Hexagram 55, Abundance

This is the sun at noon.
Everything is lit, everything is warm, the shadows are as short as they will get all day.
And anyone who has stood in a Perth paddock at midday in January knows the other half of it. Noon does not last.

The figure

The lower trigram is Fire, the middle daughter, clinging, light and clarity.
The upper trigram is Thunder, the eldest son, arousing, movement.
Light underneath and movement above is a storm with lightning in it, the whole sky lit and moving at once.
That is abundance in the sense this book means it, clarity and energy together at full strength, everything you have working at once.

Its pair in the sequence is Hexagram 56, The Wanderer, which is the same six lines turned upside down.
Abundance is the lord at home with the hall full. The Wanderer is the traveller with no hall at all.
The warning inside Abundance is that the one can turn into the other.

When it comes up in a reading

When Abundance comes up for a question, I read it as good news with a clock on it.
Opportunity, energy, money, attention, whatever the question is about, this is the high point of it.
The sense of the old text is that the moment calls for a leader who shines at noon and does not fret about the afternoon.
Do not waste the brightest hour of the day worrying about dusk.

That sounds obvious, and I have watched more people fail at it than you would think.
We stand in the middle of the good thing scanning the horizon for the catch, and by the time we finish the peak has passed.
When this comes up, I tell the person the sun is overhead right now, and to put their face up to it.

The second message is about what to do with fullness while you have it.
Abundance flows outward or it rots.
So the hexagram asks what you will do with the plenty, who you will share it with, what you will put right while you have the means.

And the third message, quietly, is that afternoon comes.
A life that accepts afternoons gets to enjoy noons. A life that fights them spends every noon braced.

As a birth hexagram

If this is your birth hexagram, or if it keeps coming back to you, your life has seasons of real plenty.
Opportunities line up, your capacities peak, money and recognition arrive together, and for a while you are the warm centre of something.
You have had one or you will have one, and quite possibly several.

You also, by nature, understand that they are chapters.
The carrier of Abundance knows in their bones that a peak is a moment, and that the wisdom is to enjoy it, use it and share it while it lasts.
When you are full, the people around you eat, and in your bright seasons you become a gathering point, with collaborators and friends and hangers on all drawn to the warmth.
That generosity is the gift, and the good that comes off one of your peaks lands on a great many people besides you.

The shadow is clinging to noon.
When the season turns and you try to hold it, by force, by pretence, by refusing to see the shadows lengthening, you damage yourself and whatever you are gripping.
The mature carrier of Abundance enjoys the noon and accepts the afternoon with grace, and in my experience the acceptance makes the next noon more likely.
Looked back on from later in life, you have been full and you have been generous, and the two together add up to a life that fed a lot of people.

If a line moves

When you cast this hexagram and a line is moving, the position of that line tells you where you are in the matter.
The two lower lines are the beginning, the climb toward the peak, where the right move is to join forces with those who share your aim and to keep your head.
The two middle lines are the heart of it, where the light is at its brightest and the question is whether you can see clearly through your own glare.
The two upper lines are the end, where the fullness is passing and the danger of going too far is trying to hold the peak past its hour.
The moving line changes to its opposite and gives you a second hexagram, the one the situation is heading toward.
The How to Cast a Hexagram page works through a cast that lands on this very hexagram with a moving line, and shows you how to find the second one.

Across the traditions

The Eight Trigrams page gives you Fire and Thunder on their own.
The Chinese Astrology section covers yin and yang, and the Five Elements page there explains why the fire of the trigrams and the fire of the five elements are cousins, with a family resemblance and different jobs.
My own association in the tarot is The Sun, card 19 of the Major Arcana, the child in the garden with the whole sky lit, which is this figure drawn in colour.

What are you enjoying right now, while it is here?

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