← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 155/164
Colour, tone and base
Below the line, the gate wheel keeps dividing. Each line splits into six colours, each colour into six tones, and each tone into five bases — the one place where the pattern of sixes breaks. These three levels are what the tradition reads the four Variables from: the small arrows beside a full chart that describe how a person takes things in, the surroundings they do best in, what drives their mind and what they naturally watch for.
They are also the most fragile numbers in the whole chart, and how we treat them follows from that.
The arithmetic
A gate is 5°37′30″. Dividing down:
- a line is 0°56′15″;
- a colour is a sixth of that, 0°09′22.5″;
- a tone is a sixth of a colour, 0°01′33.75″;
- a base is a fifth of a tone, 0°00′18.75″ — under twenty seconds of arc.
What matters is how long a body takes to cross each one, since that is how precisely the birth time has to be known. At its average speed the Sun spends:
| Division | Sun | Moon |
|---|---|---|
| Colour | about 3 h 48 min | about 17 min |
| Tone | about 38 min | under 3 min |
| Base | about 7½ min | about 34 s |
The lunar nodes, by contrast, crawl: a node spends about three days in one colour and half a day in one tone.
The accuracy budget
Because of this, we compute each of these values together with a confidence, and the confidence decides whether it may be shown at all. For each level we compare how uncertain the birth time is with how long the body stays in one division:
- solid — the uncertainty is no more than a quarter of the division;
- provisional — the uncertainty is about the size of one division;
- withheld — the uncertainty is larger than a division, and nothing is shown.
"Withheld" means exactly that: the value is not shown with a caveat, it is not shown at all. A birth time with only a noon assumed is treated as six hours uncertain, and at that the Sun's colour, tone and base are all withheld, while the nodes' colour can still stand. A time known to within fifteen minutes lets the Sun's colour stand as solid, its tone as provisional, and still withholds its base.
We do this because a confident value read from noise is worse than no value. Below the line, the difference between a time rounded to the hour and a time read off a birth record is the difference between a description and a guess.
What they feed
Four particular points are read below the line, each feeding one Variable:
- the built-in Sun → how a person takes things in (digestion, the tradition's "Determination");
- the built-in nodes → the surroundings that suit them (environment);
- the aware Sun → what drives the mind (motivation);
- the aware nodes → what the eye goes to (perspective).
The colour gives the main description, and the tone a finer shading — including, in the tradition, which way each arrow points. Two of the four arrows hang on the slow nodes, which is why they often survive a birth time that the other two do not.
How it is read
Taken on its own terms, this layer offers practical suggestions — a kind of setting, a way of taking things in — to try and see whether they fit. It is reflective material, not instruction, and the suggestions about taking things in are about habits and settings, never about diet as health advice.
In your chart
A full chart carries a small table of the four arrows: how you take things in, where you do best, what drives you and what you watch for. An arrow the birth time can bear is named, with a note when it is only provisional. One it cannot bear keeps its row, with no value and a plain note that it needs a birth time known to the minute — usually one of the two Sun arrows, while the two node arrows stand.