The Canon

Ra Uru Hu, Jovian Archive, and the International Human Design School

In a sentence: Human Design as Ra Uru Hu taught it and the institution preserves it, the original that every other version here departs from.

System and author. Human Design, as transmitted and taught by Ra Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower, 1948–2011), and held after his death by Jovian Archive Corporation and the International Human Design School (IHDS), the school licensed to his student and co-author Lynda Bunnell in 2010.

Relationship to Ra. This is the source line. Every other entry in this reference defines itself by its distance from it.

Origin. By the founder’s account, the system arrived in an eight-day encounter on Ibiza in January 1987. Its first book appeared in 1992; its central practical architecture, the four Types with their Strategy and Authority, was introduced, by participants’ first-hand accounts, in 1997. The documentary record of these dates is set out in The Voice on Ibiza.

What it defines. Everything the other schools keep or discard. The BodyGraph of nine centers, sixty-four gates, and the channels between them; the synthesis of I Ching, astrology, the chakra system, and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life; the calculation from birth data of a conscious “Personality” and an unconscious “Design” some three months prior; and the practical teaching of living by one’s Strategy and Authority.

Distinctive claims. That the system was received whole rather than authored; that it is a “science of differentiation,” a phrase that is the founder’s own label and not a statement of scientific validation; and that the chart is to be tested by experiment rather than believed.

Published works. The Human Design System (the 1992 “Black Book”); The Definitive Book of Human Design (Ra Uru Hu and Lynda Bunnell, 2011); the recorded course libraries of Jovian Archive and IHDS.

The institution after the founder. When the founder died in 2011, the system passed to an estate and an institution rather than to a successor teacher: the school to Bunnell, the governance to the founder’s widow and sons, and the rights, through a corporate structure consolidated from 2016 in a Singapore rights-holding company, toward a single ownership asserting exclusive worldwide control. The estate’s line has since extended into a digital one: by the middle of the 2020s the institution’s chart platform reported more than a million registered accounts, and in 2025 it introduced an AI interface trained on the founder’s recorded teaching.¹

Posture. The canon is the position against which “authorized” and “unauthorized” are defined. Its consolidation, and the litigation that followed, is the subject of the later chapters of The Voice on Ibiza and of ZENO.

Record versus claim. The institution presents the system as a fixed and complete transmission; the documentary record shows a body of teaching assembled in datable layers across the founder’s life. Both are reported in the biography.

Cross-references. The Voice on Ibiza, throughout; ZENO, on the institution’s treatment of its early teachers.

Official applications and sub-brands

BG5 Business Institute. The institution’s own career-and-business application of Human Design, presenting the chart as a tool for work, teams, and organizations. At the level of the individual it reads a person’s design for career fit; at the level of the group it analyzes small working groups through the Penta, a reading of a group of roughly three to five people as a single entity, and larger organizations through the OC16, the corresponding analysis for entities of sixteen or more. By the founder’s account the BG5 (“Base Group 5”) data came in the same 1987 transmission; he began teaching the business application in 2005, and it was later organized as the BG5 Business Institute, which holds the official career line today. Its materials carry a copyright dated to 1992, the year of the Black Book, though the application itself postdates that book by more than a decade.²

Living Your Design. The official entry-level curriculum of the IHDS, the standardized first course (the “LYD”) through which most students enter the canonical system. It is not a divergence but the institution’s own on-ramp, included here because it defines what learning Human Design officially means.³

The Differentiation Degree Program. At the far end of the official training line sits the Differentiation Degree Program, the advanced curriculum that certifies its graduates in the system’s health and psychology applications, as Primary Health System practitioner and Rave Psychologist. The institution describes the program as developed with Ra Uru Hu, Alokanand Díaz del Rio, and Andrea Reikl-Wolf, and Reikl-Wolf, a Vienna molecular geneticist turned analyst, is its principal teacher today; the documentary record in the companion volume shows the program was carried to completion by the two named co-developers after the founder’s death. It matters to this map for what it shows about the canon itself: the deepest official curriculum is, in material part, the work of the founder’s senior students rather than of the founder alone.⁴

Outside the official line: 64keys. The business application also has an unofficial branch. The Viennese consultants Nicole and Andreas Ebhart, who came to the system in 2004 and learned from Ra on Ibiza, built a professional consulting software platform called 64keys, earlier PentaDesign, aimed at coaches, human-resources consultants, and entrepreneurs in the German-speaking market, and opened it to all users in 2016. It is the documented case of the chart pointed at business outside the institution’s own BG5 line: the official application holds the certification, not the territory.⁵