13 Coming Together - The I Ching
Chris Gabriel January 31, 2026
Judgment
Together in the wild. Cross the great river.
Lines
1
Together at the gate.
2
Together at home.
3
Hiding weapons in high grass. Climbing the high hill. He doesn’t rise for three years.
4
Climbing the wall, but unable to attack.
5
Together we cry, together we laugh. Great leaders meet.
6
Together in the country.
Qabalah
Tiphereth to Kether: The Path of Gimel. The High Priestess.
Here the connection is made from below to above, the Solar Tiphereth seeks to rise to the Heavenly Kether.
In this hexagram we see the rising sun, coming together with the sky. It is pure heat rising. This hexagram is the perfect opposite of hexagram 6 - water under heaven - in which rain splits away from the sky. When fire is below heaven, it moves up. As such, the lines of the hexagram show a progressive coming together of people from within to without.
Judgment: A group of people together in the wild crossing a great river conjures thoughts of the teamwork it takes to “build bridges”, both literally and metaphorically. We can also see the other side of this; crossing the Rubicon and marching on Rome. A group of people cross the river to make everyone join their circle.
1 The group is at the gate, the first impasse. They remain on the boundary. This, again, can be understood in two ways: either as a force seeking to expand into territory out beyond the gate, or they may be the idiomic “barbarians at the gate” seeking to get in.
2 A group at home, amid family. This is a very small community, built on a base natural sympathy. It has no need to spread out. This is the natural human state, totemic and clannish. Getting people to come together was a great labour of history; the combining of disparate families and clans to form cities, states, and empires, against their own selfishness is extraordinarily difficult.
3 When outmatched, it’s best to hide one's strength and wait it out from a good vantage point. It’s useless to fight impossible odds.
4 One climbs the wall to fight the city, but they lack the force to achieve their goals.
5 After much commotion and turmoil, victory comes and peace is made.
6 People have gathered together. From the gate, to the homes, to the whole city, and now the country, but it has not yet reached past itself, the group has not satisfied its expanding desire for empire.
“The Sun never sets on the British Empire.” The rising sun of the hexagram shines its light first on very little, and then on more and more. This is the human desire to gather people together, to have dominion and expand our control. The familial clan shown in line 2 come to control the country in line 6, so we consider the actions necessary for one family to gather its allies and take control of a country. Or how an individual man, like Caesar, can create an empire. This is not solely through violent conquest, as Abraham Lincoln proves in his famous line “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
Just as the Sun rises and falls, so too do Empires, families, and groups. As Hawthorn says “Families are always rising and falling in America.”. While all powers are destined to fall, the time indicated by this hexagram is that of their rising.
