From Experience to System

A received experience is not a system. The account of the eight days, however it is understood, gave Krakower a body of material and a conviction about its origin. It did not give him students, a vocabulary the public could use, a method of producing charts, a book, or an institution. Between the departure of the Voice in January 1987 and the first documented teaching of Human Design lies a stretch of years in which a destitute man on Ibiza turned what he said he had received into something that could be taught to other people. That turn, from experience to system, is the subject of this chapter, and it is the first part of the story the documentary record can follow closely rather than at the distance the transmission required.

The quiet years

The record of 1987 to 1990 is thin, and the thinness is itself informative. The system that would later be presented as complete from the first eight days did not appear in the world in 1987, or 1988, or 1989. There was no book, no course, no organization for the better part of the period immediately following the experience. The accounts that describe the transmission as total, a finished architecture handed over in eight days, have to be set against the plain chronology, in which several years passed between the reported transmission and any public form of the teaching.

The gap admits more than one reading, and the book declines to choose among them as a matter of interior fact. It may be that the material required years of work to render teachable. It may be that a man in his circumstances needed time to find his footing before he could present anything. It may be that the system continued to develop in these years in ways the later account, committed to the idea of a complete transmission, would prefer not to emphasize. What can be said without choosing is that the system entered the world gradually, through ordinary human effort, in the years after 1987, and not all at once in January of that year. The completeness was claimed for the transmission. The development was spread across years of work.

What the record does preserve of those years is a slow, ordinary beginning. In March 1987, two months after the encounter, Ra gave his first reading, for a resident of Ibiza, Tullia Duymaer-Van Twist, and her daughter Tonka. By his own account the first chart he tried to read was his own, and he did it with borrowed tools. The owner of the ruin where the experience had taken place was, he said, an English poet, a former personal assistant to Krishnamurti, fluent in Sanskrit, whose shelves held, among much else, some books on astrology. Ra, who had learned only a few years earlier that he was an Aries and knew almost nothing of the subject, worked through those books to calculate his own BodyGraph by hand, laboriously and, he admitted, inaccurately, having neither software nor training. What he produced struck him as oddly static, a fixed blueprint he could not yet read, and the wish to see it “in motion” pushed him toward the ephemeris and transit work that became central to his teaching.¹

Not all of those years were spent in obscurity. In 1988, by his own account, a passing benefactor asked what he would do with a windfall, and Ra answered that he would throw a party, and did: a large event on the mountain, with a band, advertised even in the International Herald Tribune, its invitations handmade by village children and sent, he said, to the Pope, Gorbachev, and Ronald Reagan among hundreds of others. He called it his “coming out party” and titled it, in the system’s own numerology, “When the Six Go Out the Door.” The destitute hermit of the conversion narrative was, in the very same years, also a showman staging his own emergence.² In 1988 he drew his first BodyGraphs by hand. In 1989, in an apartment outside Frankfurt, he began writing what would become the Rave I Ching, the textual foundation of the system, alongside the materials later gathered as the Black Book.³ His own later account of that writing, given in a recorded course, is unusually concrete. He was living, he said, in a small house outside Frankfurt that still heated with coal, and each morning through the Scorpio month he climbed to a loft with a little coal stove, fetched coal from the bin below, drew out a hexagram on the paper in front of him, and wrote it and its lines; he did one a day until all sixty-four were done, which took him about twenty-five days. He remembered the result physically: his hands black with coal dust, so that the original pages of the first Rave I Ching were, by his telling, covered with black fingerprints.⁴ The scene is independently corroborated. Genoa Bliven, a loyal teacher who knew Ra from 1995, described the same writing without prompting: the little typewriter, a hexagram a day, the trips down a narrow stair to fetch coal for the stove. He offered it, too, as the origin of the book’s nickname, that Ra’s hands, black with coal, left fingerprints over every page, so that the original hand-pasted volume, its BodyGraphs filled in by hand, became “the Black Book.” That original he said he had once held, and believed no longer to exist.⁵ The system did not arrive in the world finished. It was assembled, by hand and on paper, across the very years the account of a complete transmission passes over.

The first instrument: the chart

A system that assigns every person a distinct design needs a way to produce, for any given person, that person’s chart. From the beginning the Human Design chart, the BodyGraph, was calculated from birth data, the date, time, and place of birth, in a manner derived from astrology. In the earliest period this calculation was done by hand. The charts that reached the first students outside Ibiza were, on the documented accounts, drawn by Ra himself and carried from person to person.⁶ The image of hand-drawn charts, produced one at a time and physically transported, is worth holding onto, because it marks how artisanal the system was at its start and how far it would travel from that condition.

The hand calculation could not scale, and the people around him knew it. The turn from a hand-drawn chart to a piece of software that could generate a BodyGraph from birth data on demand was one of the practical conditions on which the spread of the system depended, and it was met, as the next chapters describe, by collaborators in Germany rather than by Ra himself. For the moment the point is structural: the system as received was a body of principles; the system as taught required instruments, and the instruments had to be built. The first of them was a reliable way to produce the chart.

The first audiences

The earliest teaching of Human Design took place in Europe, in the years immediately before its arrival in America. The accounts place Ra’s first public presentations of the system in the early 1990s, tied to the appearance of the first book, with a first lecture in 1992 and a more formal professional presentation in Zurich later that year.⁷ The dating of these first appearances is not perfectly consistent across the sources, and the inconsistency is noted rather than resolved: some accounts emphasize a presentation tied to the book’s release in February 1992, others a professional debut in the autumn. What the accounts agree on is that the public life of the system began in Europe in the early 1990s, several years after the transmission, and in close connection with the work of the German collaborators who made the book and the software possible.

These first audiences encountered something that did not yet have the shape the system would later take. The framework of the Four Types, the Strategy, and the Authority, the elements most central to how Human Design is taught today, did not arrive until 1997, by the account of a participant who was present for it.⁸ The system the earliest students met was, in important respects, not the system later students would be given. This is one of the most consequential facts the record yields about the development of Human Design, and it sits uneasily with the framing of a complete transmission: the central practical architecture of the system, the part that tells a person what type they are and how to make decisions, was introduced a decade after the eight days, in a class, in 1997. The chapter on the architecture takes up that fact in detail. Here it serves only to mark that the system the public first met was still in motion.

From a man to an enterprise

The turn this chapter describes is, at bottom, the turn from a man with an account to an enterprise with a product. By the early 1990s the elements of the enterprise were beginning to assemble: a book, a means of producing charts, a first audience, a new name under which the founder presented himself. The collaborators who would build the publishing operation and the software were entering the story. The teaching was beginning to generate, around the founder, the first circle of people who would learn the system and carry it outward.

It is at this point that the documentary record becomes genuinely rich, because an enterprise leaves traces that an unwitnessed experience does not. There are books with publication dates, software with release years, organizations with names and addresses, students with their own later accounts. The biography can proceed, from here, on firmer ground than it has stood on since Chapter Two, and it can do so without relying on the founder’s own testimony as the only source. The people who built the system alongside him left records of their own, and those records, German and American, public and attributable, carry the next several chapters.

The transmission, by his account, was the work of eight days. The system was the work of years and of more hands than his own. The chapter that follows begins the account of those other hands, with the man who, more than any other single figure, made it possible for Human Design to exist as a book and an organization at all: the German translator and publisher Jürgen Saupe, and the first book, the one the system would come to call the Black Book.