Hexagram 27, Nourishment

The figure

Look at the shape of this one before you look at the trigrams. A solid line at the bottom, a solid line at the top, and four broken lines between them. The old readers saw an open mouth. Two jaws and the space inside where food goes in and words come out.

Thunder is the lower trigram, the eldest son, movement, the jaw that works. Mountain is the upper, the youngest son, keeping still, the jaw that holds. Chewing is exactly that, one part moving against one part that stays put.

Nourishment is paired with Hexagram 28, Great Excess, which is its exact opposite line for line. Where this figure is open in the middle and firm at the edges, that one is heavy in the middle and weak at the ends. One is a mouth, the other is a beam about to snap.

When it comes up in a reading

Nourishment asks a simple question. What are you feeding yourself, and what are you feeding the people who depend on you?

I take the word wide. Food, yes, and the oracle does mean food. Also what you read, what you watch, who you spend your evenings with, what you let into your head first thing in the morning before you have had a chance to defend yourself. Everything that goes in through the mouth of your life shapes what you become. The tradition says you can judge a person by what they choose to nourish, and I have found that fair.

So when this comes up for a question, look at the inputs. If you are tired, anxious or flat, the hexagram will skip straight past your plans and ask what you had for breakfast and whose voice is in your ear all day. Change the feed and watch what changes.

The other half of the mouth is giving. Words come out of it. The old image includes care in speech, saying what feeds a person and holding back what poisons them. If the question is about someone in your care, a child, a parent, a client, a team, the oracle is asking whether what you are providing is what they need or what is convenient for you to give.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, you notice what feeds people and what drains them. You walk into a house and you can feel whether anyone is being looked after. You know which friendships leave you full and which leave you scraped out, and you act on it sooner than most.

You are often the one making sure everyone else has what they need. Sometimes that is literal, you cook, you nurse, you teach, you grow things. Sometimes it is quieter, you are the person people ring when they are running on empty, and after half an hour with you they are fed.

The shadow runs two ways. One is giving until there is nothing left in the pot. The cook who never sits down to eat. The other is deciding you know what everyone else should be eating, in every sense, and treating grown adults as if they were toddlers who need their food cut up. Your work is to keep providing while letting other people choose their own menu, and to keep a plate aside for yourself.

The mature person who carries this figure has fed a great many people across a life, in bodies and in minds, and has also learned to be fed. Meals made, students taught, patients tended, communities kept going. Every town runs on a few people like this, and most of them are never thanked enough.

If a line moves

When you cast this hexagram with a moving line, look at where in the figure it sits. The two lower lines are the beginning of the matter, the first hunger and the first choice about where to feed it. The two middle lines are the heart of it, the long stretch of being fed and feeding others, where the quality of what goes in starts to show in what comes out. The two upper lines are the end of the matter and its going too far, the point where providing turns into overfeeding or where the one who has fed everyone must at last be fed. 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 Thunder and Mountain and the family each belongs to. The Yin and Yang page in the Chinese Astrology section explains the two kinds of line that make the mouth. My own association, and nothing stronger, is with The Empress in the tarot, the one sitting in the wheat field with everything around her growing. The Empress has its own page in The 78 Cards.

What did you feed yourself today that you would not serve to someone you love?

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