Creative Self Expression

Human Design is a modern system with a known author and a datable origin, and it is candid about both.

It was originated by Alan Robert Krakower, born in Montreal in 1948, who later took the name Ra Uru Hu. After leaving Canada in the early 1980s he settled on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he worked for a period as a teacher. In January 1987 he reported an experience which he described consistently for the rest of his life: an encounter with what he called the Voice, an intelligence he judged vastly superior to anything he had met, which transmitted information to him continuously for eight days and nights, from 3 to 11 January. What he received during those eight days is what he subsequently taught as the Human Design System. He spent the remaining twenty-five years of his life developing and teaching it, and died in 2011.

That is the system's own account of its origin, and it should be stated plainly rather than paraphrased into vagueness. It is a revelation claim. It is not offered as a discovery, a reconstruction of an older tradition, or a research finding, and Ra Uru Hu did not present it as any of those things.

Two consequences follow for how the sixty-four gates should be read.

The first is chronological. Human Design is roughly forty years old. The I Ching, whose sixty-four hexagrams supply the gate numbers, is genuinely ancient, with the core hexagram text conventionally dated to the Western Zhou period and the commentarial layers accumulating over the following centuries. The two are not contemporaries and nothing about the gates is inherited from Chinese tradition except the numbering and the binary structure.

The second is evidential. A revelation claim can be described accurately, and its content set out fairly, without being either endorsed or debunked. That is what these entries attempt.

The bodygraph is the diagram at the centre of Human Design, and it is explicitly a composite. Ra Uru Hu described it as a synthesis of four older systems with a layer of modern scientific language over the top, and the seams are visible if you look for them.

From the Hindu chakra system come the energy centres, though with a significant modification: where the familiar model has seven, the bodygraph has nine. Human Design holds that the human form mutated from a seven-centred to a nine-centred configuration, a claim about the species that has no counterpart in the Indian sources and no support outside the system.

From the Kabbalistic Tree of Life comes the idea of centres joined by defined pathways, which in the bodygraph become the thirty-six channels linking the nine centres.

From the I Ching come the sixty-four gates, distributed among the centres, two gates forming each channel. The gate numbers are the King Wen numbers of the hexagrams.

From astrology comes the calculation. Planetary positions at two moments determine which gates are activated in a particular chart, using a zodiacal wheel with the sixty-four hexagrams arranged around it.

The synthesis is genuinely novel. It is also genuinely a synthesis, assembled in the late twentieth century out of traditions that had never previously been combined and that in most cases had no historical contact with one another. Chakras and the I Ching belong to different civilisations; the Tree of Life belongs to a third. Nothing about the combination is ancient, and nothing in the source traditions anticipates it.

The gates are numbered one to sixty-four, and those numbers are the King Wen numbers of the I Ching hexagrams: the traditional received order in which the sixty-four figures have been arranged for well over two thousand years. Gate 1 is the hexagram called The Creative, Gate 64 is the one called Before Completion, and so on throughout.

This matters for reading the entries in this set, because two quite separate things are in play.

The hexagram is old. Each is a stack of six lines, broken or unbroken, giving sixty-four possible figures. Each carries a name, a judgement text, an image, and line-by-line commentaries, and around them has grown one of the largest interpretive literatures in the world. The material is used for divination and has also been read for millennia as philosophy.

The gate is new. Human Design assigns each hexagram number to a centre in the bodygraph, pairs it with another gate to form a channel, and gives it a psychological reading. None of this comes from the Chinese material. In some cases the modern reading stays close to the traditional one, as with Gate 48 and the hexagram of the Well, or Gate 27 and the hexagram of Nourishment. In others it travels a long way: Gate 11 is the hexagram called Peace, and Human Design reads it as a mind full of ideas.

The two readings are best kept side by side rather than merged. The classical meaning is documented, attributable and old. The gate meaning is documented, attributable and recent. Presenting the second as though it were the first is the most common error in popular writing about this system, and the contrast between them is more interesting than the blur.