Hexagram 38, Opposition

The figure

Lake sits in the lower trigram and Fire burns above it. Fire goes up. Water goes down. Put one over the other and they move away from each other, and nothing between them is going to make them meet. That is the picture of Opposition, two things that belong to the same scene and are heading in opposite directions.

The tradition also pictures this as two people who have fallen out, or two sisters in one house who want different lives. The point of the figure is that the estrangement is real and the two parties are still, somehow, in the same hexagram. They are still in the room. They have only turned their backs.

Opposition is paired with Hexagram 37, The Family, which is the same figure turned upside down, the household in order. Anyone with relatives will understand why the book sets them side by side.

When it comes up in a reading

When Opposition answers your question, you are at odds with someone or something. There is a misunderstanding, an estrangement, a sense of being out of step with the people or the place around you. The guidance surprised me the first time I read it properly. In a time of opposition only small things can be done, and small things done patiently are enough.

So the first piece of advice is to lower your sights. Reconciling the whole thing this week is beyond anyone. You can, however, keep the door unlocked. Answer the message. Stay civil. Hold your position without turning it into a wall. In my experience most estrangements end with a small gesture that would have been impossible a year earlier and is suddenly easy, and the person who kept the door unlocked is the one who gets to make it.

The second piece of advice is to look for what the opposition is teaching you. Fire and water pulling apart still share a scene, and two people who disagree hard can polish each other in a way that two people who agree never will. Disagreement clarifies. Some of the best decisions I have been part of came out of a room where nobody agreed at the start.

The third piece is about how you read the other party. In a time of Opposition people look like enemies who are only strangers, and strangers who turn out to be allies. Check before you decide. The figure is full of things that are not what they seem on first sight.

As a birth hexagram

If Opposition is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you know this territory from the inside. Your life has included real moments of misunderstanding, falling out with people you cared about, or the long experience of being out of step with where you were.

Having lived through separation, you understand what it takes to come back together, and you can often help other people do it. You may do this for a living, in mediation, counselling, family work or diplomacy, or you may simply be the person at the table who helps two stuck people find a way back to each other. Your gift is bridging what looked unbridgeable. Relationships, groups and divides that seemed beyond repair sometimes mend in your hands.

The shadow is a taste for the fight. Having grown skilled at opposition, you can generate it where none was needed, or stay in an adversarial stance after cooperation was already on offer. Your work is learning that some tensions should be resolved and some should be held. A certain amount of creative friction is useful, and the mature form of this hexagram knows which friction is doing work and which is just habit, and can let the habit go.

At maturity you have turned a lifetime of familiarity with opposition into a lifetime of reconciliation. Families reconnected, partnerships repaired, split groups brought back into one conversation. Real work, the kind that does not get a plaque.

If a line moves

If your cast gives you a moving line in Opposition, read where it sits first. The lower lines are the start of the matter, the first falling out and the question of whether to chase what has walked away or let it come back on its own. The middle lines are its heart, the estrangement at its deepest and the small careful moves that keep a thread alive. The upper lines are its end, the isolation that comes from seeing enemies everywhere, and the moment the stranger turns out to be a friend after all. 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 Lake each have their own section on The Eight Trigrams page. The Yin and Yang page in the Chinese Astrology section is the place to read about why opposites belong to each other in this tradition. In the tarot I put Opposition beside the Five of Wands, the scuffle that is more clarifying than anyone in it would admit, though that is my own association and nothing stronger.

Who have you turned your back on while still standing in the same room?

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