Hexagram 40, Deliverance

The figure

Water sits in the lower trigram, deep and dangerous, and Thunder rolls above it. Anyone who has lived through a Perth summer knows the feeling this figure describes. The heat builds for days and everyone is short with everyone. Then the storm finally breaks over the water, the rain comes down, and within an hour the whole city can breathe again.

That is Deliverance. The release of a pressure that has been building for a long time. The thunder is movement, and the water under it is the depth the movement lifts you out of. The old picture is the thaw, when the ice that held everything still for a season cracks and the river runs.

Deliverance is paired with Hexagram 39, Obstruction, which is this figure turned upside down, the water stuck against the mountain. The book puts the block and the release side by side.

When it comes up in a reading

When Deliverance answers your question, something that was stuck has started to move, or is about to. The tension has broken. The difficulty you were in has an exit and the exit is open. The guidance is practical. Go through the exit promptly, and then get on with ordinary life.

The promptness matters. The book is clear that when the storm has broken you deal with whatever still needs dealing with, quickly and without drama, and then return to normal. Let the small faults go. Clean up and move on. In my experience the people who struggle most with Deliverance are the ones who have been in difficulty so long that they do not quite know how to stop being in it, and they keep poking at the resolved problem to see if it is still sore.

There is also a quieter instruction in this hexagram about what to do once you are free, which is nothing much. Do not rush off to start the next big thing. The storm has passed and the ground is wet. Let it dry. The tradition says that after a deliverance the wise thing is to return to the regular order of things, the chop wood and carry water of ordinary days, because that is where the new growth will come from.

And forgive. The hexagram has a strong thread of letting people off. The ones who made small mistakes in a hard time, which is almost everyone, including you. The ones who did real damage are a different conversation.

As a birth hexagram

If Deliverance is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, breakthrough is your pattern. Pressure builds in your life and then releases, and the release moves things that had been stuck for a long while.

You help other people get free. You can feel when a situation is ripe for release, and you have a gift for being the one whose nudge finally unsticks it. You may do this formally, in crisis work, reform or the breaking of deadlocks, or you may simply be the person in the family who says the thing out loud. Where things have calcified, you carry the energy that moves them, and your timing on when to push tends to be good.

The shadow is manufacturing storms. When breakthrough is your gift, you can start generating crises where patience would have done the job, and breaking things that only needed a little time. Your work across a life is to tell the difference between what deserved breaking and what you simply felt like breaking. Some tension is just weather, and will pass on its own.

At maturity you have helped a great many people and situations out of long stalemates. Patterns broken, organisations unblocked, people set free of something that had held them for years. That is what this hexagram is for.

If a line moves

If your cast gives you a moving line in Deliverance, read where it sits first. The lower lines are the start of the matter, the first crack in the tension and the early need to act quickly and cleanly. The middle lines are its heart, the release in full flow, the clearing away and the question of who to forgive and who to hold to account. The upper lines are its end, the last obstacle removed and the warning against pushing the storm on past the point where it is still clearing the air. 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

Thunder and Water each have their own section on The Eight Trigrams page. The Yin and Yang page in the Chinese Astrology section covers the turn from the held to the moving that this figure describes. In the tarot I put Deliverance beside the Six of Swords, the boat crossing the water to calmer ground, though that is my own association and nothing stronger.

What has just come loose in your life, and are you ready to let it stay loose?

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