14 · Great Holding
Gate 14 in Human Design, Gene Key 14, and hexagram 14 of the I Ching, Great Holding 大有: one number, three traditions, read together on this page and kept apart where they differ.
The number, read across the three
Human Design places gate 14 in the Sacral and reads it as power skills: the fuel for the direction gate 2 holds, the energy that loves its work and makes resources from it. Gene Keys reads it as compromise to competence, the movement from doing what is available to doing what one is built for. The I Ching calls it possession in great measure, the wealth that comes with fire in the sky.
The honest shadow is compromise: skill spent on work that pays but does not fit, energy sold rather than given, and a competence that never becomes a calling. The tradition says gate 14 is the keeper of the keys, and that the keys open the wrong doors when the work is not loved.
The hexagram
The judgement: From the source, it carries through.
The image: Fire high up in the sky. So the person of worth holds down what is bad and brings forward what is good, and falls in with heaven's good will.
The six lines
Line 1. No dealings with what harms. That is not a fault. Through hardship, no fault.
Line 2. A big cart to load up. There is somewhere to go. No fault.
Line 3. A duke makes his offering to the son of heaven. The small-minded cannot do this.
Line 4. He keeps a distance between himself and his neighbour. No fault.
Line 5. Holding true, easy with people, and carrying weight. Good fortune.
Line 6. Help comes from heaven itself. Good fortune. Everything here is worth doing.
In a Human Design chart
Gate 14 sits in the Sacral centre. Its channel partner is gate 2, in the G centre. When both gates of a channel are activated, one from each end, the channel is defined and both centres with it, which is how the tradition builds a type and an authority. A gate on its own is a hanging gate: a theme without its circuit, and the tradition reads it as a pull towards whoever carries the other half.
Three traditions, one number
The same sixty-four figures, read three ways, and the three do not say the same thing.
Human Design took the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching and mapped them round the zodiac as gates, so that a planet at a degree is a planet in a gate; Gene Keys took the same sixty-four and read each as a spectrum from a shadow to a gift to a siddhi; the I Ching itself reads the figure as a situation, with a judgement, an image and six changing lines. Number 14 is power skills in the first, compromise becoming competence in the second, and Great Holding in the third. They share a number and a diagram, and they were written for three different purposes, which is why we show all three rather than translating one into the others. The I Ching text on this page is our own English, made from the Chinese with the Wilhelm paragraph as a reading reference, and every passage carries its provenance.
Whether the number is in your chart at all is a Human Design question: the calculator says which gates your planets activate, on the personality side and the design side, and which of them complete a channel.
About 60 seconds · needs your birth time and place · both sides of the chart are drawn
Questions people ask
What does gate 14 mean in Human Design?
Power skills, in the Sacral centre. Human Design places gate 14 in the Sacral and reads it as power skills: the fuel for the direction gate 2 holds, the energy that loves its work and makes resources from it. Whether it is active in your chart depends on where your planets were at birth and about eighty-eight days before it.
What is Gene Key 14?
The same number read as a spectrum: the shadow of compromise, the gift of competence, the siddhi of bounteousness. Gene Keys reads the shadow as the starting point and the gift as what it becomes when it is met rather than fought.
Is hexagram 14 the same as gate 14?
The same figure and the same number, read for different purposes: the I Ching reads it as a situation you have cast or are in, Human Design as a fixed activation in a birth chart. A cast hexagram is not a natal gate, and the site keeps the two apart.
We read charts for pattern and coherence, not prediction. Nothing here tells you what will happen, and nothing here tells you who you are; it shows a structure and leaves the judgement with you.