From Dislocation to Unity

Each Gene Key is paired with one other, which Rudd calls its programming partner. The first and second are partners, as are the fifty-fifth and fifty-ninth, the sixty-third and sixty-fourth, and so on across all sixty-four in thirty-two pairs.

The pairing is not thematic in origin. It is positional. The sixty-four hexagrams are arranged around a wheel of three hundred and sixty degrees, each occupying an equal arc, and a key's programming partner is the one directly opposite it. The relationship is therefore geometric, inherited from the wheel that both the Gene Keys and Human Design use for chart calculation, and Rudd took it over unchanged from the earlier system.

What Rudd does with it is his own. He holds that the two Shadows of a pair reinforce one another, so that working with one without regard to the other leaves the pattern intact. Dislocation in the second key and entropy in the first are treated as a single mechanism seen from two sides.

The arrangement produces some pairings that read naturally and others that do not. The first and second keys, drawn from the two hexagrams of pure yang and pure yin, are a natural pair by any reading. Others are opposite only in the sense that a wheel makes them so.

It is worth noting what the pairing is not. The I Ching does have its own principles of relationship between hexagrams, chiefly inversion, where a figure is turned upside down, and complementation, where every line is changed to its opposite. Those relations structure the King Wen sequence itself. The programming partner is a different relation, produced by a modern arrangement of the hexagrams on a circle, and it does not generally coincide with the traditional pairings.

Every Gene Key sits on a hexagram, and the two should not be confused.

The I Ching, the Book of Changes, is one of the oldest continuously transmitted texts in the world. Its sixty-four figures are stacks of six lines, each broken or unbroken, and the core text attached to them is conventionally dated to the Western Zhou period, with the commentarial layers known as the Ten Wings accumulating over subsequent centuries. It has been used for divination throughout, and read as philosophy for nearly as long. The commentarial literature around it is vast, and the meanings of the hexagrams are documented in detail from sources that long predate anything modern.

The Gene Key is a reading laid over the number. Rudd's Shadow, Gift and Siddhi for each position are his own composition, published in 2009, and the correspondence between his triad and the traditional meaning of the hexagram varies enormously across the set.

Sometimes it is close. The forty-eighth hexagram is The Well, whose image is an inexhaustible source that serves a town unchanged, and the forty-eighth Gene Key runs from inadequacy through resourcefulness to wisdom, which is recognisably the same idea. The fifty-second hexagram is Keeping Still and the fifty-second Gene Key ends in stillness.

Sometimes it is not. The eleventh hexagram is Peace, the most auspicious figure in the book, and the eleventh Gene Key concerns obscurity, idealism and light. The eighth hexagram is Holding Together, about belonging to a group, and the eighth Gene Key is about refusing to be absorbed into one.

Both kinds of case are interesting, and neither is a defect. What matters is that the reader can tell which layer they are looking at. In this atlas the hexagrams are described in their own right, from the classical material, and the Gene Keys are described as what Richard Rudd made of the numbers.