Open Gate

One of the best-regarded gates of the eight, and the whole of it sits in a single word: through. Picture a crossroads with nothing parked across it — roads running out in every direction and traffic actually moving on them. Anything that means going out or going up is read here: distance, an audience with someone senior, money you have to leave the house to earn. More often than not, it moves.

• Founding something: registering a company, opening a shop, getting a trade off the ground for the first time.
• Career and standing: the organisation someone works for, the post they hold right now, and the shape of a working life taken over decades.
• Movement outward: long journeys, relocating, building and renovation, and travelling to study under a teacher.
• Being brought in by someone else: introductions, an audience with a person who outranks you, a door opened from the far side rather than pushed from yours.

What makes this gate good is exactly that it is open — public, outward, on the record. Turn that around and the same quality works against you. Anything that has to be handled quietly, anything strictly private, anything tangled up in politics is badly served here. The gate does not turn bad in those situations; its one strength is simply the thing you did not want.

Nature

What drives the person involved is forward and outward. A new opening or a new direction registers with them before it registers with the room, and treading the same ground twice is the one thing they cannot sit through. Underneath it is a plain belief: get the thing moving and a way will show itself.

Style

Start first, correct on the way. An untried model, an untested partner, a market nobody present has worked before — the person involved will take all three, and has no objection to being the visible one out front. The pace stays quick even when it does not need to be.

Strength

Opening things, and breaking a deadlock that has held for a while. The person involved has a feel for where a trend is heading and how long the window stays open, and is usually in the first group to move. Expansion, launches and anything outward-facing sit naturally with them.

Impression

Drive that shows, and an outward manner that reads instantly. When the person involved is in the room, people come away believing the thing can actually move — which is why a group tends to hand them the lead without anyone formally proposing it.

Pitfall

Action outruns thinking, and risk gets priced too cheaply. Too many directions are open at once, detail and finishing fall behind, and what began well starts dragging the person involved backwards. The cost is never a shortage of opportunities; it is a long row of them left at eighty per cent.

In a house, Open Gate is the living room — the room a household receives the outside world in, and the plainest reading of whether the qi of this home opens up at all.

• The reception room itself: how easily an outsider gets in, how the household presents itself once they are in, and how freely anything moves through the front of the house.
• Home position: the Northwest, the Qian Palace, Metal.

The same room carries one symbol on each of the three layers — a gate, a star and a deity. All three are read at once; they are not rival answers to the same question.

Primary indicator for: Job / Interview, Travel, Business Opening.

Also considered as a secondary indicator for: Deals / Contracts, Missing Person.