The Transmission to America

Two things had to happen for Human Design to become more than a European curiosity taught from hand-drawn charts. The chart had to be producible by machine, so that the system could scale beyond the reach of one man’s pen. And the system had to cross the Atlantic, into the larger and more receptive market of North American alternative spirituality. Both happened in 1993, the first in Germany and the second in a small town in New Mexico, and the documentary record of each survives in attributable form: the software in the German company that still publishes it, and the American arrival in the first-person account of the two people who received it.

Neutrinos Through Windows

The instrument that freed the system from the hand-drawn chart was a piece of software, and it was the work of a German collaborator named Erik Memmert. By the German Human Design community’s own history, Memmert created, in 1993, the Human Design software called Neutrinos Through Windows, and the same record states plainly that without it the system could not have spread.¹ The software was published by a company, New SunWare, based in Augsburg, Germany, which continues to publish Human Design software under that name.²

The judgment embedded in the German record, that the system could not have spread without the software, deserves to be taken at face value, because it identifies a real condition. A system that assigns each person an individual chart, calculated from precise birth data through an involved procedure, is unusable at scale if every chart must be computed and drawn by hand. Memmert’s software converted Human Design from an artisanal practice into a reproducible product. Anyone with the program and a person’s birth data could generate a BodyGraph. The chart, the system’s central artifact, became something a machine could produce on demand, and the system became something that could be taught to many people in many places at once. Like the Black Book, the software was built by a German collaborator whose name does not appear in the founder-centered history most students receive.

Taos, 1993

The arrival of Human Design in America is documented, more fully than almost any other early episode, in the first-person memoir of the two people at its center: a couple who taught and published under the names Zeno and Chaitanyo, and who became the founders of the system’s American operation. Their account, published on the website of the practice they later ran, is an interested one, written by participants who came into open conflict with the system’s corporate successor, and it is read here with that bias in view. It is also detailed, specific, and internally consistent, and on the basic facts of the American founding it is the fullest source available.³

One feature of that founding circle is easy to miss and worth naming, because it helps explain how the system first found its people. The names recur, Zeno, Chaitanyo, Ambuja, Ra Uru Hu itself, and they are sannyasin names, the kind taken by followers of the Indian guru Osho. By the account of Eleanor Haspel-Portner, herself a former sannyasin, the early American circle drew heavily on that diaspora of spiritual seekers, and a shared sannyasin past was a near-instant passport into Ra’s inner circle; when she later asked him why he had chosen her and her husband as partners, he answered that the choice had not been his, “it wasn’t my choice,” she recalled him saying, “I was told.” The system that presented itself as pure logic was, in its first diffusion, carried along an existing network of guru-trained seekers, and its founder explained even his recruitments as the Voice’s instruction rather than his own.⁴

By their account, the two had met in Switzerland in 1990, emigrated to the United States, and settled in Taos, New Mexico, where they published a local alternative monthly. The system reached them in the summer of 1993 through a Swiss friend, Peter Wolf, who had heard Ra lecture in Zürich some months earlier and carried away the day’s materials, hand-drawn charts among them, to two Americans he thought would understand. They recognized themselves, by their account, in Ra’s descriptions before they had ever met him, and made contact; Ra telephoned and asked them to host introductory lectures and training. In late November 1993 they collected him from the airport in Albuquerque, and he stayed with them for roughly six weeks.⁵

Chaitanyo, who made that drive to collect a man he had never met, Ra crossing from Ibiza with charts drawn by hand, the system as yet having no software in American hands, recorded that his wariness was immediate:

“From the moment I met Ra at the airport in Albuquerque I had my reservations about his character and his guru attitude, but I went along because I wanted the Human Design information he had.”⁶

The arrangement was domestic and unequal: Zeno cooked for the guest, washed his clothes, and managed the practical needs of the stay while he taught.

The teaching itself moved fast. The opening introductory lecture in Taos drew, by their tellings, some fifty to sixty people; of those, ten enrolled in the Basic training and eight went on to the Advanced, and before the six weeks were out those eight had been certified as the first licensed Human Design analysts in America, the two founders among them.⁷ The speed was, by Ra’s own claim, intrinsic to the material: eight days of class, he told them, would be enough to convey the entire system as it had been revealed to him, the same eight-day span he gave the original transmission.⁸ On the third of December a local television station put him on the air to promote the Black Book, the first time the system reached an American audience beyond a single room.⁹

In one visit, then, Human Design crossed the Atlantic, drew its first American audience, certified its first American teachers, and carried its founder onto television in a small New Mexico town. Ra marked the crossing himself from the stage in the same period: this was, he told an early American audience, “my very first visit to America,” the system by then in use, he claimed, in “over 40 countries.”¹⁰ The intimate detail of those weeks, the wariness, the domestic arrangements, the impression of a guru’s bearing, comes from a source that would later break bitterly with him, and the book’s fourth register governs it: these are the founders’ characterizations, carried with their evident interest and set against the loyal recollections gathered in a later chapter. What the account establishes beyond dispute is the outline, the airport, the house, the lecture, the eight analysts, the broadcast, at the moment the system entered the United States.

New Sun Services America

Before he left, by the same account, Ra drew up a contract making the two his exclusive representatives in the United States, and the company they formed to carry the work was named, at his request, New Sun Services America, after Saupe’s German original.¹¹ The name reached into the system’s German foundation and carried it into the new American operation, binding the two national beginnings together under a shared label. The American organization’s documentary traces survive: archived newsletters of New Sun Services America give its mailing address as a post office box in Taos and an email address at the domain the founders established, which they state was the first Human Design website in the world, created in 1997. As late as January 1998 the same newsletter could count the whole profession on two hands: “there are only 19 licensed analysts in North America.”¹²

The contract matters beyond its immediate effect, because exclusive representation, granted personally and then later withdrawn or superseded, is a recurring shape in the system’s history. The founders of the American operation were given, on their account, an exclusive and a license for life; the relationship did not survive intact, and their later, hostile account of the system’s corporate consolidation is one of the sources the closing chapters of this book draw upon. The pattern visible already in the German founding, the essential early contributor whose central place is later diminished, repeats on the American side. The people who brought Human Design to the United States, hosted its founder, organized its first trainings, and produced its first American teachers became, in time, critics writing from outside the institution they had helped to start.

The shape of the early network

In the winter of 1994 to 1995, on the founders’ account, the two traveled to Ibiza for Ra’s first Teachers Training and were licensed as teachers for life, “with 198 and 199 out of 200 possible points at the top of the class,” and the American network was beginning to take its early shape.¹³ The same account names some of the people who passed through the New Sun Services classes in these years, and the list is, in retrospect, a roster of the system’s future. Among those who came through New Sun Services were Lynda Bunnell, who would one day run the official school; Richard Rudd, who would build the Gene Keys from what he learned; and Chetan Parkyn and Mary Ann Winiger, who would become among the most widely read teachers of the system.¹⁴¹⁵ The first circle of American Human Design formed, in other words, around two people in Taos before it formed around any institution. The early network, in other words, was not a hierarchy radiating from a single center. It was a spreading circle of teachers, many of them licensed personally by Ra, many of them building their own practices, several of them destined to fall out with the institution the system would become.

This horizontal early period, a founder and a widening ring of personally licensed teachers across Europe and America, is the condition against which the later consolidation should be read. The system in 1994 was a network of people who had learned it from Ra or from his first students and who carried it outward under their own names and their own organizations. What it would become, a centralized institution holding exclusive worldwide rights through a single corporate entity, is a transformation that the early structure did not contain and did not predict. The chapters that follow trace that transformation: first the architecture of the system itself, which changed in 1997 in a way that reshaped how it was taught, and then the institutions that grew up to certify, license, and finally to own it.