dark, and the inner work of staying whole while nothing outside confirms you. The upper lines are its end, the darkness at its fullest and the warning that a hiding carried too long turns into a darkness of your own making. The moving line then changes to its opposite and gives you a second hexagram, the one the situation is heading toward. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows you how to do that step by step.

Across the traditions

Fire and Earth each have their own section on The Eight Trigrams page. The Yin and Yang page in the Chinese Astrology section explains why the book treats light and dark as a pair that need each other. In the tarot I place Darkening of the Light beside The Hanged Man, who hangs upside down with the light still around his head, waiting out a season he cannot hurry, though that is my own association and nothing stronger.

What are you keeping alive quietly right now, and who will you hand it to when the light comes back?

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