The Sources of the System

The founder said the system was given to him whole, in eight days, by a Voice. Whatever one makes of that account, the materials the system is built from did not originate in the ruin. Every one of its major components existed, named and elaborated, in traditions older than the founder, several of them centuries or millennia old, and the most striking of its modern correspondences had been published by other writers before January 1987. A documentary life owes the reader a plain inventory of where the parts came from, not to settle whether the synthesis is true but to establish what, in it, was inherited and what, if anything, was new. The system calls itself a synthesis. This is the genealogy of the things it synthesized.

The I Ching and the sixty-four gates

The skeleton of Human Design is the I Ching, the ancient Chinese “Book of Changes,” whose sixty-four hexagrams become the system’s sixty-four “gates,” each retaining a version of the hexagram’s traditional meaning.¹ The I Ching reached the modern West chiefly through one book: the German sinologist Richard Wilhelm’s translation, made with Chinese collaborators and published in 1923, and rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes in 1950 with a foreword by Carl Jung that introduced a generation of Western seekers to the text. It was this Wilhelm-Baynes I Ching, not the Chinese original, that furnished the post-war esoteric world, and the founder’s own gate meanings track the Wilhelm line closely enough that the debt is not in question.²

The system’s boldest move with the I Ching was to map its sixty-four hexagrams onto the sixty-four codons of the genetic code, the triplets of DNA bases that specify the amino acids of every living thing. The correspondence is arithmetically exact, sixty-four and sixty-four, and the system treats it as evidence that the I Ching encodes the architecture of life itself. The match is real, but the observation was not the founder’s. The parallel between the sixty-four hexagrams and the sixty-four codons had been noticed and published more than a decade before his transmission, most prominently by the German physician Martin Schönberger, whose book on the I Ching and the genetic code appeared in 1973, and it circulated among several writers in the 1970s and 1980s.³ What the founder added was not the correspondence but a use for it: a claim that an individual’s genetic activation could be read, gate by gate, from the position of the planets at birth.

He did not, however, simply reproduce the classical text. By his own account the Rave I Ching departs from the traditional hexagram readings, sometimes entirely. He noted, for instance, that the fourth line of his fifty-fourth gate, which he glossed as a “deeply mystical” line of “Enlightenment and Endarkenment,” “has nothing to do with what it says” in the old I Ching, whose corresponding line, about marrying off a daughter, he dismissed as a relic of a text that was “very sexist.”⁴ The gate meanings of Human Design are thus the founder’s reworking of the I Ching as much as a transmission of it, a fact that cuts two ways: it loosens the system’s claim on the authority of the ancient book it invokes, and it is, at the same time, a creative act of his own.

The chakras and the nine centers

The system’s central diagram, the BodyGraph, arranges nine “centers” in the figure of a body, and these centers are a modification of the chakra system of tantric Hinduism and Buddhism, the subtle-energy centers that reached the West through Theosophy and the twentieth-century occult revival.⁵ The traditional model counts seven principal chakras. Human Design counts nine. The founder accounted for the difference with one of his more striking claims: that humanity had physically mutated, around 1781, the year of the discovery of Uranus, from a “seven-centered” being into a “nine-centered” being, and that the older spiritual systems described a form that no longer exists.⁶ The claim is unfalsifiable and is reported here, in the system’s own register, as the founder’s explanation for why his diagram departs from the tradition it borrows. What the chakra system supplied was the idea of mapped energy centers in the body; what the founder supplied was the number nine and the mutation story that justified it.

The Tree of Life and the channels

The lines that connect the nine centers, the system’s “channels,” are drawn, in the system’s own account, from the Kabbalist Tree of Life, the diagram of ten emanations joined by twenty-two paths that is the central glyph of Jewish mysticism and of the Western magical tradition that absorbed it.⁷ The fit is loose: Human Design has thirty-six channels, not twenty-two paths, and nine centers, not ten sephiroth, so the borrowing is of an idea, a network of named conduits between centers of force, rather than of a structure carried over intact. The research partner of the founder’s later years, herself a long student of the Tree of Life, observed that the system’s debt to the Kabbalah was real but partial, and that the founder showed little interest in integrating the tradition more deeply than his diagram required.⁸

Astrology and the calculation

The engine that generates a chart is astrology. Human Design takes the positions of the sun, moon, nodes, and planets at the moment of birth, in the tropical zodiac of Western astrology, and adds a second calculation for a point some three months before birth, which it calls the “design” date; the two sets of positions are translated, through the sixty-four gates, into the activations marked on the BodyGraph.⁹ The astrological substructure is the most thoroughly inherited element of all, and the least disguised: the system is, mechanically, a form of astrology, with the zodiac’s degrees recoded as hexagram lines. The founder’s claim to precision rests on it, which is why, as the opening chapter noted, the irregularity of his own recorded birth time sits so awkwardly against the system he built.

The Tarot, as sequencing

Late in his teaching the founder named one further source, less often counted among the system’s components. He had been given, he said, a knowledge of “sequencing,” the principle that all things move in an ordered sequence, which he identified with the true root of the Tarot, a root he traced to the ancient Egyptian priesthood and distinguished sharply from the Tarot “as it has existed for four or five hundred years.”¹⁰ In the system this became the ordering of the sixty-four gates and their lines along the evolutionary “rounds” of his cosmology, a span he put at some nineteen thousand years and likened to the Hindu yuga. The research partner of his later years, herself a student of the Tarot’s Major Arcana, pursued the same thread further than he did. The Tarot is thus one more strand in the synthesis, named by the founder himself, and like the others it was old long before he reached it.

The neutrino and the mechanism

What binds these borrowed parts into something the founder could call new is the mechanism he proposed for how the heavens reach the body: the neutrino. In his cosmology the planets and stars stream neutrinos, near-massless particles passing constantly through all matter, and these carry the “information” that imprints a person’s design at birth. The choice was timely. The neutrino was a live frontier of late-twentieth-century physics, and in February 1987, within weeks of the founder’s January encounter, the neutrino burst from the supernova SN 1987A was detected by underground observatories in Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union, the first neutrinos ever detected from beyond the solar system and the birth of neutrino astronomy.¹¹ The founder folded that event into his account, and the coincidence of timing is real, though his specific figures, the quantities and durations he gave from the stage, are his own embellishments and not the measured record. The neutrino is where the system reaches for the authority of contemporary science; it is also the one load-bearing element with no ancient pedigree, the modern mortar between old stones.

The lineage of synthesis

Stand back from the parts and a final source comes into view, which is the practice of synthesis itself. The fusing of East and West, of scripture and science, of astrology and physiology into a single received system was not new with Human Design; it was the house style of the modern esoteric tradition that began with the Theosophical Society in the 1870s and ran through a century of New Age teaching. Theosophy too claimed to have received its synthesis from a higher intelligence; it too drew the chakras into the West and married them to Western occultism; it too presented an ancient wisdom recovered for a modern age. The academic notice the system has received, discussed in a later chapter, places it squarely in this transreligious family, and the placement is apt.¹² The founder’s achievement, on the documentary evidence, was not the invention of his materials, which were all to hand, but their combination into a single calculable chart, delivered with a conviction and a vocabulary that the materials alone had never had.

This is not, in itself, an argument against the system. Synthesis is a legitimate intellectual act, and the value of a combination is not decided by the age of its parts. But the system’s own account of its origin, knowledge given whole and new in eight days, sits uneasily beside an inventory in which every major element can be traced to a prior tradition and the headline scientific correspondence to a book published when the founder was in his twenties. The eight days, whatever happened in them, did not happen in a vacuum. The man who entered the ruin carried into it, in the culture that surrounded him, most of what he said the Voice brought out.