The Voice on Ibiza, January 1987
Before Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler ever met Ra Uru Hu, before the November 1993 flight to Albuquerque and the six weeks in their Taos house and the contract Ra drafted in their kitchen and signed in his own hand, there had been a man named Alan Robert Krakower who had spent eight days and eight nights inside an experience he would, for the rest of his life, struggle to describe.
He was thirty-eight years old. He was Canadian by birth (born in Montreal on April 9, 1948) with a bachelor’s degree behind him and a career in advertising, magazine publishing, and media production. He composed and performed music; he had worked in film. In 1983, at thirty-five, he had left Canada and made his way eventually to the small Mediterranean island of Ibiza, where he had taken work as a schoolteacher. He was a science-trained skeptic by his own later description. He held no mystical beliefs. He could not, when later pressed, name his astrological sign.
On the evening of January 3, 1987 (by his own subsequent account, sometime around nine in the evening) something began that would not finish until the morning of January 11. The published accounts of what happened during those eight days vary considerably in tone, but the basic structural elements are consistent across the sources: a sustained encounter with what he would later describe simply as the Voice; the reception of an enormous body of structured information about the design of the human form, about the mechanics by which the planets and the I Ching correspond to a graphical representation of that design, about types and centers and gates and channels and lines, about authorities and strategies and the framework that would, in his hands across the following twenty-four years, be called the Human Design System.
He did not eat. He did not drink. He did not sleep. He took notes. By his own later description, two days of the eight were devoted specifically to the architecture of what became Human Design. The remaining six days carried what he would call, with characteristic flatness, cosmic fairy tales, the larger cosmological context inside which the bodygraph mechanic was situated. He came out the other side of those eight days with a name he had been given inside the experience, Ra Uru Hu, and with the obligation, as he understood it, to spend the rest of his life translating what he had received into a teachable form.
He did not, by his own later admission, want this obligation. He had not asked for it. He resented the intrusion. He frequently described himself in the years that followed as a person who had been ambushed by something he had not believed in and could not refuse. The integrity of his subsequent teaching, in his own account and in the account of those who studied with him in the earliest period, came partly from this resistance. He did not present what he had received as something he had earned or developed. He presented it as something that had happened to him.
* * *
In March 1987, two months after the encounter, Ra received his first invitation to do a Human Design reading. Tullia Duymaer-Van Twist, a resident of Ibiza, asked him to read her chart and that of her daughter Tonka. He did. In 1988 he drew his first Human Design bodygraphs by hand. In 1989, in a small apartment outside Frankfurt, Germany, he began writing what would become the Rave I’Ching, the textual foundation of the system, alongside the materials that would later be gathered as the Black Book.
In 1991 he met Jürgen Saupe, the German translator and publisher, hired Saupe to translate the Black Book into German, and after the original publishing deal fell through, accepted Saupe’s offer of help propagating the work. Through the 1990s, Saupe’s firm, New Sun Services International, produced the first printed bodygraphs, maintained the European archive, and translated every German course Ra would later teach. The summer of 1991 carried the first Design Analyst training, with three students. The Black Book was published that year. By February 1992, in Sant Miquel, Ibiza, Ra delivered his first public lecture. Later that year, the Rave I’Ching was published, in English and in Jürgen Saupe’s German translation, and a small Design Network newsletter began circulating to subscribers in Germany and Austria.
In the autumn of 1992, at a Zürich lecture organized through informal channels, Ra spoke to a small group. Among them was a Swiss man named Peter Wolf, who carried the day’s materials back to two American friends he knew were the sort of people who would understand them. (The couple’s own archive would later place Wolf’s encounter with Ra a few months before August 1993, at what it calls his first introduction lecture in Zurich; the two datings sit close together, and both are recorded here.) Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler had recognized themselves in Ra’s descriptions before they had ever met him. Within a year, they would be paying his airfare to America.
* * *
This chapter offers no opinion about what happened to Alan Robert Krakower on January 3 through 11, 1987. The book treats the encounter as Ra subsequently described it, not as a claim it is the book’s job to verify, but as a foundational subjective experience that produced the body of teaching the rest of the book is about. Whether the Voice was a mystical encounter, a sustained psychological event, a creative breakthrough of unusual intensity, or something the categories of contemporary description do not capture cleanly, is a question this book is not equipped to answer and would not try to answer if it were.
What the book does say, and what every page that follows from this one assumes, is that something happened. A man went into eight days of solitary contact with something he experienced as larger than himself, and a body of structured knowledge came out the other side. That body of knowledge subsequently passed through hundreds of teachers in dozens of countries across the next four decades and helped millions of people come to a more articulate understanding of how their own systems were built. The institutional question of who owns the resulting body of knowledge, who is permitted to teach it, who is permitted to develop it, and what happens to those who develop it outside the institutional framework, those are the questions this book is about. But this chapter belongs to what came before any of that.
It belongs to a thirty-eight-year-old advertising executive on a Mediterranean island in January 1987, who came out of eight days he had not asked for with the rough architecture of a system that, by the time he died on March 12, 2011, would carry his name and the names of his collaborators across a worldwide community of practitioners. The book begins, properly, in the kitchen in Taos in November 1993, when the first contract was drafted. But it begins, before that, in a small apartment on Ibiza across eight days in January 1987, with a man who would later say that he had not been the same person on the eleventh as he had been on the third, and who would spend the next twenty-four years trying to make the difference legible to anyone who would listen.
That is where Human Design begins.
The rest of this book is what happened next.