Saupe and the Black Book

The history of Human Design as it is told to students is a history with one author. The system was received by one man, named by one man, taught by one man, and is owned, today, by the corporate successor to that one man. The documentary record tells a more crowded story. The system that reached the public in the early 1990s did so because a small number of other people built the instruments that made it transmissible: a book, a piece of software, an organization, a means of producing charts. The most important of these figures, by the evidence of the system’s own German records, was Jürgen Saupe, and the most important of the instruments was the first book, the one the system would come to call the Black Book.

Jürgen Saupe

What is known of Saupe comes in part from the German Human Design community’s own published record, including a history page and an obituary maintained on a long-standing German Human Design site.¹ These sources establish the outline. Jürgen Saupe was born on May 3, 1940, in Berlin, and died on July 13, 2002, in Munich.² In the history of the system he is credited with several roles at once: as its outstanding translator and interpreter, as the publisher of the books, and as the founder and head of the organization called New Sun Services.³ The same record states that from 1992 he held the rights to the Rave BodyGraph, the chart at the center of the system, and that after his death in 2002 those rights passed to the Saupe family.⁴

The bare facts carry a weight the official biography does not acknowledge. The chart that every Human Design reading produces, the BodyGraph, was held as a right by Saupe, not by Ra, from 1992 onward, by the German community’s own account. The publisher of the foundational books was Saupe. The organization that first carried the system as an enterprise, New Sun Services, was Saupe’s. A system presented to the public as the singular work of its founder rested, at its commercial and material foundation, on the work and the rights of a German translator and publisher whose name most students of Human Design would not recognize.

The circumstances under which Saupe took on this role survive mostly in the secondary and community literature rather than in the two German primary pages, and they are reported here with that caution. The accounts describe Saupe entering the project to translate the first book into German, and then, when a publishing arrangement collapsed, carrying the project financially himself in order to see it into print.⁵ Some versions add that he mortgaged his house to do so. The financial-sacrifice detail cannot be confirmed from a primary source and is presented as a claim of the secondary literature, but the underlying fact that Saupe was the publisher, and that the system’s first appearance in print depended on him, is supported by the German community’s own record.

The Black Book

The first book on Human Design was titled, plainly, The Human Design System, and it became known by the color of its cover as the Black Book.⁶ It was published in 1991, attributed to Ra Uru Hu, the pseudonym under which Krakower presented the material, though an independent reference work instead dates the book to 1992 and identifies the author as Krakower writing under that name.⁷ The retail description maintained by the rights-holder’s American arm calls it the first publication on Human Design and gives its length as 244 pages.⁸

A copy of the book carries the imprint “New Sun Services Ibiza” and the line “Copyright Ra Uru Hu 1991.” Its contents run from a brief foreword and an introduction through the Rave Charts, the Rave I Ching and its astrological index, to the Juxtaposition Unified Theory and a set of blank charts, and it opens with a dedication in which the author disclaims the work as his own: “I am indebted to whatever Gods may be that I am an instrument of this knowledge. It is not mine. I have no choice.”⁹ The phrase that would become his motto, no choice, stands at the head of his first book. The imprint is worth a note of its own, because the name recurs across the whole founding: the Ibiza edition’s New Sun Services Ibiza, Saupe’s New Sun Services in Germany, and the later New Sun Services America. Whether these were one enterprise or a shared banner is not resolved by the public record, and this book does not assert a single corporate thread through them.

The companion documentary history likewise dates the Black Book’s publication to 1991.¹⁰ The larger textual foundation, the Rave I Ching, followed in 1992, and the conflation of the two has been one source of the confusion over the founding dates. The first Design Analyst training, of three students, came in the summer of 1991, and Ra delivered his first public lecture at Sant Miquel, on Ibiza, in February 1992.

A second point requires care. The system’s records establish Saupe as the publisher of the German-language books and credit him with the German diffusion of the system. The clearly attributable bibliographic record for a first edition, however, is the English-language Black Book of 1991. A separate, distinctly documented German-language first edition, with its own title page, publisher, and date, is harder to fix from the public record than the system’s general account of Saupe’s publishing role would suggest.¹¹ The honest statement is the one the evidence supports: that the first book appeared in 1991 as the Black Book, that Saupe was the publisher and translator on whom the German appearance of the system depended, and that the precise bibliographic relationship between the English and German first editions is not fully resolved in the accessible record.

New Sun Services

The organization Saupe founded, New Sun Services, is the first institutional form of Human Design, and its name carries forward into the rest of the story in a way that matters. When the system reached America in 1993, the American operation would be named, at Ra’s own request, New Sun Services America, taking the name of the German original.¹² The shared name links the German founding to the American one, though the precise corporate relationship between the two is not something the public record resolves, and this book does not assert one. What the shared name does establish is that the institutional vocabulary of Human Design, like its first book and its first chart-rights, originated in Saupe’s German operation rather than springing fully formed from the founder.

The rights, and what became of them

The most consequential fact about Saupe is the one the official history is least able to accommodate: he, not Ra and not any company Ra would later form, held the rights to the BodyGraph. The German community’s own history records that from 1992 he was the holder of the rights to the Rave BodyGraph, the diagram at the visual center of the entire system, and that on his death those rights passed to the Saupe family, not to the corporation that would one day present the image as its proprietary asset.¹³ The artifact every reading produces, the chart the institution would later attempt to trademark, sat in the name of a German publisher, and then his heirs.

Saupe did not live to see the consolidation complete. He died in Germany on 13 July 2002, at sixty-two, and he had not signed the national contracts of September 2000 that bound the other German-speaking representatives to the new corporate center.¹⁴ Of the original European circle, he stood at his death outside the structure that was forming around it. One who knew the early work, speaking years afterward, attributed his death to the loss of it, to having built something he believed in and watched it become something else; the characterization is hers, offered in that register, and it is recorded here as such.¹⁵ What the documentary record establishes, without her reading of it, is narrower and harder: the rights to the system’s central image had a history the later ownership claims do not acknowledge, and that history ran through Jürgen Saupe.

The unacknowledged foundation

The chapter’s documentary point is narrow and can be stated without editorializing. The official history of Human Design presents the system as the work of one man. The system’s own German records present a founding in which a second man, Jürgen Saupe, was the translator, the publisher, the holder of the rights to the central chart from 1992, and the founder of the first organization. These two pictures are not compatible, and the difference between them is not a matter of interpretation but of record. The Black Book existed because Saupe published it. The BodyGraph rights sat with Saupe and then with his family. The first institution bore the name Saupe gave it.

None of this diminishes the founder’s claim to have originated the material. It does establish that the material became a book, a chart-product, and an organization through the work of others, and that the most important of those others has been substantially written out of the story the system tells about itself. The pattern, the founding contribution that later disappears from the official account, is one the documentary record will show more than once. The next instance is on the other side of the Atlantic, in a small town in New Mexico, where the system arrived in America in the winter of 1993, and where the people who received it left an account of their own.