Appendix C

The Case of Eleanor Haspel-Portner and the Documentary Record of the 30,000-Case Study

The cases of Ilse Sendler and Human Design Online, Inc., treated in Sections A and B, document the post-2010 institutional erasure mechanism in its contractual and entity-disappearance forms. A third case, structurally distinct from both, documents the same mechanism in its empirical-research form. Eleanor Haspel-Portner, a clinical psychologist and social scientist who was Ra Uru Hu’s commissioned research partner from 1999 through approximately 2003, and a named co-author of the 1999 statistical paper that constituted the only large-scale empirical validation study of the Human Design System ever conducted under Ra’s direct authorization, was administratively erased from the post-2003 institutional record. Her case is documented at length and from her own voice in a 2025 republication of the original research materials.

C.1. The 1999 Joint Research Paper

In 1999, Rave Life Sciences (the corporate research entity through which Ra Uru Hu was, at that time, conducting the empirical validation of the Human Design System) undertook the research published in 2000 as a paper titled “Preliminary Research on the Human Design System and Health.” The paper’s author attribution lists, in this order: Eleanor Haspel-Portner PhD, Ra Uru Hu, Marvin M. Portner MD, Erik Memmert, and Charles Haspel.¹ The corresponding 1999 author bios identified the contributors with these institutional roles: Haspel-Portner as a social scientist and clinical psychologist leading the research team at Rave Life Sciences; Ra Uru Hu as the individual “put in trust of the Human Design System and its associated information in 1987,” teaching in the U.S. and Europe and overseeing the dissemination of all Design knowledge for its truth and integrity; Marvin Portner as a board-certified internist and allergist contributing the clinical documentation; Memmert as the software developer who designed the Rave Life Sciences research applications; and Charles Haspel as the computer scientist who designed the Rave Life Sciences website along with Ra Uru Hu.

Two features of this 1999 institutional configuration warrant attention. First, the corporate entity through which Ra was operating in 1999 was Rave Life Sciences, not Jovian Archive Corporation. Jovian Archive Corporation, as treated in Section A, was the corporate vehicle through which the seven national contracts were issued beginning in 2000, that is, in the period following the joint 1999 research effort. The institutional history of the Human Design System has been frequently characterized in the post-2010 IHDS record as having proceeded under Jovian Archive Corporation throughout, but in 1999 the empirical validation work was being conducted under a different entity name. Second, Ra’s 1999 author bio characterizes him as having been “put in trust of the Human Design System… in 1987.” This 1987 trust framing is the institutional self-description preserved in the original 1999 paper. It is not the post-2010 IHDS framing of Ra as having “established the International Human Design School (IHDS) in 1992”, the claim Lynda Bunnell would later make and that Sendler corrected from Ra’s own May 2008 admission as treated in Section A.2.

C.2. The May 1999 Legal Contract

In the introduction to the 2025 republication, Haspel-Portner describes the events of May 1999 in these terms:

Ra arrived at our home in May 1999 and, within a few days, requested that we form a legal partnership to validate the Human Design System scientifically. He had been gifted a residence in Sedona and planned to live there with his family. Marvin and I agreed to spend whatever time necessary with Ra to ensure that he could convey “everything the voice told him” in preparation for me to analyze the system statistically and both Marvin and me to evaluate it clinically. We drew up a legal contract with the intent that Marvin and I would remain independent of the Human Design community, that our focus would be on documenting the science, and that we would work with a professional group interested in clinical and statistical research.

The May 1999 contract was, by Haspel-Portner’s account, a written legal instrument.² Its principal terms (independence from the Human Design community, focus on scientific documentation, partnership with a professional research group) established the institutional position from which the 1999 research paper was published later that year. The contract predates the September 2000 Austrian contract with Sendler treated in Section A.2 by approximately fifteen months. Both contracts were issued by Ra to figures whose subsequent administrative erasure from the institutional record followed the same five-feature pattern documented in Section A.11.

C.3. The Statistical Findings of 1999

The 1999 paper presented the results of statistical analysis on five samples of 5,000 birth records each, drawn randomly from general populations. The paper documented the frequency distribution of the five Human Design Types (Manifestor, Generator, Projector, Reflector, and Manifesting Generator) across the samples, with the following findings in a representative sample of 5,000: 8.0% Manifestors, 36.8% Generators, 20.9% Projectors, 0.9% Reflectors, and 33.5% Manifesting Generators.³ The five Types were verified through Z-test analysis as statistically independent of each other at confidence levels far beyond the 99% threshold (critical value 3.29 at 99% confidence, degrees of freedom 9998), with each Type-to-Type comparison producing Z-values well in excess of the critical threshold. The paper’s conclusion states: “Type, as used in the HDS, differentiates a significant construct in the general population. It provides groundbreaking and revolutionary knowledge for education in the growth of self-awareness.”

The 5-Type framework empirically established in the 1999 paper, verified through replication across five randomized population samples, multiple astrological calculation software systems (SPSS, Jigsaw, Astrodatabank), and statistical methods, has not been incorporated into the post-2010 IHDS canonical curriculum. The IHDS public materials present Human Design as comprising four Types, with Manifesting Generators characterized as a subcategory of Generators rather than as a statistically independent fifth Type. The 1999 research paper, co-authored by Ra Uru Hu, contradicts this curricular position with empirical data that Ra himself signed.

Haspel-Portner has further recounted that Ra Uru Hu privately acknowledged the five-Type result while declining to teach it. In her account, he told her: “You found scientifically that there are five types. I’m going to keep teaching that there were four because my ego won’t let me change.”⁴

Haspel-Portner restated these findings in print years later. Her practitioner guide Human Design & Health annotates Ra’s own health teaching throughout to record that the study did not validate his defined- and undefined-Center medical hypotheses, representative annotations state that “statistical data on 30,000 cases did not validate this statement by Ra,” and that “all of Ra’s hypotheses about medical conditions and treatments … did not hold up statistically in 30,000 cases or in clinical analysis.”⁵

C.4. The Documented Relationship with Zeno

Haspel-Portner’s 2025 introduction documents her entry into the Human Design community in 1996. The relevant passage reads:

When I saw Human Design in The Mountain Astrologer magazine in March of 1996, I knew what it was because I had trained as a Jungian Analyst and recognized all the parts of the Mandala… I was fortunate to study privately with Zeno, an early student of Ra Uru Hu’s and director of New Sunware America at the time. I learned the basics in a traditional and grounded way. I was fascinated by the information and immediately began to seek mastery of it. I attended when Ra Uru Hu, the messenger of Human Design System, taught his first advanced Human Design class. It was a five-day course in Taos, New Mexico, where Ra presented the channels and circuitry for the first time. After the class, I was certified as a Human Design Analyst.

This passage provides third-party documentary corroboration, from a contemporary witness who is herself among the named subjects of Ra’s July 25, 2003 “Misrepresentation” letter, of Zeno’s institutional role in the mid-1990s.⁶ Three elements of the corroboration are documentarily significant. First, Haspel-Portner identifies Zeno as the director of the U.S. national organization at the time of Haspel-Portner’s entry into the community. Second, she identifies Zeno’s role as that of Ra Uru Hu’s early student and the figure through whom she received her first private HD training in 1996. Third, she structures her narrative such that Zeno’s instruction precedes her subsequent attendance at Ra’s first advanced class in Taos, which is to say, Zeno’s instruction was the foundation on which her own certification as a Human Design Analyst was built.

C.5. The 2003 Erasure

The July 25, 2003 “Misrepresentation” letter from Ra Uru Hu treated in Chapter Four of this book named Haspel-Portner alongside Zeno and Chaitanyo as figures of whom Ra was “appalled.” The letter characterized Haspel-Portner, without specifics, in terms equivalent to those it applied to Zeno and Chaitanyo. The contractual instrument that constituted Haspel-Portner and Marvin Portner’s institutional position vis-à-vis Ra and his research program, the May 1999 legal contract, was not, on the available documentary record, formally terminated. Its operative effect, by the same asymmetric mechanism documented in Section A.8 with respect to Sendler, was withdrawn through administrative non-recognition: the 1999 paper ceased to be cited; the 30,000-case statistical study ceased to be acknowledged in IHDS curricular materials; Haspel-Portner’s name was excluded from the post-2010 IHDS record as completely as Sendler’s.

The 2025 republication framing addresses this period only obliquely. Haspel-Portner notes that by the end of 1998 (that is, prior to the May 1999 contract) she had already “pulled back from the Human Design Community because of the way information and creative questioning were being censored,” and that her “values in handling [her] clients differed from those of Ra and Zeno.”⁷ The 1999 contract appears, on her account, to have been an attempt to formalize a research relationship that could proceed independently of the community dynamics from which she had withdrawn. The 2003 letter rendered that formalization administratively void.

C.6. The 2025 Republication

In 2025, Noble Sciences, LLC, a publishing entity operated by Haspel-Portner from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, republished the 1999 research paper, together with subsequent monograph material from 2000–2002, as a book titled The Science of Human Design: 30,000 Statistical Cases, 15,000 Clinical Cases, One Proven Map of Your Soul.⁸ The book’s author attribution lists Eleanor Haspel-Portner PhD, Marvin Portner MD, and Ra Uru Hu, that is, Ra is named as a co-author of the 2025 republication, twenty-two years after the July 2003 letter that named Haspel-Portner as a fraud and fourteen years after Ra’s death in March 2011.

The book’s dedication reads:

To Ra Uru Hu, who invited me to question the science of Human Design. My inquiry led beyond validation into the emergence of the Four Worlds framework and the development of Noble Energy Maps®, grounded in empirical structure and scientific validation. Ra, your legacy now can empower and change lives as you dreamed it would, especially for children.

The 2025 republication preserves the 1999 paper text verbatim, with Haspel-Portner’s subsequent analytical commentary inserted as inline annotations in blue italic typography. The annotations document where the original 1999 findings have been further developed by Haspel-Portner’s continuing research, where Ra’s claims in the 1999 and 2000–2002 materials have not held up to statistical scrutiny in subsequent analysis, and where Haspel-Portner’s clinical experience over the twenty-two-year period since publication has diverged from the original framings. The republication strategy preserves Ra’s original work as primary source while documenting Haspel-Portner’s continuing development as scientific elaboration.

C.7. Application to the Section A.11 Pattern

The Haspel-Portner case extends the documentary record of the institutional erasure mechanism into the empirical-research domain. The five features identified in Section A.11 apply, with adjustments for the research context.

The pre-existing contractual relationship, the May 1999 legal partnership, endured without documented termination. The administrative recognition (citation of the 1999 paper, acknowledgment of the 30,000-case study, inclusion of the 5-Type statistical framework in curricular materials) was withdrawn. The post-2010 IHDS canonical curriculum that consolidated under Lynda Bunnell’s directorship did not incorporate the empirical findings of the research that Ra had commissioned and co-signed. The Manifesting Generator was retained in the curriculum as a subcategory of Generator rather than as the statistically independent fifth Type the 1999 paper had verified. The justification for these curricular choices was not advanced in writing in any documentary form available to the author; the choices were effected through the same mechanism of asymmetric administrative non-recognition that Section A documents in detail.

The asymmetry of preservation that distinguishes the Sendler case from the HDO case treated in Section B applies in a third form to the Haspel-Portner case. Where Sendler preserved her documentary record on a public archive and HDO’s record exists only as community-circulated artifact, Haspel-Portner preserved her documentary record through commercial republication. The 1999 paper, with Ra Uru Hu named as co-author, is now available through the broader book trade in a form that the IHDS cannot administratively rescind. The post-2003 erasure rendered the work invisible within the institutional record; the 2025 republication has rendered it visible in the public record without IHDS sanction or acknowledgment. The pattern of disappearance documented in Sections A and B is, in the Haspel-Portner case, paired with a pattern of restoration that operates outside the institutional structure entirely.