Cross of Provocation

Full breakdown

Gates: 38 the Fighter, 39 the Provocateur, 51 Shock, 57 Intuitive Insight. Gate numbers: 39.4/51.1, 38.4/57.1.

Moving into Juxtaposition takes us into pure provocation, but at a much deeper level. This provocation isn't aimed at gaining control or finding a solution, since Gates 21 and 48 have dropped out of the unconscious. Here the Sun sits in Gate 51, the Shock of Awakening, and the Earth in Gate 57, the gate of clarity, the Quiet. This is another Cross where all four gates are individual, which means these people are prone not just to real mood swings but to a genuine, deep melancholy — and, right alongside it, real creative potential.

Every individual, every person carrying individual definition, needs to understand that their biggest enemy when they're deep in melancholy is often the very people who claim to love them. Keep that in mind — they'll ask 'what's wrong?' because they don't want to sit inside your mood; it makes them uncomfortable. Offer them a reason — 'I had a bad day' — and they'll happily hand you that explanation. The moment you identify with that reason, you slide from creative inspiration into actual depression. So the nature of melancholy demands a certain distance, even from the people closest to you.

The Cross of Provocation carries a force that provokes you at the deepest level, purely for the sake of provoking — and does exactly that, constantly, because it doesn't know another way. That naturally creates friction: when someone's 38 or 39 is defined in the profile, other people often sense, at the level of the aura, that they're provocative and hard to deal with, and react to that impression before anything's even said. Someone with this full Cross can be genuinely inconvenient for others — moody, unpredictable in how they provoke, which tends to generate real resistance. Most of these people are genuinely unhappy, mainly because they haven't yet understood the nature of the melancholy that's such a core part of who they are.