From Entropy to Beauty

The Gene Keys has a clear and recent lineage, and the system does not conceal it.

It was developed by Richard Rudd, a British author who came to the material through Human Design. Rudd studied and taught with Ra Uru Hu, the originator of Human Design, over roughly the period 1997 to 2004, brought that system to Britain, and ran a school that trained a considerable number of students in it. He began synthesising his own material around 2002 and published The Gene Keys: Unlocking the Higher Purpose Hidden in Your DNA in 2009.

That sequence should be stated in the right order, because the two systems are often encountered as siblings when they are in fact parent and child. Human Design dates from 1987. The Gene Keys is a derivative of it, developed by a senior teacher of that system who then diverged from it. The sixty-four correspondences, the hexagram numbering, the pairing of keys into programming partners, the underlying wheel: all of these Rudd carried over intact from Human Design rather than deriving independently.

What he changed is the use. Human Design is mechanical and prescriptive: it calculates a chart, assigns a type, and issues a strategy and an authority to be experimented with. The Gene Keys is contemplative. It gives no strategy and no rule of conduct. It offers each of the sixty-four as a spectrum to be sat with over a long period, and treats the reading of one's own chart as an occasion for reflection rather than as a set of instructions.

The result is a system that shares an entire skeleton with its predecessor and almost none of its temperament. Neither is ancient. Human Design is roughly forty years old and the Gene Keys is younger still, published in the first decade of this century.

The device that makes the Gene Keys its own system is the spectrum of consciousness, and it is applied identically to all sixty-four.

Each Gene Key is presented at three frequencies. The Shadow is the low frequency: the fear-driven, reactive, contracted expression. The Gift is the middle: the same energy opened up, creative and available. The Siddhi is the high: a state Rudd describes as transcendent, and for which he borrows a Sanskrit word traditionally used in Indian religious literature for attainments arising from advanced yogic practice.

The interpretive move underneath this is the one worth understanding, because it governs every entry in the set. The Shadow is not the opposite of the Gift. It is the same energy at a lower pitch. Entropy and beauty in the first Gene Key, victimisation and freedom in the fifty-fifth, doubt and truth in the sixty-third: in each case Rudd holds that a single underlying pattern is being expressed at different frequencies, and that the way through is not to eliminate the Shadow but to raise the frequency at which it operates. The system's stock phrase for this is that there is nothing to fix.

Two consequences follow. The first is that the Gene Keys has no diagnostic function; a Shadow is not a fault to be identified. The second is that the method is necessarily slow. Rudd asks for contemplation over months and years rather than study, and describes the transmission as working through repeated attention rather than comprehension.

The three-frequency structure is Rudd's own contribution and is not found in Human Design, which reads the same sixty-four positions mechanically. It is the principal thing the later system added.

Because the two systems share sixty-four numbers, it is easy to assume they are variants of one another. They are not, and the differences are as instructive as the overlap.

Kept from Human Design: the sixty-four positions and their King Wen hexagram numbers; the arrangement of the hexagrams around a zodiacal wheel; the calculation of a personal chart from planetary positions at birth and at a prenatal moment; the pairing of each key with a programming partner, the position opposite it on the wheel, so that the fifty-fifth is paired with the fifty-ninth and the first with the second; and a good deal of the underlying thematic vocabulary, since Rudd taught the earlier system for years before writing his own.

Dropped: the bodygraph itself, with its nine centres and thirty-six channels; the four types and their strategies; authority as a decision-making rule; the defined and undefined distinction and the whole conditioning model built on it; and the prescriptive tone. A Gene Keys reading does not tell anyone to wait for an invitation or to inform before acting.

Added: the Shadow, Gift and Siddhi spectrum; the contemplative method; and a devotional register largely absent from Human Design, which is comparatively dry.

The two systems will therefore give a person the same sixty-four numbers and quite different accounts of what to do with them. Where these entries describe a Gene Key, they describe Rudd's reading; where the corresponding gate is described elsewhere in this atlas, that is Ra Uru Hu's. Both sit on top of a hexagram whose traditional meaning is older than either by a very long margin, and the three layers are best kept visibly distinct.