Plain answers, with sources

What is Humun Design?

Humun Design is a map of how you in particular are built: which parts of you came with you, and which grew along a trellis somebody else put up. Jolly Alchemy sits right at the intersection of science and magic, and this is one of the parts we call magic. Its roots are old: the I Ching, astrology, the chakras and the Kabbalah. In 1987 Ra Uru Hu wove them into one system, after eight days he described as a mystical experience. No standard laboratory has tested it, that we know of, and most of what it claims sits outside what a laboratory is built to measure. You don’t have to believe any of it. What it offers is a vocabulary, and some things to try, and it works only as far as you use it to look at yourself. This page says why it matters, what it is, where it came from, what it claims, what its critics say, and how we use it without pretending it is something it isn’t.

Two of us wrote it. Rebecca Jolli has studied this and its cousins for thirty years and holds the magic end. Nate holds a master’s degree in applied physics and has spent ten years as an engineer, in physics labs and in software, and holds the other end. Where the page switches to his voice, it says so.

About the spelling: humun, persun and wimin, on purpose.

We write humun, persun and persunal that way because the ordinary words carry “man” and “son” inside them, and womun and wimin because the ordinary words carry “man” and “men”. A map of what a persun is shouldn’t have a gender built into its name; nobody is the default, and the word belongs to everyone. The system’s own books spell it the usual way.

Why any of this matters

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates, in Plato’s Apology58

Examining ourselves has always been a stab in the dark with a sharp stick. Humun Design hands us a template for it, so we see ourselves more clearly, more quickly and more precisely. A bunch of things you thought were bugs in yourself turn out to be features: they are how you are wired. Once you know, you get to give yourself a break: you weren’t being an idiot, you just didn’t know what that part of you does. Science is very good at describing how humuns are alike; medicine knows how every heart and every spleen works. It has no good way to describe how we are different, and that is what Humun Design is good for.

Most of us were taught, early and thoroughly, that what we are naturally is not good enough. The lesson arrives in layers: you’re fine, and you also need to sit still, to read before you’re ready, to compete, to want what everyone else wants. Each layer lands on top of a quiet “no” that a two-year-old can feel and a twenty-eight-year-old has long since forgotten. Somewhere in there a small persun gives up a part of themselves, notices, and knows there will be a price.

The price gets paid for decades. It shows up as a life that doesn’t quite fit, work that runs on willpower, a body that keeps saying no, more loudly each time. Some people come through the conditioning and find a way to thrive anyway. The difference is whether a persun ever got to see a spread of possibilities and feel which one was theirs. That is what a chart is for. It is the seed packet you arrived with: the variety, the light it leans toward, the water it wants. With it in hand, the seed itself and the trellis somebody else built around it can finally be told apart.

None of that is a grudge against the people who did the conditioning. They were working under the same false premises and the same incomplete knowledge, and so were we. Now we know a little more, and that is the whole of the forgiveness required. The same forgiveness is owed to you: forgive yourself for not knowing what you didn’t know before you learned it. That is the sentence for the day you first see your chart and realize how long you have been paddling upstream.

Passengers

The deeper claim, and the one Ra Uru Hu returned to over and over, is that we are here as passengers. In his telling, the body has a life of its own: a natural spirit, as in any animal, that already knows where it belongs and when. Consciousness gets to ride along and watch. Taken seriously, that makes a life something closer to a film you are in the audience for, all the input arriving click by click, the dropped ball bouncing exactly where it needed to land. Rebecca’s shorthand for the practice is the trick of being in the right place at the right time. For a Coordinator or an Observer especially, that is the job, and the chart is one way of getting sensitive enough to find it.

Living that way changes what growth feels like. A realization arrives as “what a cool idea, and what does it imply”, and life rearranges around it. The other version is the one most of us know well: pinballing from wall to wall, each wall recognized only after it has been hit.

Weather and climate

The chart also helps tell the weather from the climate. In the system’s account, some patterns run for years, long enough to feel like a new self. A persun builds a business inside one transit, then the planet behind it moves on, the energy goes with it, and they are left asking why they can’t do the thing they thought was them. The chart draws the boundary between what is yours for life and what is passing through, what Ra called the neutrino weather.

The science of differentiation

Ra called the system the science of differentiation, and we pass the phrase on with a note on each word. Science, in his sense, is collective and experiential: a persun submits to an experience, a crisis, a mistake, an afternoon in a canoe, and afterward has something to reflect on and talk about. Once learned, the lesson doesn’t need repeating. Differentiation is what it describes: how one persun differs from the next. A body of knowledge built that way is real to the persun who built it, and the truth it carries is local and alive, true for you, at that time. That is a real kind of truth, and our culture places little value on it.

Half of humunity has been keeping notes on how a persun is built for as long as there have been kitchens and birthing rooms, and for most of that time nobody with a title was listening. Old wives’ tales, they called it, and later, unscientific: same put-down, new coat. What you know in your body counts here, and it always did. 🌱

Most of the work is looking backward. Decisions made at five, while coping, became assumptions, and the assumptions led somewhere nobody chose. The root belief is usually far back, at the cusp where a whole path began, and getting there means retracing some of that path. That’s hard, and the sunk cost is real: eight years building a boat is a lot to let go before being able to experience its first sail. The way back is shorter than the way out, because the path is known.

“Learn who you are, so you can love that. Meet yourself, and love what you see. Fall in love with what you find.”

Rebecca Jolli

Where it comes from

Here is the origin story as the system’s own keepers tell it. In January 1987, on the island of Ibiza, a Canadian named Alan Robert Krakower had an eight-day mystical experience: an encounter with what he called “a Voice”, which he said gave him the whole system. He took the name Ra Uru Hu, wrote down what he had received, published The Human Design System in 1992, and taught it until he died in 2011.1,2,17

The story practitioners pass on, by word of mouth rather than in any document, adds that the information was available to anyone that week because of a neutrino transit. He was the one able to receive it and carry it to the rest of the world, and at least one other persun who received it was not able to bear it. Nothing written stands behind that part, so it is lore, and we hold it as lore.

The parts are older than 1987. The 64 numbers on a chart are the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, a text people have been reading their lives into for more than three thousand years. The planets come from Western astrology. The nine centers are an updated understanding borrowed from the ancient chakras, and the way the pieces connect borrows from the Kabbalah’s tree of life.

The literature also adds a layer of physics, and here we owe you some care. Its keepers say the Voice told Ra that neutrinos have mass and carry an imprint, the neutrino stream, as practitioners call it. Physics was already asking whether neutrinos have mass when he said it: one experiment claimed to measure it in 1980, and the supernova of February 1987 set a limit on it the month after Ra’s eight days. The question was settled in 1998, and the answer won the 2015 Nobel Prize. None of that supports the imprint part, and no physicist has a way to test it. So the story stays a story here, and one of the skeptics’ cards further down is about exactly this kind of borrowing.3,19,27

We put the story first because it matters. There is a story, a set of rules, and more than thirty years of people testing it in the one laboratory each of us has, our own life. You can hold the story however you like. Between the two of us we hold it differently, and Rebecca holds it both ways at once: as a myth in the old sense of the word, a story people use to understand themselves, and as a claim about how the universe is built, one she thinks the sciences are slowly catching up with. Nate holds the first and keeps the second on the shelf, as an experiment that could still fail. Neither of us knows for sure, and both of us feel strongly, which is how most things go around here. We agree on what we won’t do with it, and that is what most of this page is about.

What a chart is

🙏 With all thanks to 64keys: the type names on this site are theirs, and a free account there draws your chart and hands you their dictionary to read it with.

The chart is the seed packet: the variety, the light it leans toward, the water it wants, the season it wakes up in. Humun Design is how the packet gets printed. A chart starts with two moments: the moment you were born, and a moment about three months earlier, when the Sun was 88 degrees back along its yearly path. Why that moment? In the system’s account, that is when consciousness is downloaded into the fetus, and the fetus becomes a separate conscious entity from its mother. The body’s unconscious “design” is imprinted then, and the conscious “persunality” is imprinted at birth. That is the system’s answer, and we pass it on as the system’s answer.4,5

For each moment, the positions of the Sun, Moon, lunar nodes and planets are sorted into 64 slices of the sky, one per hexagram. Those slices are the numbers on the chart. The nine shapes are centers, the channels run between them, and a channel colored in at both ends is called defined. From that pattern the system assigns a type, a strategy, an authority (its word for how you make decisions), a profile, and a great deal more, down to levels finer than the numbers you can see.

Rebecca’s Humun Design chart: a 3/5 Specialist (Manifesting Generator) with Sacral authority, on the Right Angle Cross of Explanation
Rebecca’s own chart, a 3/5 Specialist with Sacral authority. It is the example used everywhere on this site, so you can see the design and bias of the teacher. The colored-in shapes are her defined centers; the white ones are undefined. The home page has the story that goes with it.

The five types

The first thing most people look up is their type. Here are the names we use, with the traditional ones beside them, each by what it is:

Inner and outer authority

Authority comes in two kinds. Inner authority is what you can trust to make good decisions as the unique individual you are; the chart names where in the body it lives for you, and for nobody is it solely the mind. Outer authority is one of the mind’s proper jobs, along with measuring, sorting and pondering. Once it is relieved of decision duty, what it knows becomes something to offer other people.

The undefined parts

The white centers on a chart are the undefined parts. They are where a persun takes in the room: other people’s pressure, other people’s certainty, other people’s moods. The system calls them the places with “the greatest potential for wisdom”, and in our experience that is right. The undefined parts are where most of the borrowed habits grew, and once you are comfortable in your own colors, they are where the wisdom comes from.6

The astronomy is real and reproducible: anyone with the same birth data gets the same chart, to the second. That fact stays in its place. An exact calculation doesn’t make the meanings true; the meanings are a separate question, and they are the whole point. We don’t use the precision as proof, and precision used as proof is a flag wherever you meet it.

The type names above come from 64keys, a company started by two of Ra’s direct students who have carried the system forward through decades of their own practice. They found the traditional labels “insufficiently meaningful” once their charts were being used at work. When Ra’s wording and the 64keys gloss differ, we read them side by side rather than pick one. They are two attempts at explaining the same information, and Ra had a big job that he did not finish, so in places the later refinement is simply further along.15

The chart is where you start. The parts that light up are the seed, and everyone is also conditioned by the people around them (if nobody else, then the parents or whoever did the caretaking). With a caretaker’s chart beside yours, specific influences come into view: the kinds of information they gave you consistent access to, the trellis you grew along. All of that is read from information that is publicly available.

What it says about itself

We’d rather you hear its own claims than our summary of them. Here they are, the humble ones and the large ones side by side.

“Don’t believe me.”

Ra Uru Hu, as a student recalls him saying during a reading, before telling them to experiment and find out for themselves. Jovian Archive, “Don’t Believe Me”7

“it’s not about believing; and it certainly isn’t about believing me.”

Ra Uru Hu. Jovian Archive, “Your Truth”8

“Your mind is not for decision making.”

Ra Uru Hu, who presents it as something that had never been said before. Jovian Archive, “The Mind is Not for Decision Making”9

Deconditioning: “the seven-year cellular process of transferring decision making from your mind to your Inner Authority by following the Strategy of your Type.”

Jovian Archive, Human Design Dictionary. Ra put a number on it so that nobody would mistake seeing their chart for living it. Deconditioning means doing your homework: sitting with each activation and watching yourself do the things the chart says you do, for years. The seven is a marker for the long view, borrowed from the popular idea that the body renews itself every seven years. That idea is part folk and part science: carbon dating of humun cells puts the average age of an adult’s cells at around seven to ten years, though some, like most of the brain’s neurons, stay for life. The seven is never a finish line: Ra is remembered saying he was still deconditioning in his third cycle. The rest of your life is about the right length for that process. 😉10,59

“You are unique. You have no choice. Love yourself.”

Ra Uru Hu’s own mantra, as he describes it in The Line Companion (Jovian Archive). See also Jovian Archive, “Love Yourself”.11

“if you push, if you initiate like an energy being, bitterness arrives. It always does.”

On the Projector type (Coordinator, in the names we use). Jovian Archive, “What is a Projector in Human Design?”. This is the texture of the advice: specific and unhedged. No judgment in Humun Design, though: bitterness here is a signal, the other end of the same spectrum as success.12

“The Science of Differentiation.”

The subtitle of The Definitive Book of Human Design by Ra Uru Hu and Lynda Bunnell, which its publisher describes as “a concrete map to the nature of being”. The same tradition says Humun Design “is not a belief system”.13,14

When read together, those show a tension. The same tradition that says “don’t believe me” also calls itself a science and tells you that you have no choice. We don’t resolve that for you. We just want you to see it before you decide how to hold the rest.

What it doesn’t claim, and what we don’t

If a practitioner ever tells you that your chart requires you to do something, they have left the framework. Everything in it rests on your own authority. What’s useful is yours to take and the rest is yours to leave, and that includes the authority to put the whole thing down.

What the critics say

Wikipedia opens its article by calling Human Design “a pseudoscientific theory and practice described as a holistic self-knowledge system”.17

Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid podcast spent an episode on it and concluded that it “lacks any theoretical basis and any set of falsifiable predictions that can be tested”. He also generated a chart for a birth he made up and got a complete, confident description. A chart describes a birth moment, and someone is born in almost every minute, so the chart he drew is probably somebody’s. His point stands in the form that matters: the system will describe any moment with the same confidence, and whether a reading fits the persun in front of it is the only test there is.18

The best-known study behind the “it fits anyone” objection is older than Humun Design. In 1949 Bertram Forer gave 39 students what they believed were persunal profiles. Everyone received the same text, assembled from an astrology book, and they rated its accuracy at 4.26 out of 5. The effect now carries his name. Does that settle it? No. It settles what kind of claim this is, and it is the reason the useful parts of a reading are the parts specific enough to be wrong.20

Two tests come close to the heart of it, and we would rather you heard about them from us. In 1985 Shawn Carlson published a double-blind test of astrology in Nature: astrologers matching birth charts to persunality profiles did no better than chance. In 2003 Geoffrey Dean and Ivan Kelly followed more than two thousand “time twins”, people born in London within minutes of each other, and found them no more alike than chance predicts. Neither tested Humun Design by name. Both tested the premise it shares with astrology, that the minute of birth describes the persun, and both found nothing. Nobody has run the same test on a Humun Design chart, that we know of.21,22

What exists beyond that is field use. 64keys says its software has been “tried and tested for many years by thousands of coaches, therapists and management consultants”, and practitioners have been running their own informal experiments since 1992. That is experience which is worth something, and it is not a controlled study.16

Here is what would change our minds. If readings written for the wrong chart fit people as well as readings written for their own, with people who did not know which was which, then the specific parts of this are worth nothing, and this page would say so. That test is cheap, and a small version of it is in the cards below. The critics are right that the evidence, in the laboratory sense, isn’t there. We would rather say that here than have you discover it later and wonder what else we left out.

If you like Myers-Briggs

Plenty of people who wouldn’t touch astrology will happily tell you they’re an INFJ, and plenty of companies pay to type their whole staff. The publisher says about two million people take the Myers-Briggs each year, and that most of the Fortune 500 use it in hiring or training; those are its own figures.55 It is also a framework for self-reflection. Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, neither of them a psychologist by training, built it from Carl Jung’s 1921 book Psychological Types, and it was first published as a test in 1962.56

The research on it is mixed. In a 1993 review, David Pittenger reported that even with a five-week gap, “as many as 50 percent of the people will be classified into a different type” on retest.24 In 1989, McCrae and Costa found that the four MBTI scales measure aspects of four of the Big Five traits, which have the stronger research record.25 And Jung himself cast horoscopes for difficult cases “to have a further point of view from an entirely different angle”.26

None of that is a dig. Companies keep paying for it because it gives people words for how they and their coworkers differ, and that is the honest reason to use any of these systems: they give you words for things you half-knew, long before anyone proves them. By that standard, Humun Design is in the same family as the MBTI: a vocabulary chosen for its usefulness, with a stranger origin story and a great deal more detail.

For skeptics

This section is Nate’s. If you were trained in science, or you simply like evidence, you may be here because someone you care about got into this and you’re worried. That is a reasonable response, and for a long time it was mine. I was formally trained as a physicist and hold a master’s degree in applied physics. I have spent ten years as an engineer: half of it in experimental physics labs, building optical and plasma systems, and half as a software engineer, building cloud systems and applications, libraries, frameworks and data visualization solutions. I still live inside what science built, and I build with it every day. Coming into this meant noticing where physics stops being able to say anything at all, and keeping both. This is written for the persun I used to be, and it isn’t trying to win.

What you’re right about

There is no evidence for Humun Design in the sense you mean, and the critics’ section above says exactly how much has been tested and what came of it. Its origin story is a mystical experience, and its vocabulary comes from systems older than the scientific method. If someone presented it to you as a proven discovery about the universe, you would be right to walk away. We don’t present it that way.

What “real” means

The word that kept coming up for me was real. Science’s working answer is what can be measured, repeated and checked by somebody else: the view from nowhere, the philosopher Thomas Nagel called it.31 That answer gave us , and . Taken as the whole definition of real, it also leaves out what it is like to be anyone, because an inner life can’t be handed to a second observer. Nothing you feel passes the test, and none of us lives as if that settled anything. We say “it’s just subjective” as if the subjective were a small side room, when it is the only room anyone has ever been in.

Here is the plainest version. Gravity counts as real because I can drop a cup and you can watch it fall: two people can check it. When someone says “I feel awful today”, that is every bit as true for them as gravity is, and no second observer can check it. Science has no instrument for that kind of truth, and it is the kind each of us lives in.

Psychology is the odd exception. Wilhelm Wundt opened the first psychology laboratory in 1879 and studied consciousness by introspection.44 In 1913 John B. Watson declared psychology “a purely objective experimental branch of natural science”, with no place for introspection, so psychology won its seat among the sciences partly by setting aside the inner life it set out to study.45 When Freud presented his theory of hysteria in Vienna in 1896, the chair of the meeting called it “a scientific fairy tale”,46 and Jung built his later work on years of waking visions he induced on purpose.47 Both are now in every introductory textbook. The inner life did get into science, through a side door, and the men who opened it were called fanciful for it at the time.

So I hold the two as a division of labor. Science is a language for the outer world, and a remarkably reliable one for everything we have built with it. Humun Design is one framework for the inner one: how it is to be this particular persun, alive and conscious. The question it answers is whether something is real to you, and important to you, and science was never built to answer that question.

Further reading: Galileo’s story Open

Most of us know one story about Galileo: the trial. He argued that the Earth moves around the Sun, the Church told him in 1616 not to defend it, and after his 1632 Dialogue the Inquisition found him “vehemently suspect of heresy”. He recanted on his knees in 1633 and lived under house arrest until he died in 1642. The famous “and yet it moves” was first printed more than a century later and is probably legend, and the Church formally admitted its error in 1992, 359 years on.54 That story makes him the hero against belief.

The part fewer people know came ten years before the trial, and it shaped science far more. In 1623, in The Assayer, Galileo wrote that “tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the consciousness.”48 Shape, size, number and motion could be measured, and they stayed in physics. Taste, smell and color went to the perceiver. Galileo never called taste unreal. He moved it out of physics, and physics has been built on that move ever since; the philosopher Philip Goff argues that the modern puzzle of consciousness starts right there.49

Humun Design has a name for the era that began then. In Ra’s account of the great global cycles, the Cross of Planning began in 1615 and runs to 2027, an age of planning, institutions and agreed rules;50 The Assayer was written eight years in. The trial made him the hero of a story against belief systems. He also drew the line that left taste, color and love off the official map, and set the rules of the game everyone has played by since.

The rules of the game

Science also stands on starting points it can’t test with its own method. Induction assumes the future will resemble the past; David Hume saw in 1748 that no experiment can prove that without assuming it.28 The rule that a claim must be falsifiable can’t itself be falsified. Karl Popper, who proposed it, called his rules “the rules of the game of empirical science”.29 Every experiment assumes a shared world that two observers see alike. These are good rules, kept because they keep working, and a careful scientist would tell you so. Hans Reichenbach’s answer is the fair one: if nature has any order, induction will find it, so it is the best bet going.30 I grant that, and I grant the harder point too. All of us live by science’s starting points every day, and Humun Design asks you to add more of them, so the burden of proof sits on our side.32 What the rules of the game show is only this: every framework, science included, rests on something it adopted and can’t prove from the inside, and the honest move is to say which ones.

Further reading: Ohm’s law Open

Take a law nobody doubts. Ohm’s law, from 1827, says the current through a conductor is proportional to the voltage across it, and every circuit built from it behaves accordingly.51 Here is what I mean by a framework ratifying itself:

“Ohm’s law certainly is ground truth in the sense that, if we build things based on Ohm’s law, all of electronics is internally consistent. It behaves the way Ohm’s law describes. Therefore, Ohm’s law must be true. Not necessarily capital-T Truth. It just means that everything we build from that axiom validates that the axiom can describe the systems built from it.”

Nate

Parts that don’t obey the law, like diodes, are called “non-ohmic” rather than counted against it. That is honest bookkeeping, since the law was never meant to cover every material, and it still shows the pattern: a framework draws its own boundary and then finds that everything inside it agrees. The sociologist Harry Collins named a cousin of it, the experimenter’s regress: we trust the experiment because it got the right result, and trust the result because a good experiment produced it.52 The philosopher Ian Hacking gives the fair reply: once we use electrons as tools to build other things, our confidence in them is no longer purely circular.53 Both are true, and that is the point of the rules of the game.

Who got counted

Scientific evidence is only as wide as what got counted, and for most of its history science was built, practiced and checked by men. Wimin were kept out of the academies and the universities, and when they did the work the credit often went to someone else. So until very recently, the framework that decides what counts as real and what counts as truth was built from the observations of half of humunity. The method itself holds up; the room it was practiced in left half of us out. That doesn’t make Humun Design true. It does make “only science can tell us what is real” a smaller claim than it sounds.

This needs to be set against the missing laboratory evidence, too: the I Ching is more than three thousand years of people reading patterns in humun lives, and more than thirty years of charts landing for people is not nothing. You can weigh that as accumulated experience or as the pull of a good story; the cards below take both seriously.

Further reading: science as a boys’ club Open

Wimin were let into science within living memory. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, elected its first two wimin in 1945;34 the French Académie des sciences elected its first in 1979.35 Harvard would not grant Cecilia Payne a doctorate in 1925, so hers came from Radcliffe,33 and Cambridge gave wimin full degrees only in 1948.36

When wimin did the work, the credit often went elsewhere. Lise Meitner explained nuclear fission, and the 1944 Nobel Prize went to Otto Hahn alone.38 Chien-Shiung Wu ran the experiment that overturned a law of physics, and the prize went to the two men who had proposed it.37 Jocelyn Bell Burnell found the first pulsars as a graduate student, and the 1974 prize went to her supervisor.39 Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray work on DNA, including the image now called Photo 51, reached James Watson and Francis Crick through colleagues before she had published it. She died in 1958, the 1962 Nobel Prize went to Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins, and historians now count her an equal contributor to the double helix.57 Wimin were left out as subjects too: in the United States, medical trials were required to include them only from 1993, so a great deal of what medicine knows about the body was learned on men’s bodies.40

None of that is the method’s fault. Within its reach, the outer world that two observers can check, the method works, and Payne, Meitner, Wu and Bell Burnell were all right by it. The room is another matter. For most of the history of science, the knowledge kept outside that room, about how a particular persun is built, got other names (old wives’ tales, intuition, hysteria) and was not counted. So when someone says only science can tell us what is real, it is worth remembering whose observations science was built from.

My own experiment

The edges are where it gets interesting. Observe only 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 and you will write a tidy rule, and the next number might be 17. When it is, the honest move is to write a bigger rule that has room for the 17, rather than calling it noise and keeping the tidy one. My experiment, run in the only laboratory I have, is this: here is a framework that says my life will go easier if I live by it, and I am living by it to see whether it does. That is a test I can fail, and so far it hasn’t failed.

Here are the concerns we hear most, in the words we hear them.

“It’s dangerous.”

 What’s true in it

It can be. Self-knowledge systems hurt people in known ways:

  • When they are sold as truth.
  • When someone uses one instead of getting help they need.
  • When a practitioner with influence over a vulnerable persun starts giving instructions.
  • When a reading becomes the reason to cut someone off or make a big decision.
  • When it becomes a way to make money from people who are hurting.
What we do about it

We present it as a framework and say so on every page. We give no medical, legal or financial advice. We say plainly when a reading isn’t enough, and we point you toward someone who can help. We make no predictions. Every decision stays with you. And nothing is hidden: how the chart is built, where the meanings come from, and Rebecca’s own chart, which is on this page.

“It’s vague enough to fit anyone.”

 What’s true in it

Much of it is. Forer showed in 1949 that people will rate a generic sketch as highly accurate when they think it is about them, and a one-line typing (“you’re a Builder, so you have lots of energy”) is exactly that kind of sketch.

What we do about it

We spend our attention on the parts specific enough to be wrong. A reading that says only flattering things that would fit your neighbor is a bad reading, whatever system it came from. A fair test, and one anyone can run: a reading written for someone else’s chart, read as if it were yours. If it fits as well as your own, you have learned something true about readings, and we would want to know. A free account at 64keys gives you your chart and a friend theirs, which is all the test needs.

“It says you’re fixed at birth. Where’s the room to change?”

 What’s true in it

The chart doesn’t change, and the system says so without softening it: “You have no choice.”

What it means

What is fixed is described as temperament, the hand you were dealt. Your life isn’t in the chart. The chart is your starter seed packet: it names what you were planted with, not where conscious cultivation takes the plant. Every humun is meant to grow fully capable of owning every piece of the chart, defined and undefined alike. The chart only shows which pieces you started with, and which you get to study until you have wisdom in them that you didn’t start with. Mastering what it means to be a whole humun is everyone’s job. None of us is confined by where we started; we are only defined by it. Chaos theory has a picture for this: a tiny difference in starting conditions flourishes into a whole different shape.

The system’s own word for change is deconditioning: dropping the habits you picked up from other people that were never yours. That is the entire practice: going downstream instead of upstream, as we say around here, borrowing the phrase from Esther Hicks41, working with the wiring you have instead of against it. The chart lays out initial traits; the path is yours. So is it fate? No more than temperament is. Whether the rest is true of people is for you to judge.

“It borrows credibility from the planets and the math.”

 What’s true in it

It does, constantly. The chart is built from real astronomy. The literature mentions neutrinos. Practitioners say “mechanics”. None of that connects the numbers to the meanings, and dressing a mythology in the language of physics borrows trust it hasn’t earned.

What we do about it

We won’t use the precision of the calculation as an argument for anything, and the neutrino story above is told with the physics in its place. If we ever say “the math is real” as if it settled something, that is a fair thing to call us on.

“You could make one up from rocks, or the seasons, or tea leaves.”

 What’s true in it

You could, and people have. Tarot, runes, the Enneagram, the Myers-Briggs, your grandmother’s sayings. Any set of symbols rich enough will prompt reflection.

Our answer

Then a system is tested by its use. Does it give you words you didn’t have? Does it point your attention at something you can then check in your own life? This is the one we found useful. We won’t argue that it is special, and it isn’t the only one we use: around here it sits next to Chinese astrology and face reading as a quick-and-dirty cross-check, and in our experience they tend to tell the same story.

A thought experiment: one cup of tea leaves, two readers

A good tool gives the same answer to whoever picks it up. A thermometer doesn’t care whose hand it’s in, and by that standard tea leaves fail at once: anyone could make up an equally compelling system from nothing.

Now follow it to the edge. One cup of leaves, two readers. One walks away and does something reckless. The other walks away thinking, “The rat race is making me miserable, and this helped me see it. I’m going to go live free.” Same leaves, two lives. What did the work was neither the leaves alone nor the reader alone: it was what each reader brought to the cup, their timing, their sensitivity, how ready they were to hear it.

The interchangeable observer works beautifully for thermometers and quietly fails almost everywhere else. The same sentence from a friend lands as cruelty or as rescue depending on the day. The research cuts both ways. Steven Levitt found that people who let a coin flip push them into a big change were, on average, glad they did. Forer showed that almost anyone will rate a vague sketch of themselves as accurate, so a reading feeling true is no evidence that it is. Both hold at once: the leaves may know nothing, and the reader still matters.23

“Doesn’t it take away your agency?”

 What’s true in it

Used badly, yes. Anything that tells you who you are can become an excuse. “I’m a Coordinator, so I don’t initiate” is a cage with a nice label on it. No judgment; everyone builds one at some point.

The direction we aim for

From the inside out. The framework prompts you; you notice; you decide. If it ever starts deciding for you, you have stopped using it and started obeying it. We will say so if we see it happening.

“If it were real, science would have found it by now.”

 What’s true in it

Science finds things. If the minute of birth shaped a persun as much as the system says, the pattern would have turned up in somebody’s data by now, and in the two tests of the shared premise above it didn’t. Nobody has run that test on a Humun Design chart, and nobody with a grant has looked.

Our answer

Our answer is to distrust the room and trust the method where it reaches. Within that reach, the outer world that two observers can check, it works, and it is not what we are arguing with here. The room is another matter. The Royal Society was founded in 1660 and elected its first two wimin in 1945. Cecilia Payne worked out in 1925 that the stars are mostly hydrogen; the leading astronomer of the day called the result impossible, she wrote into her thesis that it was “almost certainly not real”, and he published it himself four years later. Chien-Shiung Wu ran the experiment, over Christmas 1956, that overturned a law of physics, and the Nobel went to the two men who had proposed it. Both were right by the method and overruled by the room. For most of the history of science, the knowledge kept outside those rooms, by the people they kept out, got other names and was not counted (more on that above). Humun Design is exactly as untested after all that as before. What changes is how much “science hasn’t found it” weighs, and it is why the test we trust most is the one you run in your own life.33,34,37

“Why the moment of birth? Why 88 degrees? Why the planets?”

 What the system says

The system has an answer for each, and it is the system’s own. The birth moment imprints the persunality. The Design is taken from the moment the Sun stood 88 degrees of arc earlier, about three months before birth, which Ra taught is when consciousness enters the body. The planets and their positions come from Western astrology, sorted into the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching.

What nobody has shown

A mechanism. No one has measured anything happening to a fetus at 88 degrees, or traced a path from a planet’s position to a persun’s temperament, and we won’t invent one. These are the rules of this particular game, as Ra set them down from 1987 on. The vocabulary is useful without taking the rules as physics, and each of us decides how far to take them.

“What about therapy?”

 How the two fit

They are two different things, and they work well together. A reading is not therapy. A chart gives you language for parts of your being, and for how you meet the world and other people, that you may never have had words for. That language is something to bring into therapy, where someone trained can help you work with what it opens up. When help is needed, it comes first. The chart will keep.

One more thing, since the subject is therapy: the design of your therapist matters too, and it matters a lot. A center your therapist has defined and you have undefined flavors the session one way; a center you both have defined flavors it another. Peter Schoeber’s book on the centers walks through each of those pairings, and we found it eye-opening for looking at therapy and choosing a therapist. It is worth knowing before you choose who to sit across from.60

“Is it a cult?”

 What’s true in it

Humun Design isn’t an organization you join; it is a body of ideas with many teachers, some of whom disagree with each other. Parts of the community, though, have a habit that deserves the worry: the information gets gatekept. Some programs charge a great deal before a student learns enough to read their own chart, and some certification ladders work much like a multi-level marketing scheme, where the way to earn back what you paid is to recruit and certify the next round of practitioners.

What we do about it

We give the basics away. Everything about your own chart is free here, and we would happily be made obsolete. The warning signs are the same anywhere, here included: a teacher who can’t be questioned, secrecy about how things work, pressure to spend more, pressure to cut people off, people being told what to do. Our rule for ourselves is that students should evaluate their teachers, and that goes for Ra Uru Hu too.

If someone you love is into it

You don’t need to decide whether Humun Design is true to tell whether it is doing someone good. How they are using it tells you. Nobody knows all of it: the system runs far deeper than the numbers on a chart, and every chart is lived through years of conditioning on top. So it holds up as a tool, a language for looking at yourself, and it goes wrong when it turns into a belief system, because then someone is believing a summary.

Using it as a tool

  • They use it to look at themselves, and talk about what they noticed.
  • They hold it loosely, and say “I don’t know that part yet.”
  • They test it against their own life and drop what doesn’t fit.
  • It informs their decisions, and the decisions stay theirs.
  • They can laugh about it, and show you their chart without needing you to agree.

Using it as a belief system

  • A one-line reading has turned into rules: “the chart says I can’t.”
  • They have become didactic, telling other people what their type means they must do.
  • People get cut off because of a reading, or a type.
  • A practitioner is giving instructions instead of advice.
  • Money keeps going to someone who says more is needed before they can understand their own chart.

A question opens more doors than a verdict. “What has it given you?” gets a truer answer than “that’s not real”. It is also what we would ask of you in return: make a judgment by its use, and we will do the same.

How we hold it

Here is what we actually do with it, in three moves.

  1. We get the vocabulary. A reading gives you names for patterns you may already half-know. That is its first and largest gift.
  2. We pick one thing specific enough to be wrong. “I’m a Builder” is too broad to test. “When I say yes from my head instead of my gut, I resent it within a week” is about the right size.
  3. We try it for a few months and keep what holds. A misfit counts as evidence just as much as a fit, and we would rather hear about it. In our experience the sentence that makes you say “that’s not me at all” is often where the work starts, so it earns a little time before it goes on the shelf; if it still doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit. (The 5th gate story on the home page is the worked example.)

That is the whole method: a tool, used one piece at a time, checked against a life. Nobody has to take the system whole, and nobody could, since there is more of it than any of us will ever learn.

Our rules for ourselves

When we write about a chart, we try to describe only what we can see. In Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, a Fair Witness asked the color of a house on a hill answers, “It’s white on this side.” That is the standard: this is what the chart says, this is what you told us, this is what we noticed. Never: this is who you are.42

Still curious?

Everything about your own chart is free. That’s the deal. The free chart on our home page draws your chart and gives some introductory words on each part of it. While our own software is still being built, a free account at 64keys.com holds the fuller reading we don’t have yet: the deeper layers like colors, tones and bases, Penta interactions, and the other fancy things. Rebecca’s own chart is right here on this page, so you can see the bias; the neutrino weather reports on YouTube walk through the basics; and a report on your own chart is a birth date, time and place away by email. Knowing yourself is a birthright. If everybody learned their design for free and we went out of business, we would count that a success.

With all thanks to 64keys 🙏 for their years of hard work in the field of Humun Design: carrying Ra’s knowledge forward, keeping it alive and growing, and helping so many of us learn it.

A live session is typically where your chart meets somebody else’s: a partner, a kid, a friend, a team, or Rebecca’s own. What the two of you make between you, who supplies what, where the pull and the friction are wired in, which of your gates gets overridden by their channel: that only shows up when charts overlap, and it is where Rebecca earns her groceries. Nobody starts a session at the bottom of the mountain. You start at home, with the free part under your belt, and then we climb. A trade is always on the table. Pass on by if it’s not your thing; this page isn’t going anywhere.

Ask about a session

Take care of yourselves, folks. Ciao.

Sources

The 57 sources, by section

Humun Design’s own

  1. Jovian Archive, “Ra Uru Hu”. The origin story: January 3–11, 1987.
  2. International Human Design School, “Ra Uru Hu”.
  3. Jovian Archive, “About Human Design”, on the neutrino claim.
  4. Jovian Archive, “Personality vs. Design”.
  5. Jovian Archive, “The Magnetic Monopole and Human Design”, on the 88 degrees.
  6. Jovian Archive, “The Nine Centers of the BodyGraph”, on open centers.
  7. Jovian Archive, “Don’t Believe Me”.
  8. Jovian Archive, “Your Truth”.
  9. Jovian Archive, “The Mind is Not for Decision Making”.
  10. Jovian Archive, Human Design Dictionary: Deconditioning.
  11. Ra Uru Hu, The Line Companion (Jovian Archive). The “You are unique” mantra. See also Jovian Archive, “Love Yourself”.
  12. Jovian Archive, “What is a Projector in Human Design?”.
  13. Ra Uru Hu and Lynda Bunnell, The Definitive Book of Human Design: The Science of Differentiation (IHDS, 2011). Publisher’s page.
  14. Jovian Archive, “What is Human Design? A Beginner’s Guide to the System”.
  15. 64keys, FAQ, on the type names.
  16. 64keys, on the software.

Critics and research

  1. Wikipedia, “Human Design”.
  2. Brian Dunning, “The Human Design System”, Skeptoid #770 (2021).
  3. The Skeptic’s Dictionary, newsletter, 2011, on the neutrino claim.
  4. Bertram R. Forer, “The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 44 (1949), 118–123. doi:10.1037/h0059240. See also Wikipedia, “Barnum effect”.
  5. Shawn Carlson, “A double-blind test of astrology”, Nature 318 (1985), 419–425. doi:10.1038/318419a0.
  6. Geoffrey Dean and Ivan W. Kelly, “Is Astrology Relevant to Consciousness and Psi?”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, no. 6–7 (2003), 175–198. The time-twins study.
  7. Steven D. Levitt, “Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness”, Review of Economic Studies 88 (2021), 378–405. doi:10.1093/restud/rdaa016.
  8. David J. Pittenger, “Measuring the MBTI… and coming up short”, Journal of Career Planning and Employment 54 (1993), 48–52. ResearchGate.
  9. Robert R. McCrae and Paul T. Costa Jr., “Reinterpreting the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator from the perspective of the five-factor model of personality”, Journal of Personality 57 (1989), 17–40. doi:10.1111/j.1467-6494.1989.tb00759.x.
  10. C. G. Jung, letter to B. V. Raman, 6 September 1947, in Letters, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 1973), 475–476.

Science and its history

  1. Nobel Prize in Physics 2015, summary: neutrino oscillations, which show that neutrinos have mass. The 1980 claim is V. A. Lubimov et al., Physics Letters B 94 (1980), 266–268, later refuted; the February 1987 limit is from SN 1987A.
  2. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), section IV. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “The Problem of Induction”.
  3. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934; English edition 1959), section 11, on methodological rules as “the rules of the game of empirical science”.
  4. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (University of Chicago Press, 1938), on induction as the best bet. See Schurz on Reichenbach’s argument.
  5. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford University Press, 1986). See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Scientific Objectivity”.
  6. Susan Haack, Defending Science, Within Reason (Prometheus, 2003), on science as continuous with everyday inquiry.
  7. Wikipedia, “Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin”: the 1925 thesis, her Radcliffe degree and Russell’s 1929 paper.
  8. Wikipedia, “Kathleen Lonsdale”, one of the Royal Society’s first two wimin Fellows, 1945.
  9. Wikipedia, “Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat”, the first womun elected to the Académie des sciences, 1979.
  10. Rita McWilliams Tullberg, Women at Cambridge (Cambridge University Press, revised 1998): full degrees for wimin from 1948.
  11. Wikipedia, “Wu experiment”: the result over Christmas 1956, and the 1957 Nobel Prize to Lee and Yang.
  12. Wikipedia, “Lise Meitner”: fission, and the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Otto Hahn.
  13. Wikipedia, “Jocelyn Bell Burnell”: the first pulsars, and the 1974 Nobel Prize to Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle.
  14. Wikipedia, “NIH Revitalization Act of 1993”: wimin required in federally funded clinical trials.

Other

  1. Esther and Jerry Hicks, Ask and It Is Given (Hay House, 2004), on going downstream.
  2. Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961). The Fair Witness scene is quoted at Wikiquote.
  3. Alcoholics Anonymous, The Twelve Traditions, Tradition Eleven.

Psychology, Galileo and inner experience

  1. Mississippi State University, “Wilhelm Wundt and the first psychology laboratory”, Leipzig, 1879.
  2. John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”, Psychological Review 20 (1913), 158–177. Classics in the History of Psychology.
  3. Wikipedia, “Freud’s seduction theory”: Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s “a scientific fairy tale”, 1896.
  4. C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, edited by Sonu Shamdasani (W. W. Norton, 2009). See Wikipedia, “The Red Book (Jung)”.
  5. Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (1623). Quoted in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Primary and Secondary Qualities”.
  6. Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (Pantheon, 2019). Wikipedia.
  7. Ra Uru Hu, on the global cycles and the Cross of Planning, 1615 to 2027, as taught through Jovian Archive.

More on method, Galileo’s trial, the Myers-Briggs and Franklin

  1. Wikipedia, “Ohm’s law”: Georg Ohm, 1827, and non-ohmic devices.
  2. Harry Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (Sage, 1985). See Wikipedia, “Experimenter’s regress”.
  3. Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening (Cambridge University Press, 1983). See Wikipedia, “Ian Hacking”.
  4. Wikipedia, “Galileo affair”: the 1616 injunction, the 1633 sentence, house arrest until 1642, and John Paul II’s 1992 acknowledgment.
  5. The Myers-Briggs Company, “MBTI myths” infographic: about two million people a year; the Fortune 500 figure is the publisher’s own, as reported by Live Science.
  6. The Myers-Briggs Company, “Myers-Briggs history”: Briggs and Myers, Jung’s Psychological Types (1921), and the first published version through Educational Testing Service, 1962.
  7. Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort, “What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure”, Nature 616 (2023), 657–660.
  8. Plato, Apology 38a, Socrates at his trial, 399 BCE.
  9. Kirsty L. Spalding, Ratan D. Bhardwaj, Bruce A. Buchholz, Henrik Druid and Jonas Frisén, “Retrospective birth dating of cells in humans”, Cell 122 (2005), 133–143: carbon dating puts the average age of an adult’s cells at seven to ten years, with most cortical neurons as old as the persun.
  10. Peter Schoeber, The Human Design System, The Centres: how each center flavors the meeting of two persuns, defined with undefined and defined with defined, therapist and client included.
  11. Neil Ashby, “Relativity in the Global Positioning System”, Living Reviews in Relativity 6 (2003): the satellite clocks’ net gain of about 38 microseconds a day.
  12. Wikipedia, “Faraday’s law of induction”: Michael Faraday, 1831, and the generators built on it.
  13. Wikipedia, “Wright brothers”: the 1901 wind tunnel, some two hundred wing shapes, and the 1903 flight.

Each small number on the page links to its source here. Where a source has no link, it is a book or a journal behind a paywall. Links last checked October 2026.

Rebecca Jolli

the Jolly Alchemist

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