Ibiza, 2011

The man who had arrived on Ibiza in poverty in the early 1980s died there, in his home, on March 12, 2011.¹ He had left the island many times in the intervening years, to teach across Europe and America, but the island was where the system had come to him, where he held his first trainings, and where, in the end, his life closed. The symmetry was not lost on the community that mourned him, and it is the kind of detail that invites the elevated, valedictory tone this book avoids. The record of the death is brief and partly contested, and it is reported here as the record stands.

The last tour

In the last years of his touring life he was, by his own account, tired. On what he called “my last physical tour,” he returned to teach a beginners’ training for the first time in eight years, and remarked that he had been “much kinder when I first started training people” than he had become.² He spoke of his own body with a grim, joking fatalism that reads differently after the fact. Despite “poisoning my body all my life,” he told a late audience, he had stayed outwardly healthy on the strength of a powerful constitution, and he expected the end to come without warning: “one of these days I’ll just drop dead… and the story will be over.”³ A loyal student recalled a second, older forecast of the same end: JR Richmond, speaking upon the news of Ra’s death, remembered Ra telling him that a Vedic astrologer in the Pacific Northwest, reading his chart on one of his tours, had said he would die at sixty-two, the age he was, on the birth year the system itself uses, when he died in March 2011.⁴ He mentioned his children in passing, two sons among them, each raised by a different reading of his own system. He had come to fatherhood again late: by his own account he “had a child at 50,” a son still small in his final years, whom he called “something very special.”⁵ The man who had spent more than two decades insisting that life is lived out rather than chosen appears to have regarded his own ending the same way, and to have seen it coming in outline if not in date.

Asked, near the end, what he did for pleasure, he named small and ordinary things. He watched movies, he said, to reach a place where he “didn’t have to think”; he had taken up gardening late in life, “raking leaves, pulling out weeds… being in contact with the Earth”; and he played music every day, as he had all his life.⁶ The private man, in his own telling, wanted less the role of messenger than the quiet of a garden and a song.

The death notice

The most primary document of the death is the notice his family placed, which appeared in the Montreal press and survives in the online obituary record. It is a spare text. It records him by his birth name, Robert Krakower, “Bobby” in the notice’s own heading, gives his dates as April 9, 1947, to March 12, 2011, states that he passed suddenly on March 12 in Ibiza, Spain, and names the family that survived him: his sisters Norma and Leeta, his brother Harold, his wife Ambuja, his children Sarah, Loki, and Jiva, and a grandson, Kian.⁷

The notice is worth reading closely for what it is and what it is not. It is a family document, not an institutional one. It names him as Krakower, not as Ra Uru Hu, and it identifies him by his siblings and children rather than by the system he founded; the man it buries is the brother and father, not the messenger. The institutional obituaries would supply the other identity, the founder of Human Design, the receiver of the Voice. The family notice supplied the man, and in doing so it returned him, at the end, to the name and the relations he had walked away from in 1983.

Two facts in the notice connect back to questions raised at the opening of this book. The first is the birth year. The notice gives 1947, the variant year discussed in Chapter One, against the 1948 carried by the system’s own biographies and the public databases. The death notice is, in documentary terms, a primary record placed by the family, and its 1947 stands as the strongest single source for that year even as the weight of the rest of the record favors 1948. The discrepancy that opened the life is present at its close, unresolved by the document that ought, if any document could, to settle it. The second is the cause. The notice says only that he passed suddenly. It does not state a cause of death.

The cause

The community that received news of the death quickly attached a cause to it, and the account most often repeated is that Ra died of a heart attack. That account is not supported by the primary record. The family notice says he passed suddenly and stops there; the institutional accounts give the date and a time of death, 5:40 in the morning, but state no cause.⁸ The heart attack is community lore, plausible and widely believed but not documented in any source this book can verify, and it is reported here only as the unverified attribution it is. The honest statement is that the founder of Human Design died suddenly at his home on Ibiza on March 12, 2011, and that the cause, beyond the word sudden, is not established in the public record.

His age

The age at which he died depends on the birth year the reader accepts, and the sources reflect the same split they reflect on the year itself. By the 1947 of the death notice, he was sixty-three. By the 1948 of the system’s biographies, he was sixty-two; the institutional account, consistent with 1948, describes him as dying less than a month before his birthday, which would have been his sixty-third.⁹ The difference is a single year, and it cannot be resolved, for the same reason the birth year cannot. The book records both, as it has throughout, and declines to manufacture a certainty the documents do not provide. The man died in his early sixties, in March 2011, weeks short of an April birthday whose year his own records dispute.

The end of the founder, the beginning of the estate

The death of a founder is a hinge in the life of any institution, and in the case of Human Design it opened the period that the rest of this book examines. The system did not end with the man. It passed, by the arrangements described in the earlier chapter on the institutions, to his director and his family: the school to Lynda Bunnell, the governance to a board including his widow and his son, and the rights, through the corporate structure the next chapter describes, into a single ownership that would assert exclusive worldwide control over the teaching. The family’s role in that governance is documented and specific: the school’s standards board is composed of his eldest son, Loki Krakower-Riley, his widow, Jacqueline Ambuja Riley, and Bunnell.¹⁰ What the family has not done, so far as the public record shows, is speak. The one family voice on record is Loki’s, and it is heard only as an interviewer, drawing his father out in a teenage school project and, after the death, questioning the teachers who remained; Sarah, Jiva, and the widow have left no first-person account of the man. The people who inherited the system administer it without describing him, and the silence, as with Saupe, is itself part of the record.¹¹

The founder’s death also fixed the canon. While he lived, the system could continue to change, as it had changed in 1997 when the Types and Strategy and Authority were introduced. After March 2011 there was no longer a living source to revise it, and the teaching became a fixed body of material to be transmitted, defended, and owned rather than developed. The institution’s task shifted from following a living founder to administering a closed estate, and the questions that had been deferred while he lived, who held the rights, what exactly they covered, and whether they could be held at all, became urgent and unavoidable. He had received the system, by his account, in eight days in 1987. He had spent twenty-four years building it into an enterprise. He left it, in 2011, to an estate that would spend the following decade attempting to secure its ownership, and that would discover, in an Italian courtroom, that the law did not agree the system could be owned. That discovery is the subject of the book’s final chapters.