The people named in this book appear in four registers, as the note on method sets out, and the testimony of those who knew the founder characterizes him without settling questions of fact. This list is provided as an aid to the reader. Where a person’s relation to the founder was devoted or estranged, that interest is noted, because it bears on how their testimony should be weighed.
The founder and his family
Alan Robert Krakower, later Ra Uru Hu (b. Montreal, April 1947 or 1948; d. Ibiza, March 12, 2011). The subject of this book. An advertising man, magazine publisher, and musician in Canada before he left for Europe in 1983; by his own account he received the Human Design System in an eight-day encounter on Ibiza in January 1987, and spent the rest of his life building it into a worldwide system.
Joseph Krakower and Yetta Krakower-Wachman. The founder’s father and mother, of Montreal.
Norma and Leeta, sisters; Harold, brother. The founder’s siblings, named in the family death notice.
Ambuja (Jacqueline Ambuja Riley). The founder’s wife at the time of his death, and a figure in the official school’s governance after it.
Sarah, Loki, and Jiva. The founder’s children. Loki Krakower-Riley conducted a recorded interview with his father that forms part of the documentary record, and appears in the school’s later governance. Kian, a grandson, is named in the death notice.
Ibiza and the first years
Mary Blakstad. Founder of the Morna Valley School on Ibiza, who gave the newly arrived founder his first teaching work after asking only, “Can you teach?”
Tullia Duymaer-Van Twist and her daughter Tonka. Residents of Ibiza who received the founder’s first Human Design reading, in March 1987.
Don C. Andrews. An Englishman who lived on Ibiza in the 1980s and later published a memoir of the island, with no stake in Human Design, in which the founder appears as one of the island’s eccentrics; an outside witness to the setting of the eight days.
The founding-era collaborators
Jürgen Saupe. The German translator and publisher who, more than any single figure, made Human Design exist as a book and an organization; associated with the first printed edition the system came to call the Black Book.
Erik Memmert. The German developer who built the first Human Design software, freeing the chart from the hand-drawn BodyGraph.
Eleanor Haspel-Portner. An American collaborator of the founding period, associated with the documentary record of the 30,000-case validation study; her relationship with the founder ended in estrangement, and the testimony attributed to her is carried with that interest.
Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo. Early teachers associated with the carrying of the system to America (New Sun Services) and, in Dickson’s case, with a pre-1993 lineage; the erasure of Dickson and that lineage from the institutional record is the subject of the companion volume to this book.
Klaus Jürgen Becker. A German student who came to the system through Saupe and studied under the founder in the mid-1990s; author of an admiring German-language memorial that preserves rather than smooths the founder’s hardness. A devoted witness.
The institution and its teachers
Lynda Bunnell. A student of the founding-era school who came to run the official International Human Design School and co-authored with the founder; a central figure in the institution after his death.
Richard Rudd. A student who built his own system, the Gene Keys, from what he learned of Human Design.
Chetan Parkyn and Mary Ann Winiger. Among the most widely read independent teachers of the system; Parkyn’s book became the occasion of the Florence copyright case.
Genoa Bliven. A loyal teacher who knew the founder from 1995 and corroborated, unprompted, the account of his daily writing of the Rave I Ching. A devoted witness.
Randolph “JR” Richmond. A devoted student whose recorded tribute, upon the news of the founder’s death, supplies key testimony, including on the pattern of later teachers who taught the system without naming its source.
Contesters and courts
Human Design Italia and Nicolas Caposiena. The official system’s Italian licensee and an associated party, plaintiffs in the 2020 Florence copyright suit that sought to stop the publication of Parkyn’s book in Italian.
Judge Niccolò Calvani. The judge of the Tribunale di Firenze who, on June 3, 2020, rejected the ownership claim and held that the Human Design system as such cannot be owned as copyright.
Observers from outside the community
J. R. Hustwit. A theologian who, in a 2016 article in the peer-reviewed journal Open Theology, treated Human Design as a “transreligious” synthesis.
Robert Carroll. A skeptic who treated Human Design as New Age pseudoscience in his Skeptic’s Dictionary, disbelieving the account of the Voice.
Steve Rhodes. A teacher and author whose 2012 study of the founder’s 2027 prophecy, The Prophecy of Ra Uru Hu, was drawn from Jovian Archive’s recordings and written with the support of Ra’s son; an institution-aligned account, cited here for its plain derivation of the name “Ra” from “Robert Alan.”