Hexagram 42, Increase

The tide is coming in. The question is what you do with it.

The figure

The lower trigram is Thunder, the eldest son, movement and arousing. The upper is Wind, the eldest daughter, gentle and penetrating. Wind and thunder together are the picture of a storm that helps itself along, each force making the other stronger. The thunder stirs, the wind carries, and the whole thing builds.

Increase is paired with Hexagram 41, Decrease, which is this figure turned upside down. Where Decrease takes from below to feed above, Increase takes from above to feed below. The one at the top gives something away and the whole structure gets richer for it. In the old court language that was about a ruler and his people. In a kitchen or an office it is about whoever has the most being the first to share, and watching the room lift.

When it comes up in a reading

When Increase comes up I take it as good weather, and I say so. Whatever you are asking about is in a season where effort pays, doors open and help arrives at roughly the moment you need it. If you have been waiting to start something, this is the hexagram that says start.

The book has two pieces of advice for a season like this. The first is to move. Favourable conditions are for using, and the wind and thunder do not stay in the sky all year. The second is to use the good season to fix your own faults. When things are going well is exactly when you can afford to look at what you do badly, because nothing is on fire. Most of us only look at ourselves when the roof falls in.

Increase also asks you to share the increase. Hoard a good season and it quietly closes. Spread it and it tends to widen. So stand in it gratefully, with your sleeves rolled up. Say yes to the opportunity. Give something away while the giving is easy. And do not confuse the good weather with your own merit, which is the trap the next section is about.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you are someone things tend to work out for. Opportunities arrive. Relationships form at the right moment. Your work finds the people it was meant for. People call this luck, and I have watched enough of it to say it is closer to alignment, a knack for being in the right spot when the wind picks up and for moving when it does.

The increase that comes to you tends to flow outward. Careers that grow, families that prosper, resources that build, and all of it shared with the people around you in a way that feels earned. You carry a quiet confidence about abundance, and that expectation has a way of making itself true, because a person who believes a door will open actually tries the handle.

The gift is growth that benefits more than one person. Your increase becomes shared increase, and that is rarer than it sounds.

The shadow is losing your humility. A long run of favourable conditions can start to feel like proof of your own excellence. What it actually is, every time, is your effort plus a season that let the effort land. The person who forgets the second half of that sentence becomes insufferable, then lonely, then wonders where the good weather went. The work is to handle good fortune without being captured by it. Stay grateful, stay generous, and keep working as if the wind might drop, because one day it will.

At maturity the Increase person has grown a great deal across a life and has pointed that growth at things worth growing. The careers built, the families fed, the causes helped with what came in, that is the harvest of this hexagram, and it is prosperity in the full sense of the word.

If a line moves

When you cast Increase with a moving line, its position tells you where the good season is working. A line moving low in the figure is the beginning of the matter, the first opportunity and whether you take it. A line moving in the middle is the heart of it, the season in full flow, where sharing keeps the increase coming. A line moving high is the end of the matter and its danger, where a person has taken too much and given too little, and the increase starts to turn. Change the moving line to its opposite and you have the second hexagram, where the situation is heading. The How to Cast a Hexagram page shows the step with a worked example.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives Thunder and Wind their own sections and shows how a pair of trigrams is read. The Chinese Astrology section covers yin and yang, the two forces every line here is built from. In the tarot, my own association for Increase is the Ten of Pentacles, the card of wealth that has turned into a household and a lineage, with the coins almost beside the point. Take that as my pairing and nothing stronger.

Who in your life would be the first to hear about a good season, and who would be the first to share in it?

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