Appendix A

The Contract Chain and the Institutional Erasure Mechanism, 1992–2016

A.1. The Forensic Anchor: August 5, 2010, 8:29 AM

The institutional history of the Human Design System has been, for most of its public life, an oral tradition disputed between parties with incommensurate interests. The documentary record presented in this Appendix proceeds from a different basis. It is anchored to a single verifiable timestamp.

On the morning of August 5, 2010, at 8:29:17 AM, a one-page letter signed by Lynda Bunnell on International Human Design School letterhead was converted to PDF using Acrobat PDFMaker 8.1 für Word, a German-language Microsoft Windows installation of Adobe Distiller 8.2.3. The letter is titled, in the original Acrobat title field, “Hello all Human Design Professionals,” which matches its opening salutation. The PDF was modified one second later, at 8:29:18 AM, and has not been altered since. It now resides in the documentary archive operated by Human Design Austria at ra.uru.hu/hd-background/, where it is presented under the heading “the result” of an open-letter response by a coalition of national HD organization directors to a prior contractual demand from the IHDS.

The text of the letter is short. It reads, in full:

Hello all Human Design Professionals,

We have a change in the online license program and I am please to let you know that offering HD services online no longer requires a contract or payment.

And I’m also pleased to let you know that the discounted room from iVocalize is still available to you. The window for taking advantage of the discounted room is good through the end of September. More information about the special online room is below.

If you would like to take advantage of the discounted rate from iVocalize please use this link to sign up for the room: http://tinyurl.com/HDConferenceRoom

Enjoy your work!

All the best, Lynda Bunnell, IHDS, www.ihdschool.com

Three features of this letter are documentary in nature and reward forensic attention. The first is its opening phrase: “We have a change in the online license program.” This phrase, in passing, confirms that an online license program had existed as formal institutional policy of the IHDS, requiring contracts and payments from Human Design professionals as a precondition of offering Human Design services online. The second is the phrase “no longer requires,” which confirms that this license program was rescinded, and, given that the letter offers no transition period or implementation date, that the rescission was immediate. The third is the absence of any explanatory framing. No legal basis is offered for the original program, no apology is tendered for its imposition, no reason is given for its withdrawal. The letter pivots, in its third paragraph, to a commercial promotion of a discounted iVocalize conference room.

The Acrobat producer string on the PDF, Acrobat PDFMaker 8.1 für Word, bears on a separate question. Lynda Bunnell, then the recently-installed Director of the IHDS, operated in English from a United States base. The PDF on which her letter is preserved was not generated on her system. It was generated by a recipient working in a German-language Office environment on a Windows system, who saved her letter to PDF on the morning of August 5, 2010. The strongest candidate, given the timing, the eventual archive location, and the corroborating contractual record, is Ilse Sendler, then the contractually exclusive Director of Human Design Austria with authority over all German-language Human Design education.

This forensic anchor establishes the morning of August 5, 2010, as the moment when the institutional record of the post-Ra Human Design consolidation crisis began to be preserved by parties outside the Jovian Archive corporate apparatus. The rescission letter is the visible artifact of that morning. The contractual demand it rescinded, and the open-letter response that elicited the rescission, are the documentary substrate that surrounds it. The chapters of this Appendix that follow are organized around the contract chain that produced this moment and the institutional pattern that followed from it.

A.2. The Original National Schools, 1992–2003

The institutional history of the Human Design System in the period from Ra Uru Hu’s first public teaching in 1992 to the consolidation of the IHDS in 2010 is best summarized in a single sentence written by Ra himself, in an email circulated to a group of his professionals and teachers in May 2008. The email is preserved in scanned form in the Human Design Austria archive.¹ In that email, Ra wrote:

The IHDS spent most of its existence as me. In the last years this has begun to change and September mutates the IHDS into you.

This sentence, written by Ra approximately three years before his death and twenty-six months before the August 5, 2010 forensic anchor, settles a question that has since been the subject of considerable institutional misrepresentation. Through 2008, the International Human Design School (the entity that would, in 2010, claim worldwide certification authority over Human Design education) did not exist as an organized institution. It was, in Ra’s own characterization, a designation he applied to his own teaching. Whatever structures existed alongside Ra’s teaching were not a centralized school. They were a constellation of national organizations operating under direct or indirect contractual relationships with Ra and his corporate vehicle, Jovian Archive Corporation.

The earliest of these structures emerged through Ra’s friendship with Jürgen Saupe, a German practitioner who translated Ra’s first book into German, the so-called “black book”, and served for several years as Ra’s organizer and promoter throughout Europe. The pattern of activity in this period was itinerant rather than institutional: Ra traveled, taught in intensive formats of one to several weeks, and was supported by a rotating set of dedicated students from various countries.²

By approximately 2000, this informal structure was contractually formalized for a small group of these supporting students. Ra and Jovian Archive Corporation issued the first national contracts to representatives in seven countries: Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Spain, Japan, and Austria. These contracts established the recipients as national licensees of the Human Design System, with exclusive rights to deliver Human Design education and to develop and distribute educational materials in their respective territories. The original IHDS, as it then existed, was the collective body of these national licensees. The name was plural: International Human Design Schools. This plurality reflected the structure that was actually contracted, a federation of national schools, each operating under contract with Jovian, rather than a single central school operating through a network of subordinated branches.

The Austrian contract was issued in September 2000 to Ilse Sendler. It gave Sendler, and the organization she operated under the name Human Design Austria (HDA), the exclusive contractual right to act as the representative of Jovian Archive Corporation in Austria, to operate a Human Design school, to create and distribute educational materials, and to train and license Human Design professionals. The terms of the contract were materially equivalent, by Sendler’s own subsequent account and the account of other national directors, to the terms of the parallel contracts issued in the other six territories.³

The same period, the late 1990s through the early 2000s, saw a parallel intellectual development inside the United States national organization, Human Design America (HDA-US), then directed by Mary Ann Winiger. Between October and November 2003, Winiger published a series of essays under the title “Locks and Keys” through the Human Design Voice Channel newsletter (HDVC numbers 48 through 54). The essays articulated, in Winiger’s own voice and from her own seven-year experiment as a Generator, the framework that Ra had taught as the Global Cycles course: the 1615–2026 historical cycle, the 2027 mutation of the Solar Plexus center, and the correspondence table of eight locks (the gates of the Cross of the Sphinx and the Cross of the Vessel of Love) with their corresponding keys for the current and subsequent eras. Winiger was succeeded as Director of HDA-US by Genoa Bliven later in 2003. The “Locks and Keys” framework remained in continuous community circulation in subsequent years⁴

A.3. The November 2003 Contract Extension

In November 2003, Ilse Sendler’s original September 2000 Austrian contract was supplemented by a written extension. The extension expanded the territorial scope of Sendler’s exclusive rights from Austria alone to the entirety of the German-speaking Human Design education market. The extension, like the original contract, was issued by Jovian Archive Corporation. Its existence and continued legal force was confirmed, more than a decade later, in writing by Jacqueline Riley, then identified as President of Jovian, in correspondence with Sendler.⁵

The combined effect of the September 2000 contract and the November 2003 extension was to establish Ilse Sendler, and Human Design Austria as the organization she operated, as the contractually exclusive representative of Jovian Archive Corporation for Human Design education in Austria, Germany, and the broader German-speaking territories of Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the South Tyrol. No other entity held a contractual right to deliver or supervise Human Design education in this territory. By the operative terms of the contracts, no other entity could be granted such a right without breaching the existing agreements.

A.4. The July 2010 Licensing of the IHDS to Lynda Bunnell

The transition from the federated national-schools structure of 1992–2009 to the centralized IHDS structure of 2010 onward was effected in July 2010 through a transfer that has never been documented in a publicly available contract. The transfer is, however, confirmed by Lynda Bunnell herself, in correspondence preserved in the Human Design Austria archive. In a letter to Werner Lessmann, a German Human Design analyst and graduate of the Differentiation Degree Program, dated to late 2015 or early 2016, Bunnell wrote:⁶

I’ve been running the IHDS since 2010, and I take my job very seriously. My commitment is to follow through on Ra’s wishes, the integrity of the knowledge and getting Human Design out into the world as best we can… He asked me to take over the IHDS in July 2010 and gave me the authority to continue his work and run these programs, as well as all the others. He entrusted his school to me and gave me complete authority.

Three elements of this admission are documentarily significant. First, it confirms a transfer date, July 2010, that aligns with the timeline of the events that follow. Second, it characterizes the transfer as an oral transmission of authority from Ra to Bunnell (“He asked me to take over,” “gave me the authority,” “entrusted his school to me”), with no reference to a written instrument that could be inspected or contested. Third, it asserts that the authority transferred was “complete”, a characterization that, as the contract chain reviewed in Section A.3 establishes, was not consistent with the existing contractual obligations of Jovian Archive Corporation to the seven national licensees from 2000–2003. The IHDS that Bunnell received in July 2010 was, by Ra’s own May 2008 characterization, an entity that had “spent most of its existence as me.” Its existence as a separable institutional structure, transferable from Ra to a successor, was a recent development.

A.5. The Online Sublicense Demand

The first action taken by Lynda Bunnell in her new role, by her own implicit admission in the August 5, 2010 rescission letter and by the explicit testimony of Ilse Sendler, was to circulate a contract to all Human Design professionals worldwide. The contract, preserved in PDF form in the Human Design Austria archive⁷, required every analyst, teacher, and professional to pay a fee of five hundred United States dollars per year as a precondition of conducting any Human Design activity online. The breadth of this requirement was expansive: the contract was structured such that any chart reading delivered over Skype, any class taught through a webinar platform, any consultation conducted via email, any service touching the internet, fell within the definition of “online work” and was subject to the annual fee.

The legal basis claimed for this fee structure was the assertion that the IHDS held not merely the rights to the Human Design System as a body of knowledge, but specifically the rights to the delivery of Human Design education online. This second claim, that the IHDS held enforceable “online rights” distinct from and additional to its claims to the underlying knowledge, was the specific point of contention that emerged in the response of the national directors.

A.6. The Open-Letter Response

The contractual demand circulated by Bunnell in summer 2010 elicited an immediate response from a coalition of national directors and senior professionals organized by Ilse Sendler. The response took the form of an open letter to Bunnell, also preserved in PDF in the Human Design Austria archive.⁸ The letter raised a series of legal questions about the basis of the online-rights claim. Sendler’s own retrospective account of the response, given in video testimony recorded in approximately 2015 or 2016, summarizes the substance:⁹

After quite some discussion I wrote an open letter and open email to Linda, criticizing this claim and asking for the legal backup — what is the so-called online right? I don’t think, and I still don’t think, that it exists.

The legal position embedded in the open letter was, in essence, that no enforceable category of “online rights” distinct from the underlying intellectual property rights to the Human Design System had ever been established, by trademark registration, by patent, by copyright registration covering the online delivery medium specifically, or by any other recognizable legal mechanism. The mode of delivery was, on this analysis, an attribute of how professionals worked; it was not a separately licensable property that the IHDS or Jovian Archive could rent back to those professionals on an annual basis.

A.7. The August 5, 2010 Rescission

The response to the open letter was the August 5, 2010, 8:29 AM rescission letter that constitutes the forensic anchor for this section. By Sendler’s account, the rescission came within hours of the open letter’s circulation:¹⁰

Within a few hours — really, literally very, very fast, within hours — Linda took back her plan. So you can do Skype readings now without being obliged to pay a $500 yearly fee. That was the positive result of this letter.

The retraction followed the open letter by a matter of hours. The letter offered no explanation for the change, no transition period, and no defense of the prior legal position. The first contractual instrument issued by the centralized IHDS structure under Bunnell required Human Design professionals to pay $500 per year as a condition of online activity; the second action issued under that structure, executed within hours of the first being challenged in writing, withdrew the requirement without comment.

The retraction did not, however, restore the institutional status quo ante. It produced an asymmetric outcome that the next section addresses.

A.8. The Erasure

The August 5, 2010 rescission of the online license program was a rollback of the contractual demand. It was not, by all subsequent indications, a restoration of normal institutional relations between the IHDS and the national directors who had signed the open letter. Sendler describes the asymmetric consequence directly:¹¹

The other result was not quite so nice. I personally was deleted from all records as a teacher and analyst. My national organization was deleted, simply disappeared. So that was the price you pay for being correct, for speaking up, for criticizing.

The mechanism of this erasure is the central institutional pattern documented by this Appendix. Sendler’s contractual relationship with Jovian Archive Corporation, the September 2000 Austrian contract and the November 2003 German-language extension, was not terminated by any procedure provided for in the contracts themselves. The contracts, by Jacqueline Riley’s later written admission, remained in force.¹² What was effected instead was a withdrawal of administrative recognition. Sendler’s listings as a teacher and analyst on the IHDS website were removed. The institutional acknowledgment of Human Design Austria as a national organization was withdrawn from IHDS and Jovian channels. Sendler’s name was excluded from forward-going IHDS communications, professional directories, and educational materials.

The contract endured. The recognition was withdrawn. Riley, in correspondence later cited in the Human Design Austria archive, defended this asymmetry on the grounds that the IHDS could withdraw its recognition independently of the underlying contract: “your contract has not ended — that would mean your license was revoked, which is not the case. What is the case is that you are no longer IHDS recognized due to your refusal to acknowledge IHDS guidelines, rules and standards.”¹³ The position embedded in this exchange, that rights granted under contract could be functionally nullified by unilateral withdrawal of recognition without termination of the contract itself, is the pattern that recurred in subsequent years against other holders of pre-2010 contractual relationships with Jovian, and that Section A.11 examines as institutional mechanism.

A.9. The 2015–2016 Knebelung

The pattern of administrative erasure established in summer and autumn 2010 was extended, in late 2015 and through 2016, into an active attempt to install a replacement national organization in Sendler’s territory in contravention of the still-valid September 2000 and November 2003 contracts. The mechanism is documented in the Human Design Austria archive under the German term Knebelung, a word meaning “gagging” or “muzzling,” used in the archive to describe the contractual instrument by which the attempt was made.

The instrument took the form of contracts circulated to all German-speaking Human Design professionals by Peter Schöber, operating under the entity name HD Services. The contracts required signatories to commit to purchasing educational materials and courses exclusively from Schöber and to acknowledge his entity as the recognized German-speaking Human Design school. The contracts threatened that professionals who declined to sign would lose IHDS recognition and would no longer be acknowledged as legitimately certified.¹⁴

This action was undertaken with the support of the IHDS. In correspondence with Werner Lessmann dated to the same period, Lynda Bunnell confirmed that Peter Schöber had been designated as a teacher of the Differentiation Degree Program, a four-semester advanced certification program completed and operationalized after Ra’s death by Andrea Reikl-Wolf and Alokanand Díaz del Rio. Bunnell’s admission of the basis for Schöber’s DDP credential is documentarily significant:¹⁵

In my judgement and the judgement of Jovian, Peter was and is ready to step into the role of DDP teacher. We do not take these things lightly. They are thoroughly considered. There was also a demand from the public for an additional teacher of this program. We are growing and the fractal is becoming wide.

I don’t need to defend this, but I will say that Peter was one of Ra’s first students and was highly respected and regarded by Ra. The selection of Peter to fill this role was not taken lightly nor was it ‘given’ to him. He has earned it, and I have no doubt Ra would be in complete agreement.

The admission is decisive on the question of formal credentialing. Schöber had not, as Werner Lessmann established in the correspondence that elicited Bunnell’s response, completed the Differentiation Degree Program training. Neither of the program’s only two qualified instructors, Reikl-Wolf and Díaz del Rio, had trained him. The institutional basis for his designation as a DDP teacher was, by Bunnell’s own characterization, that “Peter was one of Ra’s first students and was highly respected and regarded by Ra.” The credentialing was not based on completion of the formal training that other DDP teachers were required to complete; it was based on Bunnell’s and Jovian’s “judgement,” informed by Schöber’s prior relationship to Ra.

The coalition response to the 2016 Knebelung attempt was a joint statement, drafted in collaboration with legal counsel, addressed to Schöber and HD Services and circulated through the German-speaking Human Design professional network. The statement was signed by Werner Lessmann, Ilse Sendler, Dr. Andrea Reikl-Wolf, Martin Grassinger, Hans-Werner Jansen, Marie-Luise Kreisz, Margit Müller, Meta Raunig-Hass, and by additional signatories representing the Human Design Association: Bettina Schäfer, Irmtraud Schmidt Farias, Dr. Jutta Edelbauer, Rudolf Keller, Susan Lee, Hermann Brodbeck, and Elfriede Steiner.¹⁶ The signatories collectively represent the German-language professional community of Ra Uru Hu’s pre-2010 student lineage, including two figures, Andrea Reikl-Wolf and Martin Grassinger, who had pre-Human Design personal relationships with Ra. Grassinger’s own statement, included in the coalition record, opens with the sentence: “I knew Ra before the HDS was in the world. Ra introduced me to the HDS at the early stages of its development.”¹⁷

A.10. The Legally Verified Position

The lawyer-verified statement issued by the coalition in 2016, addressed to Peter Schöber and HD Services and preserved in the Human Design Austria archive, establishes the operative legal position with respect to the German-speaking territory. The statement’s principal findings, drawn directly from its text, are as follows:¹⁸

First, the September 2000 contract between Ilse Sendler / Human Design Austria and Jovian Archive Corporation remains active and legally valid. The November 2003 written extension expanding Sendler’s exclusive rights to the entirety of German-language Human Design education likewise remains active and legally valid. The continued validity of both instruments was confirmed in writing by Jacqueline Riley, President of Jovian.

Second, the formation of the centralized IHDS as a separate institutional entity occurred temporally subsequent to the conclusion of the 2000 and 2003 contracts with Sendler. The IHDS therefore could not have inherited contractual rights in territories already exclusively contracted to Sendler. To the extent that the contractual instrument transferring the IHDS to Bunnell in July 2010 purported to convey such rights, that purported conveyance was inconsistent with Jovian’s pre-existing obligations and was, on the face of those obligations, void.

Third, the establishment of any new Human Design school in the German-speaking territory under the purported authority of Jovian or the IHDS is therefore contractually invalid. This applies to Peter Schöber’s HD Services and to any successor entity that Jovian or the IHDS might attempt to designate.

Fourth, the IHDS has no contractual relationship with Human Design Austria and therefore has no authority to issue or revoke credentials for HDA-trained professionals. HDA’s licensing of analysts and teachers under its contractual authority is fully recognized as a matter of Jovian’s own pre-existing contractual commitments; any attempt by the IHDS to declare HDA-trained professionals “no longer recognized” is contractually inoperative.

Fifth, the conduct of Peter Schöber and HD Services in distributing contracts to HDA-affiliated professionals threatening loss of recognition for failure to sign, and in describing HDA as no longer recognized, constituted, in the assessment of legal counsel, unlawful competitive interference and unlawful coercion under the applicable competition law.

The statement closed with an offer to resolve the matter through dialogue rather than litigation, contingent on Schöber’s public acknowledgment of HDA’s rights and his cessation of the contested conduct. No record of a substantive response from Schöber is preserved in the archive.

A.11. Pattern Recognition: The Erasure Mechanism and Its Application to Zeno's Lineage

The documentary record assembled in Sections A.1 through A.10 establishes, with respect to events in the period 2010–2016, a specific institutional pattern with five characteristic features.

First, assertion of authority not grounded in enforceable instruments. The IHDS, after July 2010, claimed and exercised authority (first to license, then to revoke recognition) that on examination was not grounded in legal property of the type asserted.

Second, withdrawal of administrative recognition without contract termination. Pre-existing contractual relationships were not formally terminated; rather, administrative acknowledgment of them was withdrawn, producing functional erasure of the contracted party from the institutional record while leaving the underlying obligations technically intact.

Third, replacement by Jovian-aligned figures. The territories and roles vacated by the administratively erased parties were filled by figures with closer alignment to the post-2010 IHDS structure, with credentialing decisions made on the basis of “judgement” rather than completion of the formal training requirements applied to other figures.

Fourth, reliance on oral transmission of authority from Ra. The basis for the post-2010 IHDS’s exercise of authority was repeatedly characterized in terms of Ra’s wishes, Ra’s judgement, or Ra’s prior recognition, with no documentary instrument to inspect or contest.

Fifth, collective silencing of professional witnesses. Professionals who challenged the pattern in writing were subject to the same administrative erasure as the parties whose interests they were defending. The mechanism was self-reinforcing: the visible cost of speaking up disincentivized further speech.

The documentary record of the erasure of Zeno and her pre-1993 student lineage, treated in the chapters of the main text, predates the consolidation of the IHDS by approximately two decades. The erasure of Zeno occurred during the pre-institutional phase of the Human Design System’s development, when Ra Uru Hu’s teaching activity had not yet been organized into the federated national-schools structure of 2000 and was being conducted largely from Ibiza without a corporate vehicle to issue contracts or grant recognitions. As a consequence, the erasure of Zeno did not leave the same documentary trail as the erasure of Sendler. There were no contracts to administratively rescind; the recognition that was withdrawn was direct personal acknowledgment by Ra of the figures who had carried and taught the system in its first American decade.

What the 2010–2016 record establishes is not direct documentary evidence of the mechanism by which Zeno was erased. It is, rather, the institutional pattern by which erasure has continued to function in Human Design’s organized period, and by which it presumably functioned during the pre-organized period as well, in less documented but structurally equivalent forms. The five features identified above are not specific to the 2010s. They are, in the language of the Human Design System itself, mechanical features of how an institutional power structure with no enforceable legal grounding nevertheless maintains its coherence: by selectively recognizing those who confirm it and by silently de-recognizing those who do not.

The remainder of this Appendix documents the specific cases that constitute the institutional record. Section B treats the case of Human Design Online, Inc., and its founder Gennaro Brooks-Church. Section C treats the case of Eleanor Haspel-Portner and the documentary record of the 30,000-case study. Section D treats the case of Jürgen Saupe and the pre-2000 European organizing network. Section E treats the original pre-2000 circle (Martin Grassinger, Andrea Reikl-Wolf, Werner Lessmann, and Ilse Sendler) and the persistence and continuity of its members in the public record. Section F treats the present-day roster of official national organizations as the administrative endpoint of the erasure, read against the original 2000 federation.