Eleanor Haspel-Portner

Relationship to the founder

By her own account she found Human Design in an astrology magazine in March 1996, developed a relationship with the founder, edited the 2002 edition of the Black Book, and in 1999 was asked, with her husband Marvin Portner M.D., to validate the system scientifically. The partnership operated as Rave Life Sciences; the relationship ended in estrangement in 2002, and she now teaches a system of her own.

What they say

“In 1999,” she states, “Ra asked my husband, Marvin Portner, M.D., and me to validate the Human Design System scientifically,” and she “ran statistics for 30,000 cases in matched sample groups.” Her conclusion broke with the system she had been asked to confirm: “I found that Human Design is an incomplete, faulty, and disempowering system because it is only a small snapshot of an individual’s process in the first three months of their development.” (Interview, South Carolina Voyager, September 2025.)

Her 2024 talk “My Time with Ra” narrates the years behind the verdict: the 1996 discovery, the 1999 partnership, a real friendship in the years that followed, mutual visits, a cake baked for his wedding, alongside a steady professional disillusion as the data failed to confirm his content. She and her husband took him in, she says, on a clear-eyed bargain: that the messenger was “a scoundrel and not to be trusted” but the message “important and significant enough that we would honor the messenger.”

The reversal is documented on both sides. A 2000 introduction to the system announced her study as proof: “a controlled research programme led by qualified MDs in the USA has statistically proven through thousands of case studies that the human genetic strategies outlined above have a solid, scientific foundation.” The researcher who ran those cases later said they showed the opposite. The same study was the system’s proof in 2000 and its disproof in its author’s own later telling.

How the account is weighed

Interest: Estranged She is doubly valuable and doubly interested: an insider charged with proving the system who ended as a critic of it, and now the proponent of a successor system she presents as completing what she regards as incomplete. Her claim that Ra personally commissioned the validation is self-elevating and uncorroborated by his organization. Her harsher claims about his life before 1987 are uncorroborated and are not repeated here. Her verdict belongs in the record beside Bunnell’s, weighed with the same care.

Sources