The Montreal Record

The man known to a worldwide audience as Ra Uru Hu was born Alan Robert Krakower in Montreal, Canada.¹ On the central facts of origin, name and city, the record is consistent. On the date, it is not.

The biography published by the organization that now holds his work gives his birth as April 9, 1948.² The same date appears in the public astrological database that catalogues him, which records him as born on April 9, 1948, in Montréal.³ It is corroborated, too, by three independent newspaper records of his documented adult life, each consistent with a 1948 birth: a marriage announcement in 1969, a university convocation notice in 1971, and a job-appointment notice in 1973.⁴ For a figure whose system rests entirely on the precise moment of birth, the date carried a weight beyond the ordinary biographical detail, and the 1948 date is the one reproduced across the literature that presents his life to students.

Against that date stands a single, and significant, document. The death notice published in the Montreal Gazette following his death in March 2011 records the year of birth as 1947.⁵ The notice, which names him as Robert Krakower, gives the day and month consistent with every other source, April 9, and the place and circumstance of death consistent with the record, March 12, 2011, on the island of Ibiza. Only the year differs.

A one-year discrepancy in a birth record is, in most biographies, a footnote of no consequence. Here it sits closer to the foundation. The system its subject would later build assigns meaning to the position of the planets at the instant of birth, and derives a person’s entire “design” from a birth time calculated to the minute. A life organized around the proposition that the moment of birth determines the structure of a person is a life whose own birth record ought, on its own terms, to be settled. It is not.

The book does not resolve the discrepancy, because the public record does not resolve it. It records both: 1948 as the date carried by his published biography, the public databases, and the newspaper trail of his adult life, and 1947 as the date entered in the death notice his family placed at the end of his life. The weight of the accessible record favors 1948, and this book treats April 9, 1948 as the primary date while naming the 1947 variant rather than concealing it. The reader is left where the documents leave the matter, which is without a final answer.

The year is not the only figure the record cannot pin. The day and month and place are stable, but even the birth time, the datum on which the system stakes its claim to precision, is given more than one way: the founder’s own organization publishes a time five minutes past midnight, the earliest independent chart archive records a slightly later minute, and the astrological database notes still other variants in circulation, none traced to a birth certificate.⁶ The certificate itself is beyond reach: Quebec civil-registration records are sealed except to the person and immediate family, and the researcher who assembled the newspaper trail recorded that no entry under the name Krakower could be found in the province’s birth registries at all. A system that taught, for three decades, that a chart cannot be trusted without an accurate birth time was founded by a man whose own birth time the public record cannot fix.

A name, and the order of its parts

The name itself carries a smaller ambiguity. The form most often given is Alan Robert Krakower.⁷ The death notice and other family-facing material render him as Robert Krakower, and material associated with him has appeared under the order Robert Alan Krakower.⁸ The variation is the ordinary kind that attaches to a man known by more than one given name across a long life, and nothing in the record suggests anything beyond habit and preference. It is noted here only because precision is the method of this book, and because the man would, in time, set all of these names aside.

The name Ra Uru Hu belongs to the second half of the life. By his own account it was given to him during the experience of January 1987, and he adopted it as he began to bring his system before the public.⁹ This book follows the convention the sources themselves follow. In the years before 1987, the years of the documented working life, he is Krakower. In the years after, the years of the system and its teaching, he is Ra Uru Hu, or Ra. The change of name marks a real division in the life, between a private professional and a public founder, and the book preserves that division rather than smoothing it away.

What the record establishes, and what it does not

The temptation in a founder’s biography is to read the later life backward into the early one, to find in the child or the young man the signs of what he would become. The documentary record of Krakower’s early life does not support that reading, and this book does not attempt it. The record establishes that he was born in Montreal, that he grew up and was educated in Canada, and that he earned a bachelor’s degree.¹⁰ Beyond these facts, the public record of his childhood and youth is thin, and where it is thin this account stays thin with it.

One later source fills part of that thinness. A documentary history compiled within the Human Design community records the family into which he was born: the fourth and youngest child of Joseph Krakower and Yetta Krakower-Wachman, delivered at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, into a cultured, musical, upper-middle-class Jewish household, with two older sisters, Norma and Leeta, and an older brother, Harold, roughly eleven years his senior. The siblings’ names are independently confirmed by the family’s own death notice, which records the same Norma, Leeta, and Harold; the parents’ names and the hospital come from the community history alone and are reported with that limitation.¹¹

What the record does establish is that the man who would describe a mystical transmission at the age of thirty-eight arrived at that point as an educated and worldly professional, not as a lifelong seeker. By the standard accounts of his life, his working years were spent in advertising, in magazine publishing, and in media and film production, alongside a sustained engagement with music as a composer and performer.¹² These were not the occupations of a man positioned by temperament or vocation at the edge of the esoteric. They were the occupations of a capable figure inside the ordinary commercial and creative world of his time.

This matters to the account that follows for a reason of method rather than of drama. The biographies that present his life to students tend to frame the years before 1987 as a prelude, a period of restlessness resolved by revelation. The documentary record will support the restlessness, and it will support the eventual departure from that world. It will not support the reading of the early decades as a hidden spiritual apprenticeship, because no such apprenticeship is documented. The man who left Canada was, on the evidence, an advertising executive, a publisher, a producer, and a musician, and the account is more accurate, not less, for resisting the impulse to make him more than the record shows.

Montreal at mid-century

Krakower’s Montreal was one of the major cities of North America and the largest city in Canada through the middle decades of the twentieth century, a commercial and cultural center with a dense professional and creative life. A young man with a degree and an aptitude for advertising, publishing, and media had, in such a city, a plausible path into exactly the kind of career the record attributes to him. The point is modest and is made only to keep the account grounded: the working life the sources describe is consistent with the place and the period in which it was lived. Nothing in the commercial biography requires explanation by anything other than ability and circumstance.

The record does not document the texture of those years in any detail that can be responsibly reported. It does not establish the firms he worked for, the magazines he published, or the productions he worked on with the specificity that would let this book name them. The standard biographical summaries assert the categories of his work without itemizing them, and this account follows that limit. Where later chapters can attach a documented name, a documented date, or a documented institution to the developing system, they will. For the years in Canada, the honest report is that the shape of the career is known and its particulars largely are not.

The departure

The record is clearer about the ending of this Canadian chapter than about its substance. The accounts of his life converge on a departure from Canada in the early 1980s, during a period the biographies describe as a personal crisis, and on an eventual arrival on the island of Ibiza, off the eastern coast of Spain.¹³ The published biographies place the departure from Canada around 1983 and describe years on Ibiza before the events of 1987, including a period during which he worked as a teacher.¹⁴

These are the load-bearing facts that carry the life out of Montreal and toward the events on which everything later turns: a man in his middle thirties, educated, with a career behind him in advertising, publishing, media, and music, leaving the country of his birth in the early 1980s and settling, by a route the record does not fully trace, on a Mediterranean island. The biographies attach a personal crisis to the departure. The record supports the fact of the departure and the destination more firmly than it supports any account of the crisis itself, and this book reports the move plainly while holding the interior reasons at the distance the evidence requires.

What the move accomplished, for the purposes of this account, is geographic and biographical rather than spiritual. It placed Alan Robert Krakower, sometime in the years after 1983, on the island where, in the first weeks of 1987, he would describe the experience that produced the Human Design System. The man who arrived on Ibiza was, by the documented record, thirty-five or thirty-six years old, a worldly professional at some distance from the work of his earlier life. The man who would describe the Voice was, by January 1987, thirty-eight. The intervening years on the island, and the eight days that ended them, belong to the chapters that follow.

The record of the Montreal years, then, yields a small and stubborn set of facts and one unresolved question. The facts: a man born in Montreal, named Alan Robert Krakower, educated to a bachelor’s degree, who built a career across advertising, publishing, media, and music before leaving Canada in the early 1980s for Ibiza. The question is the year of his birth, recorded as 1948 across his published biography and the public databases, and as 1947 in the notice his family placed at his death. A system built on the precision of the birth moment opens, in the record of its founder’s own life, with a date that the documents decline to settle. The chapters that follow proceed from that discrepancy outward, holding to the same rule it imposes: report what the record establishes, name what it contests, and leave unanswered what it does not answer.