The History of Human Design and Ra Uru Hu's 1987 Revelation
A Syncretic Mystery at the End of the Twentieth Century
Human Design emerged as a fully formed metaphysical synthesis in the closing decades of the twentieth century, yet its origins are unlike those of any other modern divinatory system. It is not a tradition passed from teacher to student, nor a philosophy refined over generations. It arrived, by Ra Uru Hu's own account, as a direct transmission. To understand Human Design is to understand the singular circumstances of that reception and the long, disciplined incubation that followed.
The Man Before the System
The figure known as Ra Uru Hu was born Alan Robert Krakower on January 8, 1948, in Montreal, Canada. Before 1987, he had no particular reputation as a spiritual teacher. He worked, traveled, and lived through a period of personal disorientation. Two years before the revelation, a serious motorcycle accident in 1982 left him clinically dead for a brief period, an event he would later describe as a threshold that prepared him for what was to come. By 1986, he was living a largely unremarkable life in Europe, and by his own testimony, had no formal background in astrology, Kabbalah, or the I Ching.
The Voice on Ibiza: January 3, 1987
The pivotal event occurred between January 3 and January 11, 1987, while Ra was living on the island of Ibiza. On the night of January 3, he reported being awakened by a presence, often described simply as "the Voice," which began to dictate a coherent body of information. This was not a single night of insight but an extended transmission lasting approximately eight days and nights, during which the complete architecture of what would become the Human Design System was delivered: the BodyGraph, the nine Centers, the Channels, the Gates, the Types, the Authorities, and the Incarnation Crosses.
Ra described the transmission as a non-physical intelligence delivering exact, mathematically precise knowledge. He consistently rejected the idea that he had invented the system, insisting that he was its recorder rather than its author. This claim, central to the system's identity, has been both its greatest appeal and its most persistent point of external skepticism.
The Incubation Years: 1987 to 1992
Following the transmission, Ra entered a period of deep study, refusing to publish or teach for nearly five years. During this incubation, he immersed himself in the classical systems the transmission had apparently synthesized: Western astrology, particularly the tropical zodiac and planetary mechanics; the I Ching and its 64 hexagrams; the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, including its 32 paths of consciousness; the Hindu-Brahmin chakra system, recast as the nine Centers of the BodyGraph; and contemporary quantum physics and neutrino astronomy.
The synthesis was not merely additive. Ra mapped each system onto the next, producing a unified chart, the BodyGraph, in which the 64 Gates, 36 Channels, 9 Centers, 4 Types, and countless sub-structures function as a single coherent map of human differentiation. The 12 Signs of the zodiac were assigned to the 12 Houses in a specific wheel; the 22 paths of the Kabbalah were overlaid onto the 36 Channels. The result was unprecedented in its structural ambition.
The First Publications and Early Teaching
In 1992, Ra released the initial material under the title The Human Design System of Distinction. The early years of teaching were modest. A small circle of students gathered in Montreal and later in other locations. Among them was Lynda Bunn, who became Ra's close collaborator and eventually his wife, and who would help shape the early curriculum and the foundational texts of the system.
The teaching proceeded in a particular order, known in the community as "the Penta," the five progressive courses that introduce the BodyGraph, Type and Strategy, Authority, the Incarnation Cross, and the Channels. This pedagogical sequence was itself given during the original transmission and became the canonical path for every subsequent student of the system.
The Founding of Jovian Archive
In 1996, Ra founded the Jovian Archive Corporation, named after the astrological association of Jupiter, to publish, protect, and distribute the body of knowledge. From the late 1990s onward, the system began to spread internationally through lectures, training programs, and eventually digital media. Ra relocated to Ericeira, Portugal, where the Jovian Archive remains headquartered.
Later Years and the Question of Continuity
The 2000s saw Human Design's most rapid expansion, with professional training programs, a growing network of certified Analysts, and an expanding library of "Rave" publications covering everything from Partnership Analysis to the architecture of the "Magnetic Monopole" and the deeper mechanics of the Incarnation Crosses of the 1921–1926 transit window.
Ra Uru Hu died on June 12, 2011. Before his passing, he named a small group of senior students as custodians of the work, a decision that has shaped the institutional structure of the Jovian Archive ever since. Controversies regarding interpretation, transmission claims by others, and questions of lineage have continued to surface, yet the core curriculum remains substantially as it was dictated in 1987.
Why the History Matters
For the student of the BodyGraph, the history of the system is not merely biographical curiosity. Ra Uru Hu's insistence on a non-personal, transmissive origin, and his subsequent decision to structure the teaching as a fixed body of knowledge rather than a personal lineage, has direct implications for how the work is practiced today. There is no Human Design in the sense of ongoing revelation; there is only the system, delivered in 1987, and the experiment of living it.