Left Angle Cross of Masks (13/7)

The Left Angle Cross of Masks is named for Gate 13 and Gate 7, both seated in the G, or Identity, centre. Human Design reads Gate 13, from Hexagram 13, Fellowship, as the one to whom others tell their stories, holding the past and bearing witness to it, and Gate 7, from Hexagram 7, The Army, as the self cast in the role of leader, guiding others toward a shared future without necessarily holding formal power. It belongs to the Left Angle family, read as transpersonal, a direction practitioners describe as answering less to personal choice than to what circumstance hands the individual, which is where the cross's name of masks is read from.

Its design half is Gate 43 and Gate 23. Gate 43 sits in the Ajna and is read as individual insight, a sudden inner knowing that arrives whole and cannot easily be explained to anyone; elsewhere it pairs with Gate 23 in the channel of Structuring. Gate 23 sits in the Throat and is read as assimilation, the voice that turns a strange individual insight into language other people can actually take in; it pairs with Gate 43 in that same channel.

So the chart this cross names carries witness and leadership on its exposed Identity centre surface, while beneath it a private insight waits on the very voice that would translate it into something others can hear. The hexagrams are ancient; assembling four of them into one transpersonal cross is the modern system's own construction, dated to 1987.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

This Left Angle Cross of Masks completes its two role arrangements with this ordering, Gate 13 and Gate 7 exposed, the witness who holds a story ahead of the role of leader. Its first article reads Gate 13 as the one to whom others tell their stories, holding the past and bearing witness to it, now the more exposed gate, and Gate 7 as the self cast in the role of leader, guiding others toward a shared future without necessarily holding formal power. What it does not trace is where the four gates sit on the wheel itself, the Human Design mandala's division of its sixty four gates into four Quarters, and by that measure this ordering draws one gate from each of the four.

Gate 13, the personality gate here, falls in the Quarter of Initiation, purpose fulfilled through mind. Gate 7, its personality partner, falls in the Quarter of Duality, purpose fulfilled through bonding. Behind them, Gate 43 falls in the Quarter of Mutation, purpose fulfilled through transformation, and Gate 23 falls in the Quarter of Civilization, purpose fulfilled through form.

So the witness who holds a story and the role of leader the first article reads on this ordering's surface answer to the arcs of mind and bonding, while the private insight and the translating voice beneath them answer to the arcs of transformation and form, the same four arcs the earlier ordering of Masks also draws on however its two pairs are assigned to personality and design. With both arrangements in place, Masks's two gate pairs share the same wheel wide spread, one gate from each Quarter regardless of order.