Guide
The Six Lines
The line is the smallest unit the system reads. Every one of the sixty-four gates carries all six, and a profile is one line laid over another, so these six archetypes recur throughout a chart. The pairs are covered at the twelve profiles; this is the layer they are built from.
The system’s own framework, described neutrally. The short archetype names are carried as identifying labels rather than as the founder’s fuller descriptions, and nothing here is offered as a claim about what any line predicts.
The six at a glance
| Line | Name | In the system’s terms | Half |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Investigator | Seeks a secure foundation by investigating and getting to the bottom of things. | Lower trigram |
| 2 | Hermit | Carries a natural gift that surfaces in solitude and is called out by others. | Lower trigram |
| 3 | Martyr | Learns by trial and error, bumping into what works and what does not. | Lower trigram |
| 4 | Opportunist | Moves through life on a network of established relationships. | Upper trigram |
| 5 | Heretic | Draws projections and is called on for practical, universal solutions. | Upper trigram |
| 6 | Role Model | Lives in three phases and grows into an example others look to. | Upper trigram |
Why the halves matter
The system inherits the six-line hexagram from the I Ching, and with it the older reading that a hexagram is two trigrams stacked. Lines one to three are framed as the more personal and inward positions; lines four to six as the more outward and transpersonal. That division is why the fourth line is described as the turn toward other people, and it is the one piece of the structure the system did not devise. Its derivation is documented at Human Design and the I Ching.
When the lines entered the teaching
The lines arrive with the profile, and the profile is datable. On the first-person account of the teachers present, the types, strategy, authority and profile were introduced together in a class in the spring of 1997, which the archive places at the chart-reading seminar in Taos of May 17 and 18, advertised in a newsletter printed the previous December. The hexagram lines themselves are far older; what dates to 1997 is their use as a behavioural profile. The schedule survives at the newsletter record.