The female line · Maternal

The other long diagonal of the octagram is read as the female line, the descent traced down the mother’s side. It is worked and weighed the same way as the paternal diagonal, point by point from the outer corner toward the center. The points along it stand for the maternal inheritance, the temperament and the open work a school says the mother’s branch hands on.

As with the male line, the reading stays on pattern and off people. It describes what the maternal side is thought to carry, a nourishment, a wound, a habit of holding or of leaving, and where that inheritance asks to change hands lighter than it arrived. The Matrix holds this as tendency, the program a chart runs when it comes to the mother’s line, never a proven history of anyone’s real family.

The maternal line is read for what descends, held as pattern, and never as a verdict on the mother who stands at its head.