← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 5/164
The gate wheel
The gate wheel is the zodiac divided into sixty-four equal slices called gates. It is the ring on which every planet of an Embodied Energy Chart is placed: a planet's position along the zodiac decides its gate, and nothing else does. The tradition draws it as a mandala around the bodygraph; we show it as a ring of sixty-four numbered slices with your planets marked on it.
The arithmetic
The circle of 360 degrees is cut into 64 gates of exactly 5.625 degrees (5°37′30″) each. Each gate is cut into six lines of 0°56′15″, and below the line the wheel keeps dividing into colour, tone and base. The wheel uses the ordinary tropical zodiac, the same one a Western birth chart uses.
The wheel does not start at 0° Aries. Its first gate, gate 41, begins at 2° Aquarius, and the gates then run on in the zodiac's own direction. Because 64 does not divide evenly into twelve signs, gates and signs do not line up: a gate can straddle two signs, and no sign holds a whole number of gates. Gate 25, for example, runs from about 28° Pisces across the start of Aries; gate 10 straddles the end of Sagittarius and the start of Capricorn.
The Sun takes a little under six days to cross a gate. The tradition treats its entry into gate 41, around 22 January each year, as the start of its year.
Where the order comes from
Each gate is one of the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, and carries that hexagram's number. But the numbers do not run in order round the wheel — 41 is followed by 19, then 13, then 49. The traditional numbering of the I Ching (the King Wen sequence) is one arrangement; the wheel follows another, based on the structure of the hexagrams themselves rather than the order of the book.
One property makes that visible. The gate directly across the wheel from any gate is its mirror hexagram: every line flipped, solid to broken and broken to solid. Gate 1, six solid lines, faces gate 2, six broken ones; gate 63 faces gate 64; gate 11 faces gate 12. Since the Earth is always exactly opposite the Sun, the Sun and Earth of every chart sit in such a pair — which is part of why the tradition reads them together as the life theme.
The wheel is also divided into four quarters of sixteen gates and sixteen faces of four. Those divisions begin not at an equinox or solstice but at gate 13, at 13°15′ Aquarius, and then fall every 90 degrees at the same point of each fixed sign.
What it is, and what it is not
The wheel uses the I Ching for its numbering and its imagery. Nothing is cast, thrown or drawn at any point: there is no divination in the chart. Every gate in it was calculated from two fixed moments in time. The themes we give the gates are our own short glosses on the old hexagram images, not quotations from any translation or from the tradition's own descriptions.
Nor does the wheel ask where you were born. A gate is a band of longitude and nothing more, so the chart has no houses and no horizon. Two people born at the same instant on opposite sides of the world have the same gates.
In your chart
The ring of sixty-four gates shows the zodiac with every gate in order and your planets marked at both moments: one set for the aware side, one for the built-in side, sitting roughly a quarter of the way round from each other. It is the arithmetic made visible: you can see which slice each planet fell in rather than take the bodygraph on trust. The activation table gives the same thing in figures, with the exact longitude each gate was read from.