The Public Record

“THE HUMAN DESIGN SYSTEM” Word Mark

The phrase “The Human Design System” has never been successfully registered as a word mark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Three applications have been filed and abandoned:

• Application 1: Filed May 2000. Abandoned 2004.
• Application 2: Filed 2022. Abandoned 2023.
• Application 3: Filed 2023. Abandoned.

Two live marks filed in 2025 explicitly disclaim exclusive rights to “Human Design” as words in their disclaimer statements.

Source: USPTO Trademark Search (tmsearch.uspto.gov). Verify by searching “Human Design System” — filter by owner: Jovian Archive.

Rave Mandala Composite Mark

A composite mark including the Rave Mandala design was registered with the USPTO in 2019. The registration was cancelled in 2024 for failure to file a continued-use declaration (Section 8 declaration). A cancelled registration is no longer an active registered trademark.

Note Jovian Archive websites and IHDS-affiliated pages continue to describe the Rave Mandala™ as a “registered trademark” as of June 2026. Following cancellation of a registration, use of the ® symbol or the description “registered trademark” constitutes a false designation under 15 U.S.C. § 1111.

Source: USPTO TSDR (tsdr.uspto.gov) — search Rave Mandala, owner: Jovian Archive.

BG5 and BASE GROUP 5 Marks

The BG5® and BASE GROUP 5 marks are registered trademarks. The registered owner is Inner Human Design Inc., a California corporation associated with Lynda Bunnell — not Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd.

Jovian Archive and IHDS-affiliated pages have attributed the BG5® mark to Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd. This attribution does not reflect the USPTO registration record, which shows Inner Human Design Inc. as the registered owner.

To verify independently: Search tmsearch.uspto.gov for “BG5” and “BASE GROUP 5”. The registrant field will show Inner Human Design Inc.

Source: USPTO Trademark Search (tmsearch.uspto.gov), retrieved June 2026.

Tribunale di Firenze — R.G. 2756/2020

• Court: Tribunale di Firenze (Florence Civil Court, Italy)
• Case number: R.G. 2756/2020
• Ruling date: June 3, 2020

Finding: No copyright subsists over the Human Design System as a set of ideas and methods. The ideas and methods of the Human Design System are freely discussable.

Significance: An Italian court with jurisdiction over one of the parties ruled that the system itself — its ideas, constructs, and methods — is not copyrightable intellectual property. The ruling does not affect specific copyrighted materials such as recordings, books, and software, but establishes that the conceptual framework of Human Design cannot be exclusively owned.

This ruling is significant for practitioners, teachers, and students who wish to discuss, teach, or write about Human Design concepts independently of Jovian Archive’s licensing structure.

Jovian Archive Entity Chain

The Human Design System IP has been held by at least three successive corporate entities. Two of the three incorporation dates are independently verifiable from public business registries; one is not.

1. Jovian Archive Corporation — Sedona, Arizona, U.S.A. The original entity. Address: 225 Panorama Blvd, Sedona, AZ 86336. Incorporation date: not confirmed from public records. The organization’s founding is stated as 1999 by Jovian Archive itself (jovianarchive.com/pages/about-jovian-archive), and the domain jovianarchive.com was registered January 6, 2000 (per WHOIS records). The specific Arizona incorporation date for this entity has not been independently verified in publicly accessible state records as of June 2026. Source: D&B Business Directory (dandb.com); WHOIS records for jovianarchive.com; Jovian Archive published statement (jovianarchive.com/pages/about-jovian-archive).
2. Jovian Archive Media Inc. — Ontario, Canada. Incorporated 2004. Headquarters listed as Santa Eulalia, Baleares, Spain (Ra Uru Hu’s location in Ibiza). Listed in Ontario business registry and Toronto Yellow Pages. This is the entity referenced in the IHDS About Us page statement: “Jovian Archive Media Inc. holds the exclusive copyright to The Human Design System.” As of June 2026, that statement refers to the superseded Canadian entity — the current IP holding entity is the Singapore entity (see below). Source: Ontario business registry via b2bhint.com (Canadian registry data, last updated June 19, 2024); ihdschool.com/about-us (retrieved June 2026).
3. Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd. — Singapore. Incorporated 2016 per ACRA (Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority). Registered as Exempt Private Limited Company. Current address: Unit 15-01 Valley Point, 491B River Valley Road, Singapore 248373 (per Jovian Archive’s own published address). This is the current IP holding entity. Source: ACRA registration data via sgpgrid.com (Singapore Open Data Licence v1.0); Jovian Archive published address (jovianarchive.com).

Interpretation The progression from an Arizona corporation (founding era) to a Canadian entity (2004) to a Singapore entity (2016) represents a sequence of IP restructuring across three jurisdictions over approximately 17 years. The IHDS About Us page continues to reference Jovian Archive Media Inc. (the 2004 Canadian entity) as the copyright holder as of June 2026, despite the Singapore entity being the current registered rights holder.

IHDS Domain History

The domain ihdschool.com was registered June 16, 2010.

The IHDS About Us page (ihdschool.com/about-us, retrieved June 2026) states the IHDS was “Founded in 1992 by Ra Uru Hu.” It also states: “In 2010, according to Jovian Archive’s legal rights, the International Human Design School was licensed to Lynda Bunnell, Director.”

The domain did not exist before 2010. What specifically is being dated to 1992 — whether a formal school structure, an informal teaching community, or the beginning of Ra’s public teaching — is not clarified in the published materials.

Source: WHOIS records; Internet Archive (web.archive.org); ihdschool.com/about-us (retrieved June 2026).

The Original IHDS Structure — International Human Design Schools (Plural)

Ilse Sendler, founding director of Human Design Austria and one of the original signatories of the national organization agreements, documented the original structure of the IHDS publicly in a 2017 Facebook post in the Human Design — Train with the Experts group. Her statement, preserved in a Medium article documenting the exchange (medium.com/humandesignhistory/human-design-ilse-sendler-85c50c16b158), provides a first-hand account of how the national organization network was formed and what it was originally called.

“In 2000, that group of supporting students was invited to establish national Human Design organizations — Germany, UK, USA, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Austria. This is how the IHDS was born — although slightly different, we are International Human Design Schools — SCHOOLS — plural. Lynda didn’t even know where she was at that time. Those of us who signed contracts (Jürgen didn’t sign) together represented the first Human Design organization.”

— Ilse Sendler, founding director of Human Design Austria, Facebook post 2017, preserved at medium.com/humandesignhistory/human-design-ilse-sendler-85c50c16b158

Sendler also directly contradicted the claim that Ra Uru Hu founded the IHDS in 1992 as a formal institution:

“When Ra began teaching in the 1990s there was no organization or anything like that. A group of students like us were dedicated friends and eccentrics. Building a company/community/structured production was clearly not his priority.”

— Ilse Sendler, 2017

Interpretation Sendler’s account is consistent with the domain history documented above — ihdschool.com was not registered until June 16, 2010, and the national organization network she describes forming in 2000 predates the current IHDS structure by a decade. Her account also places the original structure as a network of plural national schools rather than a single centralized institution with a single director.

Source: Ilse Sendler, Facebook post in Human Design — Train with the Experts group, 2017. Preserved at: medium.com/humandesignhistory/human-design-ilse-sendler-85c50c16b158 (retrieved June 2026). Note: The Medium article is written in Chinese and documents Ilse Sendler’s Facebook comments in translation. The original Facebook post is in English per the Medium article’s quoted excerpts.

Ra Uru Hu — May 2008 Email on the IHDS

Ra Uru Hu addressed the question of the IHDS’s institutional existence directly in an email circulated to Human Design professionals and teachers in May 2008, approximately three years before his death and twenty-six months before the August 2010 transfer to Lynda Bunnell. The email is preserved in scanned form in the Human Design Austria archive (ra.uru.hu/hd-background/).

“The IHDS spent most of its existence as me. In the last years this has begun to change and September mutates the IHDS into you.”

— Ra Uru Hu, email to Human Design professionals, May 2008 (preserved in Human Design Austria archive, ra.uru.hu/hd-background/)

Interpretation This statement, written by Ra himself in 2008, establishes that through at least that year, the IHDS did not exist as a separable organized institution. It was, in Ra’s own characterization, a designation he applied to his own teaching. The claim on the current IHDS website that the institution was “founded in 1992” is not consistent with Ra’s own 2008 description of it.

Source: Ra Uru Hu, May 2008 email, preserved in Human Design Austria archive (ra.uru.hu/hd-background/).

The July 2010 Transfer — Lynda Bunnell’s Written Admission

The transfer of the IHDS to Lynda Bunnell in July 2010 has never been documented in a publicly available written instrument. However, Bunnell’s own written account of the transfer is preserved in the Human Design Austria archive. In a letter to Werner Lessmann, a German Human Design analyst, written in approximately late 2015 or early 2016:

“I’ve been running the IHDS since 2010, and I take my job very seriously. My commitment is to follow through on Ra’s wishes, the integrity of the knowledge and getting Human Design out into the world as best we can… He asked me to take over the IHDS in July 2010 and gave me the authority to continue his work and run these programs, as well as all the others. He entrusted his school to me and gave me complete authority.”

— Lynda Bunnell, letter to Werner Lessmann, circa late 2015 / early 2016 (preserved at ra.uru.hu/hd-background/ under the heading “Strange ways to acquire HDS teaching licenses”)

Interpretation Bunnell’s account describes an oral transfer — Ra asked, Ra gave authority, Ra entrusted — with no reference to a written instrument. The assertion that the authority transferred was “complete” is in tension with the existing contractual obligations of Jovian Archive Corporation to the seven national licensees from 2000–2003. The contracts those national licensees held — including Ilse Sendler’s September 2000 Austrian contract and November 2003 German-language extension — were confirmed by Jacqueline Riley, then identified as President of Jovian, to remain in force after the 2010 transfer.

Source: Lynda Bunnell letter, preserved at ra.uru.hu/hd-background/; Jacqueline Riley correspondence, quoted in Ilse Sendler, “Abschließende Erklärung, Klarstellung der rechtlichen Situation,” ra.uru.hu/hd-background/.

The bodygraph image — the visual chart at the center of the Human Design System — was created and held by Jürgen Saupe from 1992.

Jürgen Saupe (born May 3, 1940, Berlin; died July 13, 2002, Munich) was the founding European publisher of Human Design materials and founder of New Sun Services. He translated Ra Uru Hu’s foundational text into German in 1992 and held the image rights to the bodygraph from that point.

On Jürgen Saupe’s death on July 13, 2002, the bodygraph image rights passed to the Saupe family. They did not transfer to Jovian Archive.

Jovian Archive’s copyright notices on its websites assert ownership of the Rave BodyGraph™ as a registered trademark. The image rights history documented here is distinct from trademark registration status — see Section 1 (Trademark Record) for the current USPTO status of the Rave BodyGraph mark.

Birth Year

Two public sources conflict on Ra Uru Hu’s birth year:

Jovian Archive (mybodygraph.com, jovianarchive.com) states: April 9, 1948.

The Montreal Gazette death notice of March 18, 2011 states: born April 9, 1947.

The 1948 figure is corroborated by three independent newspaper records, researched and documented by Astrodatabank researcher Sy Scholfield:

• Marriage announcement: The Montreal Star, September 20, 1969
• University convocation: Sir George Williams University, The Montreal Star, May 22, 1971
• Job appointment notice: Times Colonist, June 2, 1973

The documentary weight favors 1948. The death notice discrepancy has not been publicly explained or corrected by Jovian Archive or Ra’s family. This archive uses 1948 as the consensus figure while noting the variance.

Relevance The birth year determines the Design calculation — the planetary positions approximately 88 days before birth that produce the Design (unconscious) side of the BodyGraph. A one-year difference could affect gates, channels, Centers, Type, Profile, and Incarnation Cross at the Design level.

Source: Astrodatabank entry for Ra Uru Hu, researcher Sy Scholfield, last updated April 11, 2022: astro.com/astro-databank/Ra_Uru_Hu

Birth Time

Three figures appear in public sources for Ra Uru Hu’s birth time:

00:05 AM — Source: Jovian Archive (mybodygraph.com/about-ra-uru-hu). Official figure; used in all Jovian Archive software and published materials.

00:14 EST — Source: Chaitanyo Taschler / Zen Human Design chart archive (humandesignsystem.com/archive/charts/HuRaUru.pdf). The same figure appears in the death transit chart at humandesignsystem.com/archive/charts/transitCharts/RasDeath.pdf. Chaitanyo was among Ra’s first American students from 1993 and received chart data from Ra directly.

00:20 AM — Source: Noted in Astrodatabank as a variant “frequently found” but with no named source. Origin untraceable in the public record.

The nine-minute difference between 00:05 and 00:14 does not affect most chart elements but is significant at the sub-line level (Color, Tone, Base). Ra himself taught that birth time precision is essential at that depth of analysis.

Quebec birth records are confidential after 1900. Access is restricted to the person named in the record, immediate family, or legal representatives. Astrodatabank researcher Sy Scholfield found no entry in Quebec birth registries under the name Krakower. No independent verification of any birth time is possible through public records.

Source: Astrodatabank: astro.com/astro-databank/Ra_Uru_Hu; Zen Human Design chart archive: humandesignsystem.com/archive/

Legal Name Documentation Trail

Ra Uru Hu’s legal birth name was Alan Robert Krakower. The following primary newspaper records corroborate this name and provide biographical anchoring:

• Marriage announcement: Robert Alan Krakower and Judith Aileen Kauffman. The Montreal Star, September 20, 1969.
• University convocation: Robert Alan Krakower, Sir George Williams University. The Montreal Star, May 22, 1971.
• Job appointment: Robert Krakower. Times Colonist, June 2, 1973.
• Death notice: Robert “Bobby” Krakower, born April 9, 1947 [sic]. Montreal Gazette, March 18, 2011.

All four records researched and documented by Sy Scholfield for the Astrodatabank entry.

Source: Astrodatabank: astro.com/astro-databank/Ra_Uru_Hu

The IHDS website (ihdschool.com/about-us) states:

Founded in 1992 by Ra Uru Hu, the International Human Design School (IHDS) is responsible for The Human Design System education training standards.

The same page also states:

In 2010, according to Jovian Archive’s legal rights, the International Human Design School was licensed to Lynda Bunnell, Director.

Three documented facts bear on this claim:

1. The domain ihdschool.com was registered on June 16, 2010 — the same year the school was “licensed to Lynda Bunnell.” The domain did not exist before 2010. Source: WHOIS records / Internet Archive (web.archive.org).
2. Ra Uru Hu’s own account (2005 Teachers Training Address) describes the first teachers training as occurring in January 1996 in San Juan Bautista, California — not 1992. He described three generations of teachers training: 1996, 2000, and 2005.
3. The earliest Wayback Machine capture of content claiming an IHDS 1992 founding date has not been independently verified for this page. The Internet Archive (web.archive.org) provides a publicly accessible tool for checking capture dates.

Interpretation This archive does not assert that the IHDS was not founded in 1992. It documents that the founding claim is asserted but that the domain history and the founder’s own account of teacher training timelines raise questions about what specifically is being dated to 1992.

Source: ihdschool.com/about-us (retrieved June 2026); Ra Uru Hu 2005 Teachers Training Address (transcript on file); web.archive.org.

Eleanor Haspel-Portner, Ph.D. (University of Chicago, Comparative Human Development) was Ra Uru Hu’s formal business partner from 1999 to 2002. Ra commissioned her and her husband, Marvin Portner M.D., to validate the Human Design System scientifically — to test its core claims against empirical data.

What the research found: Haspel-Portner ran statistics on 30,000 matched sample cases and subsequently studied more than 15,000 clinical cases. Her published conclusion, stated in multiple public sources including a 2025 interview in Voyage South Carolina Magazine, is that “Human Design is an incomplete, faulty, and disempowering system because it is only a small snapshot of an individual’s process in the first three months of their development.” Her data did not validate Ra’s medical and health hypotheses as a comprehensive system.

What was published during the partnership: Between 1999 and 2002, Haspel-Portner and Ra co-authored 13 books published through Rave Life Sciences. These included the Monographs on Human Design and Health series. The research paper “Preliminary Research on the Human Design System and Health” (co-authored by Haspel-Portner, Ra Uru Hu, Marvin Portner M.D., and Erik Memmert) tested Type as a variable across five samples of 5,000 birth records and found Type holds up as a statistically significant differentiating variable at the 99% confidence level.

What happened after 2002: Haspel-Portner departed Ra’s organization in 2002. She subsequently developed Noble Sciences and Beyond Human Design — her own synthesis system. In 2025 she republished her research paper and released updated books synthesizing the original HD research with her expanded Noble Energy Maps framework. The republished material includes updated statistics and annotations.

Why this matters for the public record: Ra Uru Hu commissioned independent scientific validation of the Human Design System. The commissioned researcher conducted that validation, found the system to be statistically significant in certain dimensions and incomplete in others, published her findings, and departed. The research record — including both what was validated and what was not — is part of the institutional history of the system’s scientific claims.

The domain humandesignsystem.com was built by Chaitanyo Taschler in 1997 — making it the first Human Design website worldwide. Internet Archive captures of Jovian Archive’s national organizations page (jovianarchive.com/hdsblinks.html) from 2000 to January 2001 listed humandesignsystem.com as the official U.S. national Human Design organization.

Following the doctrinal separation between Chaitanyo/Zeno and Ra circa 2000, humandesignsystem.com was removed from Jovian Archive’s national organizations listing. The domain continues to operate as Zen Human Design (zenhumandesign.com also resolves to the same content) and maintains one of the oldest publicly accessible Human Design archives on the internet.

The chart archive at humandesignsystem.com/archive/ contains:

• Ra Uru Hu’s personal Human Design chart (using birth time 00:14 EST)
• Transit charts including Ra’s death transit (March 12, 2011)
• Historical charts from the system’s earliest years

This archive is a primary source document for the history of Human Design in America and for the birth time discrepancy documented in Section 5.

On the morning of July 25, 2003, Ra Uru Hu circulated an email to every certified Human Design practitioner worldwide. The subject line was “Misrepresentation.” The letter named three people: Zeno Dickson, Chaitanyo Taschler, and Eleanor Haspel-Portner.

The letter is preserved in Chaitanyo Taschler’s archive at humandesignsystem.com and is quoted in the public record by multiple parties. Its operative passage:

“Jovian Archive does not in any way support these individuals nor does it recognize any of their teaching. The IHDS (International Human Design Schools) does not recognize them or any of their students. Any IHDS registered professional publicly listed with these organizations has until September 1, 2003 to end their association. After this date, to protect the general public from confusion, professionals listed with these organizations will be removed from the IHDS official register of Human Design professionals.”

— Ra Uru Hu, “Misrepresentation” letter, July 25, 2003

Three documentary features of this letter bear on the institutional record:

First, the letter refers to the IHDS as “International Human Design Schools” — plural — consistent with the plural national-schools structure documented in Section 3. The singular “International Human Design School” came later; the domain ihdschool.com was not registered until June 16, 2010.

Second, the mechanism described — removal from the official register of Human Design professionals — was not a legal remedy. The 1993 contract Ra had drafted and signed in Zeno and Chaitanyo’s Taos kitchen named them his exclusive U.S. representatives. That contract was not terminated by the 2003 letter; it was not suspended; no legal proceeding is in the public record. What was effected was an administrative erasure: removal of names from a directory.

Third, the deadline imposed — six weeks, September 1, 2003 — functioned as a loyalty test. Practitioners who had trained through New Sun Services America and who wished to remain in the institutional directory had to publicly disassociate from their teachers. The mechanism was social and economic rather than legal.

Interpretation The 2003 letter established a pattern of institutional response that recurred in 2010 against Ilse Sendler and Human Design Austria (see Section 3), and in 2015–2016 against German-speaking professionals who declined to sign contracts with the IHDS-recognized entity HD Services. In each case, the mechanism was administrative erasure rather than legal termination: contracts remained in force while institutional recognition was withdrawn.

What is the difference between International Human Design Schools and the IHDS?

These are two distinct institutional structures — not the same organization at different points in time.

International Human Design Schools (plural) was the name Ra Uru Hu used in his own 2003 open letter for the federation of national organizations he had formalized around 2000. It was a network structure: seven national schools — Germany, United Kingdom, United States, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Austria — each operating under a direct contractual relationship with Jovian Archive Corporation, with exclusive rights in their respective territories. The plural was operative and intentional. Each national school was a peer in the network, not a branch of a central institution.

The International Human Design School (singular), operating as the IHDS, is the centralized institution that emerged after Ra’s death. Its domain ihdschool.com was registered June 16, 2010. Ra himself described the IHDS in his own May 2008 email as having “spent most of its existence as me” — meaning it was not a separable institution during his lifetime but a designation he applied to his own teaching. Lynda Bunnell, in her own written account, confirms Ra asked her to take over the IHDS “in July 2010.”

Ilse Sendler, one of the original national directors who signed the 2000 contracts, documented this distinction explicitly in 2017:

“We are International Human Design Schools — SCHOOLS — plural. Lynda didn’t even know where she was at that time.”

— Ilse Sendler, 2017 (source: medium.com/humandesignhistory/human-design-ilse-sendler-85c50c16b158)

The distinction matters because the contracts the national directors signed in 2000 were with Jovian Archive Corporation for the plural network. Those contracts remained in force after 2010. The IHDS’s claim to centralized authority over Human Design education worldwide rests on a 2010 transfer that post-dates Ra’s death by less than a year and that the original national contract holders were not party to.

Source: See /record Sections 3, 6, and 9 for full documentation.

What year was Jovian Archive founded?

There is no single answer. “Jovian Archive” refers to at least three successive corporate entities incorporated at different times.

Ra Uru Hu described forming “a family corporation, Jovian Archive” in his own July 25, 2003 open letter, placing the founding in approximately 1999 following his break with Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler. The domain jovianarchive.com was registered January 6, 2000.

• Jovian Archive Corporation (Sedona, Arizona, U.S.A.) — founding era. Business registration address: 225 Panorama Blvd, Sedona, AZ 86336. Specific incorporation date not confirmed from publicly accessible Arizona state records as of June 2026. Domain registered January 6, 2000. Source: D&B Business Directory; WHOIS records; Ra Uru Hu, “Misrepresentation” letter, July 25, 2003.
• Jovian Archive Media Inc. (Ontario, Canada) — incorporated 2004. Headquarters listed as Santa Eulalia, Baleares, Spain (Ra’s Ibiza address). Still referenced in the IHDS About Us page as the copyright holder as of June 2026, despite being superseded. Source: Ontario business registry.
• Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) — incorporated November 16, 2016. Current IP-holding entity. Incorporated five years after Ra Uru Hu’s death in March 2011. Source: ACRA (Singapore Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority).

Interpretation The name “Jovian Archive” dates to approximately 1999. The corporate entity that currently holds the worldwide intellectual property rights was incorporated in Singapore in 2016 — after Ra’s death, and 17 years after the name was first used.

Source: See /record Section 3 for full documentation.

What year was the IHDS founded?

The IHDS claims a founding date of 1992 on its current website. The documentary record raises several questions about this claim.

• Ra Uru Hu’s own May 2008 email states: “The IHDS spent most of its existence as me.” Written three years before his death, this characterizes the IHDS not as a founded institution but as a designation Ra applied to his own teaching. Source: Ra Uru Hu email, May 2008 (ra.uru.hu/hd-background/).
• The domain ihdschool.com was not registered until June 16, 2010 — eighteen years after the claimed 1992 founding. Source: WHOIS records.
• Ilse Sendler, a founding national director, documented that the national schools network formed in 2000 was called “International Human Design Schools — SCHOOLS — plural” and that the current IHDS director “didn’t even know where she was at that time.” Source: Ilse Sendler, 2017 (medium.com/humandesignhistory/human-design-ilse-sendler-85c50c16b158).
• Lynda Bunnell’s own written account states Ra asked her to take over the IHDS “in July 2010.” Source: Lynda Bunnell letter to Werner Lessmann, circa late 2015/early 2016 (ra.uru.hu/hd-background/).

This archive does not assert the IHDS was not founded in some form in 1992. It documents that Ra’s own 2008 description characterizes it as his personal teaching; the domain did not exist before 2010; the original structure was a plural network per a founding director’s firsthand account; and the IHDS as a transferable institution with a single director dates to July 2010.

Source: See /record Sections 3 and 6 for full documentation.

Did Ra Uru Hu live in Sedona, Arizona?

Ra Uru Hu’s documented permanent residence from the mid-1980s until his death on March 12, 2011 was Ibiza, Spain. This is confirmed by Jovian Archive’s own published materials, the IHDS About Us page, and Ra’s death notice.

Ra did have a documented American presence in Sedona:

• October 1994 — Ra taught at the Holiday Inn in Sedona/Phoenix: an Introduction lecture (October 3) and a Basic Training (October 6–7). Source: Ra’s teaching schedule, documented in Ra’s Agenda & Internet Resources 2016 (community chronological catalogue).
• Fall 1999 — Ra taught three professional-level classes at the Hampton Inn in Sedona: The Design of Sexuality (September 29–October 4), Rave Return Readings (October 6–7), and Relationship Readings (October 8–10). These classes were coordinated by Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler’s New Sun Services America. Source: July 4, 1999 New Sun Services America newsletter (humandesignsystem.com/archive/newsletters/0602.pdf).
• Jovian Archive Corporation was registered at 225 Panorama Blvd, Sedona, AZ 86336 — a Sedona business address. Ra described forming Jovian Archive in Sedona in his own 2003 letter. Whether this address was a residence, a registered agent address, or a supporter’s address has not been confirmed from publicly accessible records.

Ra’s 1994 Sedona lecture produced a memorable exchange he later recounted himself: “In my first tour to America I had driven into Sedona and I did an introductory lecture. After the lecture a woman came up to me and she said to me, ‘You’re an old soul’. I find that kind of thing rather offensive.”

Source: Chaitanyo Taschler archive (humandesignsystem.com/archive/newsletters/0602.pdf); Ra Uru Hu, 2003 letter; D&B Business Directory; goodreads.com/author/quotes/7797461.Ra_Uru_Hu.

Is the Human Design System trademarked or copyrighted?

Trademark: The phrase “The Human Design System” as a word mark has never been successfully registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Three applications were filed and abandoned: in 2004, 2022, and 2023. The Rave Mandala composite mark was registered in 2019 but cancelled in 2024 for failure to file a continued-use declaration. Two live 2025 registrations — MyBodyGraph and Jovian Archive Human Design — each disclaim any exclusive right to the words “Human Design” as such.

Copyright: Jovian Archive Media Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) claims exclusive copyright over the Human Design System and all knowledge derived from Ra Uru Hu’s teachings. The Tribunale di Firenze (Florence Civil Court, Italy) ruled on June 3, 2020 (case R.G. 2756/2020) that no copyright subsists over the Human Design System as a set of ideas and methods, and that those ideas and methods are freely discussable. Specific written and recorded expressions — Ra’s books, Jovian Archive recordings, course materials — remain protected by standard copyright as original works.

Source: See /record Sections 1 and 2 for full documentation.

Who were Ra Uru Hu’s first students?

• Jürgen Saupe — met Ra in 1991; translated the foundational Black Book into German; founded New Sun Services International as the European publishing vehicle. Source: humandesignsystem.de/History.asp
• First formal Design Analyst Training (summer 1991, Ibiza) — three participants; names not in the public record. Source: Jan van den Berg, Ra’s Work (2020).
• Martin Grassinger — met Ra privately on Ibiza in 1991, before Human Design went public. Received the first official Human Design analyst license globally on April 9, 1993. Source: martin-grassinger.com/en/about-me/
• First American cohort (December 1993, Taos, New Mexico) — eight students certified by year-end 1993: Zeno Dickson, Chaitanyo Taschler, Josef Velten, Liz Winslow Fruits, Sarasvati Cohen, Ilse Grunninger, Ivy Amar, Lenny Blank. Source: humandesignsystem.com/archive/ (Chaitanyo Taschler’s preserved archive and photographs).
• The first US Teachers Training, held in Taos in May 1997, certified three additional teachers: Chetan Parkyn, Don McKinney, and Dietrie Rudat.
• Alokanand Díaz — documented at Amsterdam Basic Course, September 1993. Source: Multiple teacher biographies; humandesignsystem.com/archive/
• Ilse Sendler — began training with Ra from 1993; certified HD analyst 1995. Source: humandesignsystem.info

Source: See /teachers for full profiles of founding-era teachers; /lineage for the full teaching timeline.

What happened to Zeno Dickson?

Zeno Dickson (born Karen Cox, 1952, California; also known as Ma Vedant Zeno) was Ra Uru Hu’s exclusively contracted U.S. representative from 1993 and the principal teacher of the original American Human Design school. She and Chaitanyo Taschler built the American school from 1993 through 1999 and certified most of the teachers who would later become the infrastructure of the IHDS — including Lynda Bunnell, who took her Basic and Advanced Trainings through New Sun Services America in 1999.

The break with Ra came in early 1999, following years of doctrinal disagreement over Ra’s introduction of the Four Types behavioral overlay in 1997 and a direct dispute over authorship credit for The Course in Human Design. Ra’s July 25, 2003 “Misrepresentation” letter named Zeno, Chaitanyo, and Eleanor Haspel-Portner as frauds and issued a deadline for practitioners to disassociate from their organizations or be deleted from the IHDS professional register.

Zeno continued teaching the original mechanics of Human Design without Ra’s behavioral overlay until her death. By 2013 she was teaching from a wheelchair, recording video classes as her illness progressed. Between 2014 and 2016 she published a systematic YouTube video critique of Ra’s Four Types strategy designations on mechanical grounds — finding problems with Reflector, Generator, Manifesting Generator, and Projector strategies, while leaving the Manifestor designation intact as mechanically honest.

Zeno Dickson died on March 25, 2020, in Taos, New Mexico, aged sixty-seven. Her teaching archive and the book Human Design Revealed (co-authored with Chaitanyo Taschler) remain publicly accessible at humandesignsystem.com.

Source: See /teachers/zeno-dickson and /record Section 9 for full documentation.

What happened to Ilse Sendler and Human Design Austria?

Ilse Sendler held the exclusive contractual rights to represent Jovian Archive Corporation for Human Design education in Austria (from September 2000) and in all German-speaking territories including Germany and Switzerland (from November 2003). These contracts were confirmed in force by Jacqueline Riley, then President of Jovian, in correspondence preserved in the Human Design Austria archive.

In summer 2010, following the transfer of the IHDS to Lynda Bunnell, Sendler organized a coalition of national directors to challenge a new IHDS requirement that all Human Design professionals pay $500 per year to offer services online. Sendler’s open letter challenged the legal basis of the claimed “online rights.” Within hours, Bunnell rescinded the fee requirement. Within the same timeframe, Ilse Sendler and Human Design Austria were deleted from all IHDS professional listings and national organization rosters — without termination of the underlying contracts.

As of June 2026, Austria does not appear on the Jovian Archive or IHDS national organizations pages. Sendler continues to operate as Human Design Worldwide (humandesignww.com). Her contracts with Jovian Archive Corporation have not been publicly terminated.

Source: See /record Section 3 and /national-directors for full documentation.

What did Eleanor Haspel-Portner’s research actually find?

Eleanor Haspel-Portner, Ph.D. was commissioned by Ra Uru Hu in 1999 to validate the Human Design System scientifically. Her research produced two distinct findings that are often conflated:

What was validated: Human Design Type holds up as a statistically significant differentiating variable in the general population at far beyond the 99% confidence level. This finding was published in “Preliminary Research on the Human Design System and Health” (co-authored with Ra Uru Hu, Marvin Portner M.D., Erik Memmert, and Charles Haspel), based on five samples of 5,000 birth records drawn at random from a general population. It remains the only statistically documented validation of any Human Design construct against a general population sample. (Source: humandesignsystem.de/news/RLS/prelim(1).htm)

What was not validated: The broader system. Haspel-Portner’s research across 30,000 matched sample cases and 15,000 clinical cases led her to conclude that Human Design is, in her own words, “an incomplete, faulty, and disempowering system because it is only a small snapshot of an individual’s process in the first three months of their development.” (Source: Voyage South Carolina interview, September 2025, southcarolinavoyager.com/interview/conversations-with-eleanor-haspel-portner/)

Haspel-Portner departed Ra’s organization in 2002 and subsequently developed Noble Sciences and Beyond Human Design, which incorporates her expanded research findings. Her 2025 republications — The Science of Human Design and Human Design and Health — contain both the original research paper and updated clinical annotations.

Source: See /teachers/eleanor-haspel-portner and /sources Section 4 for full documentation.

Who holds the bodygraph image rights?

The bodygraph — the visual chart at the center of the Human Design System — was produced and held by Jürgen Saupe from 1992. Saupe (born May 3, 1940, Berlin; died July 13, 2002, Munich) was the founding European publisher of Human Design materials, translator of Ra’s foundational Black Book into German, and founder of New Sun Services International.

On Saupe’s death on July 13, 2002, the bodygraph image rights passed to the Saupe family. They did not pass to Jovian Archive. This is documented in the obituary published by the German Human Design community at humandesignsystem.de/Nachruf_Saupe.asp.

Jovian Archive’s websites assert ownership of the Rave BodyGraph™ as a trademark. The trademark record is separate from the image rights history documented here: the Rave BodyGraph trademark as a word mark has not been confirmed as registered with the USPTO as of June 2026. See Section 1 (Trademark Record) for full trademark documentation.

Source: humandesignsystem.de/Nachruf_Saupe.asp; see /record Section 4 and /teachers/jurgen-saupe.

What was Ra’s first public lecture?

Ra Uru Hu gave his first public lecture on February 14, 1992 — Valentine’s Day — in Sant Miquel, Ibiza, Spain. By his own account, “there was a whole bunch of Ibiza-friends” in attendance. The Rave I’Ching was published that year alongside the Black Book.

His first American public lecture was given on November 26, 1993 at the Civic Center in Taos, New Mexico. Chaitanyo Taschler, who organized the event, described it as drawing approximately sixty people — the largest live audience Ra ever had. The lecture was promoted through the Taos Time, a magazine Zeno and Chaitanyo published at the time.

Source: Jan van den Berg, Ra’s Work (2020); humandesignsystem.com/archive/ (Chaitanyo Taschler); Global Cycles lecture, April 2005.

What is Zen Human Design and how is it different from IHDS Human Design?

Zen Human Design is the teaching practice operated by Chaitanyo Taschler at humandesignsystem.com — the oldest Human Design website in existence, built by Chaitanyo in 1997. It presents the Human Design System as Ra taught it before his introduction of the Four Types behavioral overlay in May 1997.

The key distinction, as articulated by Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler from their break with Ra onward: the original system taught the bodygraph as a set of mechanics — centers, gates, channels, definition types, the calculation mathematics — without behavioral prescriptions attached to Type designations. Strategy and Authority as absolute rules were introduced by Ra in 1997 and became mandatory teaching in the IHDS framework. Zen Human Design teaches the pre-1997 mechanics without the overlay.

Zen Human Design is not affiliated with Jovian Archive, the IHDS, or any licensed national organization. It operates under the life-long teaching license awarded to Zeno and Chaitanyo by Ra at his first teachers training in Ibiza, December 1994 (where Chaitanyo scored 198/200 and Zeno scored 199/200). The underlying 1993 contract Ra drafted and signed naming them his exclusive U.S. representatives remains in the public record.

Source: humandesignsystem.com/about/ (Chaitanyo Taschler); humandesignsystem.com/archive/newsletters/; see /teachers/chaitanyo-taschler and /teachers/zeno-dickson.