Human Design chart

How it works

A Human Design chart is computed from three things: the date of birth, the clock time, and the time zone of the place. The place itself is not used, because every position is taken as seen from the centre of the Earth. From them the engine finds two moments and takes the positions of thirteen bodies at each: the Sun, the Earth (the point opposite the Sun), the Moon, the north and south lunar nodes, and the eight planets from Mercury to Pluto.

Two moments. The first set, which the school calls the Personality, is the sky at the recorded time of birth. The second, the Design, is the sky at the moment the Sun's longitude was exactly 88 degrees less than at birth. The engine measures this in degrees, not days: it searches for the moment and stops when it is within a billionth of a degree. Because the Sun moves a little faster in January than in July, the interval is between 86.6 and 92.0 days, depending on the time of year. The school says the Personality is what a person knows of themselves and the Design what they do not, and explains the 88 degrees with its own account of when the conscious mind takes hold; both are its teaching, and we state them as such.

The wheel. The zodiac is divided into 64 gates of 5°37′30″ each, starting with gate 41 at 2° Aquarius and running in a fixed order of Ra Uru Hu's: 41, 19, 13, 49, 30, 55 and on round to 60. Each gate takes its number from one of the I Ching's 64 hexagrams. The order is Shao Yong's 11th-century circle of the hexagrams, turned, an arrangement first printed in 1992; it is not an I Ching teaching. Each gate has six lines, each line six colours, each colour six tones and each tone five bases: 69,120 bases of 18.75 arcseconds round the circle. A position is written by gate and line, as 60.4.

Channels and centres. The figure has nine centres joined by 36 channels, and each channel has a gate at each end. A channel is defined when both its gates are activated, by either set of positions; a centre is defined when a defined channel reaches it. Every gate belongs to one centre. The centres carry names taken from parts of the body, and the schools' pairing of them with organs and glands, which came from the Western chakra books of the 1920s, is the system's association and not anatomy. In the system's own terms, the centres and the gates in each are:

What the chart prints. From the defined centres the engine reads, by the school's published rules:

• Type. No defined centre: Reflector. A defined Sacral: Generator, or Manifesting Generator if a motor connects to the Throat. Otherwise Manifestor if a motor reaches the Throat through defined channels, and Projector if not. The same rule is in every engine we checked.
• Strategy, the school's advice for each type, printed as the engine gives it: "Wait to respond" (Generator), "Wait to respond, then inform" (Manifesting Generator), "Wait for the invitation" (Projector), "Inform before acting" (Manifestor), "Wait a lunar cycle" (Reflector), which we explain as a full lunar cycle, about a month.
• Authority, the school's name for how each person is advised to decide: the first defined centre in the order Solar Plexus, Sacral, Spleen, Heart, G; then "Mental" for any other defined centre, and "Lunar" for none.
• Definition, how many separate groups the defined centres form, from none to four; profile, the line of the Personality Sun over the line of the Design Sun, such as 4/6, with the school's six line names; and the incarnation cross, a name the school gives to the four Sun and Earth gates of both sets, with its angle.

The engine also gives the finer labels some schools use (two kinds of Ego authority, three kinds of Projector, a simple or wide split) by the published rules; other tools can label the same chart differently, so we say so beside them.

A worked example. The sample person in Figure 1 was born at 19:17 in Ann Arbor, Michigan on 19 January 1989, which is 00:17 on 20 January in universal time. Their Design moment is 03:03:21 on 25 October 1988, 87 days earlier. The Sun was in gate 60, line 4, at birth and in gate 50, line 6, at the Design moment, so the profile is 4/6 and the cross is the Right Angle Cross of Laws (60/56 | 50/3). Five channels are defined; the Sacral is defined but no motor reaches the Throat, so the type is Generator; the Solar Plexus is defined, so the authority is emotional; the defined centres form two groups, a split definition.

Checked. On 445 births from 1900 to 2050, across 24 time zones and both hemispheres, every one of the 11,570 positions agreed with an independent calculation to the base, and so did every channel, centre, type, authority, profile and cross. After the engine audit of 14 October 2026 the check was repeated on 450 births, with the same result; three public calculators returned the same charts. That is a check of the arithmetic, not of anything the chart is said to mean.

Origins and history

The system is less than forty years old, but it borrows from older sources, and the order in which those reached it matters for what its claims are.

Read in that order, the sources are clearer than the system's account of them. The hexagrams are about 2,800 years old and the circle of them Ra used is Shao Yong's; the seven chakras it cites are a Western scheme of the early 20th century; the genetic parallel is of 1969; the neutrino burst came weeks after the Voice; and the types, with their strategies, were taught from 1997.

The 64 gates

Each gate has its own page: the hexagram it takes its number from, with a short quotation from Legge's translation of 1882; where it sits on the wheel and in which centre; the channels it ends; the gate opposite it; the crosses it names; and our own reading. The gates are grouped here by centre.

Variants and what we leave out

The calculation is the same in every school; the words differ. Where tools disagree, we say what we do.

• The node. We use the true lunar node, as Jovian's own software and every engine we checked do; the mean node is available on request, and it moves only the two node positions, by up to about 2 degrees.
• A birth time in a daylight-saving change. A time that falls in the hour skipped in spring is read with the offset in force before the change, and a time that occurs twice in autumn as its first occurrence, as two of the three public calculators read them; one reads the gap the other way. The engine flags either case, because the hour is ambiguous.
• The finer labels. Two kinds of Ego authority, three kinds of Projector and a simple or wide split are given by the rules pyhd documents from the Definitive Book. Jovian's public dictionary has no entries for them, and other tools can label the same chart differently.
• Two wrong wheels. One open-source package starts gate 41 at 0° Aries and fixes the Design moment at 89.28 days; another shifts every gate by 150 arcseconds. Both are recorded so nobody copies them.
• Gate names. Several sets circulate. Ours equals the Definitive Book's gate titles on 51 gates, as the pyhd tables cite them; on 13 it differs, five in form and eight in substance, and the pages of those 13 give the book's title beside ours. Two of ours, 25 Innocence and 61 Inner Truth, are also common English names of the hexagrams; on our pages a gate name is never the hexagram's name.
• What we do not compute. The schools also read meanings into the circuits, give each line a planet that exalts or weakens it, cast daily transits, compare two charts, and read the colour, tone and base as further variables, including a scheme of advice about the body that we will not give. We print the circuit names only and compute none of the rest.
• The line texts. Each gate's six lines have texts in Ra Uru Hu's books, which are in copyright. We do not quote or paraphrase them, and our gate pages do not describe the lines one by one.
• Gene Keys. Richard Rudd's system of 2009 reads the same 26 positions on the same wheel in its own words; our Gene Keys Profile computes it in our own words, and each gate page links to its key.
• Other schools. Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler's line, which later dropped the types; Chetan Parkyn's books; Karen Curry Parker's school; and many later teachers use the same calculation with their own vocabularies. We follow the structural rules every engine shares and the words of none of them.
• The hexagram as such. Our I Ching chart names the hexagram of the Sun's gate only as a cross-reference: a gate is a modern placing of a hexagram, not a birth hexagram of the I Ching.

Myths and disputed claims

What is said about Human Design, who says it, and what the record shows. The label is ours.

• Ra Uru Hu was a scientist, trained in physics.

  false

  Who says it: Practitioner articles from 2011, and our own first public page.

  What the record shows: No biography gives him a physics qualification or post. Jovian's own pages describe an advertising agency and a television production company in Toronto, then school teaching on Ibiza.

• The Voice came during the neutrino burst of Supernova 1987A.

  false

  Who says it: Retellings of the founding story, and our old page.

  What the record shows: By his own account the experience began on the evening of 3 January 1987 and lasted eight days. The neutrinos reached the Earth on 23 February 1987, about seven weeks later. The link was made afterwards.

• Neutrinos carry an imprint tied to the planets, which marks a person at birth and 88 degrees of the Sun before.

  unverified

  Who says it: Ra Uru Hu's lectures and Jovian's introduction.

  What the record shows: Neutrinos exist, have mass and pass through the Earth almost unimpeded, tens of billions through each square centimetre every second. That they carry an imprint is the system's claim; no mechanism is offered and nothing tests it.

• Ra Uru Hu said in 1987 that neutrinos have mass, and the Nobel Prize of 2015 proved the system right.

  false

  Who says it: Practitioner sites, and our old page.

  What the record shows: Neutrino mass was an open hypothesis long before 1987. The 2015 prize was for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass. It says nothing about Human Design.

• The system was dictated by a Voice over eight days and nights, while he neither ate, drank nor slept.

  told as lore

  Who says it: Ra Uru Hu's own account, published by Jovian Archive.

  What the record shows: The founder's story of a revelation. It cannot be checked; we tell it as his, with his dates.

• Human Design joins four ancient traditions with genetics and modern physics.

  disputed

  Who says it: The school's introductions; our old page and catalog line.

  What the record shows: The I Ching gives 64 numbers and figures on a wheel of Ra's own; astrology the ephemeris; the Kabbalah's ten sefirot and 22 paths do not map onto nine centres and 36 channels; the seven chakras it cites are a Western scheme of 1919 and 1927. The synthesis is the system's description of itself.

• The 64 gates are the 64 codons of the genetic code, so the chart maps a person's genes.

  false

  Who says it: Popular Human Design and Gene Keys writing.

  What the record shows: Both sets have 64 members because both are built from a small alphabet in groups. The parallel was first suggested in 1969 and tabulated in 1973 as a numerical coincidence; nothing beyond the count matches.

• In 1781, with the discovery of Uranus, humanity began to change from a seven-centred being into a nine-centred one.

  false

  Who says it: Ra Uru Hu's teaching.

  What the record shows: No change in human anatomy or lifespan in 1781 is known; the seven-centred scheme it replaces is itself a 20th-century Western one. It is the system's cosmology, not history.

• The Design moment is a fixed number of days before birth.

  disputed

  Who says it: Many practitioner pages, and our old page.

  What the record shows: It is 88 degrees of the Sun's longitude, which takes 86.6 to 92.0 days depending on the season, because the Sun moves faster in January than in July.

• A Reflector should wait 28 days before a major decision.

  disputed

  Who says it: Some of the school's pages.

  What the record shows: The school gives 28, 28.5 and 29.5 days in different places. The Moon returns to a gate after about 27.3 days and to a phase after about 29.5. We write "a full lunar cycle, about a month".

• The types are shared out among people as fixed percentages.

  disputed

  Who says it: Many practitioner pages.

  What the record shows: No census exists. The figures are the school's own counts of charts people requested, with repeats, or of charts computed at even time steps from 1781 to 2027. Rounded sets differ from page to page.

• A few arcseconds of error can change a channel, so only an elite engine will do.

  disputed

  Who says it: Marketing copy, including our old page.

  What the record shows: Only when a body sits within a few arcseconds of a line or gate boundary. A base is 18.75 arcseconds wide and a line 3,375; our positions agree with an independent calculation to the base.

• Human Design is not a belief but an empirical synthesis of sciences.

  disputed

  Who says it: The school's introductions.

  What the record shows: No experiment tests its claims. The one study found it could not validate Human Design descriptions against a standard personality inventory, and found the Barnum effect in how people rated their readings.

• The chart shows what a person's body needs, and how their health will fare.

  unverified

  Who says it: The schools' teaching on the body, and our old gate pages.

  What the record shows: Health claims with no evidence behind them; our pages and readings make none.

• Each centre is an organ or gland of the body.

  unverified

  Who says it: The schools, after the Western chakra books of the 1920s; our old gate pages.

  What the record shows: The centres carry the names of parts of the body, but their pairing with organs and glands, which the system took from the chakra literature, has no physiological correspondence that anyone has shown. We treat the names as names.

• Jovian Archive owns the system itself.

  disputed

  Who says it: Claims made for the school.

  What the record shows: Jovian owns Ra Uru Hu's writings and recordings, its artwork and its software. A Florence court held in 2020 that the system and its doctrine may be freely described and illustrated. We draw our own chart and write our own words.

• Each gate has one canonical name.

  disputed

  Who says it: Most gate lists.

  What the record shows: Several sets circulate. Ours equals the Definitive Book's titles on 51 gates; on 13 it differs, and those pages give the book's title as a labelled variant.

• An undefined centre makes a person live falsely and act out of fear.

  unverified

  Who says it: The school's teaching about the open centres.

  What the record shows: The system's own scheme, not an observation, and it reads like a diagnosis. We describe an undefined centre as undefined in the chart, which the school reads as open to others' influence.

• The four types were part of the revelation of January 1987.

  disputed

  Who says it: The school's account.

  What the record shows: Ra Uru Hu's first American students say he first presented the types with strategy and authority in Taos in May 1997. Neither account is independent.

• Placing the hexagrams round the zodiac, with hexagram 41 at 2° Aquarius, is an I Ching teaching.

  false

  Who says it: Popular Human Design and Gene Keys writing.

  What the record shows: The wheel is Ra Uru Hu's arrangement: Shao Yong's circle of the 64, of the 11th century, rotated. No Chinese source ties hexagrams to degrees of the zodiac.

Stories and lore

These are told as the school and its founder tell them.

The Voice. Ra Uru Hu told that on the evening of 3 January 1987, living on Ibiza, he was overtaken by a voice whose first words were "Are you ready to work?", and that for eight days and nights he neither ate, drank nor slept while the experience ran through him; when it ended he sat under a fig tree and cried. He insisted he had been a sceptic who would have laughed at anyone telling such a story. An early student, Kumud, told it as seven days and nights; Taschler reports that Ra told him he burned his notes soon after.

The name. He took the name Ra Uru Hu after 1987. Kumud writes simply that he changed his name; the pages of Jovian's we read do not say how it was chosen.

The supernova. The school's introduction sets "the death of a star", Supernova 1987A, beside the revelation of January 1987, and our own old page once made its neutrino burst the moment the system was given. The burst arrived on 23 February 1987, about seven weeks after his start date. The link was made afterwards, and the neutrino became the system's chosen physics.

The neutrino ocean. In a lecture of 2006 Ra described the stream of neutrinos passing through everything as a field each person filters, whose imprint the chart's positions show, and recalled having talked of neutrino mass before physics confirmed it. It is his cosmology: neutrinos are real, the imprint is his teaching.

1781 and 2027. Ra taught that with the discovery of Uranus in 1781 a nine-centred human began to replace a seven-centred one, and that 2027 closes a cycle and begins another. Both are his doctrine.

The first students and the types. Zeno Dickson and Chaitanyo Taschler say they met Ra in 1993 and hosted him in Taos, where in May 1997 he first presented the four types with strategy and authority, after years of teaching other categories; they separated from him in 1999 and 2000. Their line calls itself the original revelation and later dropped the types; the school's line carries the formal curriculum from 2000. Two bodies of teaching, each claiming the founder.

The Florence case. In 2020 Jovian's Italian licensee sued the Italian publisher of Chetan Parkyn's book over its illustrations of the chart and its names. The judge reasoned that if a system speaks of centres and gates, the books that illustrate it must speak of centres and gates, and rejected the claim with costs.

The trade mark that could not be registered. Jovian filed THE HUMAN DESIGN SYSTEM in the United States three times, in 2004, 2022 and 2023, and in the European Union; every word mark was refused or abandoned as descriptive or generic. What registered was the coloured picture of the bodygraph.

Evidence and criticism

No test of the system's claims. Searches for controlled or validation studies found none. The one peer-reviewed paper that treats Human Design, Hustwit's of 2016, studies it as a religious project and tests nothing.

The one study. A diploma thesis at the University of Vienna in 2012, with 88 participants, set out to test the system as a description of personality. Its descriptions could not be validated against the NEO PI-R, a standard personality inventory; three analysts matched a person's profile to the right one of two charts no more often than chance; and the Barnum effect showed in how people received their readings, since those who scored high on it rated their analysis as more fitting, and correct and incorrect analyses were rated about the same. The German Wikipedia adds that the method does not meet the German standard for aptitude assessment. We know the thesis from its record and abstract; its author has locked the full text.

The type shares are the school's own counts. No census of types exists. By the school's own chart counts, about a third of charts are Generators: of some 50 million charts requested through its services by 2026, Generators are 35.9 percent, Manifesting Generators 30.4, Projectors 22.5, Manifestors 9.8 and Reflectors 1.43. A second set comes from charts cast every 7.2 minutes from 1781 to 2027. The first sample chose itself and has repeats; the second measures how the wheel's geometry plays out over time.

The claimed large study. A self-published book of 2025 claims 30,000 statistical and 15,000 clinical cases gathered at Ra's request. It is unreviewed, with no public method or data, and its own listing calls the system fundamentally incomplete.

The physics does not hold. Neutrinos have mass, as the oscillation experiments of 1998 and 2001 and the Nobel Prize of 2015 confirm; tens of billions pass through each square centimetre every second, and through the whole Earth almost unimpeded, so no planet filters them, and no mechanism is offered by which they could carry a gate. The burst of 1987 came weeks after the Voice, and the idea of neutrino mass is older than the system.

The synthesis is nominal. The I Ching gives 64 numbers and figures on a wheel of Ra's own; astrology gives the positions; the Kabbalah's ten sefirot and 22 paths do not map onto nine centres and 36 channels; the seven chakras are Woodroffe's and Leadbeater's; the codon parallel was a numerical coincidence first suggested in 1969.

Criticism from inside. A practitioner's critique of 2023 concedes that no experiment has been devised, that the traditions drawn on are belief systems, and that the only physics borrowed is the neutrino. The first American students reject the types as Ra's later invention. Jovian's own pages disagree with each other on the Reflector's cycle and on the type shares, and one gives a gate example that the published wheel contradicts.

Journalism treats it as the new astrology, and notes the risk of reading people as pre-programmed.

What is sound is the arithmetic: our calculation reproduces the published arrangement exactly, as three public calculators and three open-source engines do. That is the only correctness the system has.

Our own record. Until October 2026 our page gave the founder a physics career he never had, made the supernova the moment of the revelation, called the neutrino account proven by physics and sold arcsecond precision as a necessity, and our old gate pages read the centres as organs. Those pages are gone; the corrections are recorded as OPEN-155.

Rights and names. Ra Uru Hu's books and lectures and Jovian's and the school's pages are in copyright, so we use their facts and never their words: no line texts, no gate descriptions. The gate, channel, cross and profile names are short names, used as names. "Human Design" names the system; the trade-mark offices refused it as a word mark. Our chart is our own drawing on the open-source hdkit geometry, with our own colours and no silhouette or mandala. The independence notice is below.

Terms

Bodygraph

The figure of the chart: nine centres joined by 36 channels, with the gates at the channels' ends. Written in lowercase here; ours is our own drawing.

Personality and Design

The two sets of positions: Personality at the birth time, Design at the moment the Sun's longitude was 88 degrees less. The school calls the first conscious and the second unconscious, and prints them in black and red.

Activation

One of the 26 positions (13 bodies in each set) falling in a gate. A gate with any activation is shown as active.

Gate

One of 64 divisions of the zodiac, 5°37′30″ each, numbered by the I Ching hexagram it borrows; each sits at one end of one or more channels.

Line, colour, tone, base

The divisions of a gate: six lines, each of six colours, each of six tones, each of five bases, 69,120 bases of 18.75 arcseconds in all. Written gate.line, as in 60.4.

Channel

A pair of gates in two centres. It is defined when both of its gates are activated, by either set.

Centre

One of nine: Head, Ajna, Throat, G, Heart, Sacral, Spleen, Solar Plexus, Root. Defined when a defined channel reaches it. The names are names, not anatomy.

Defined and undefined

Whether a centre is reached by a defined channel in this chart. The school reads an undefined centre as open to others' influence; we never call it empty, broken or a weakness.

Motor centre

Four centres the system treats as sources of drive: the Sacral, the Heart, the Solar Plexus and the Root.

Type

Manifestor, Generator, Manifesting Generator, Projector or Reflector, set by which centres are defined and how they connect.

Strategy

The school's advice for each type, printed as the engine gives it, for example "Wait to respond" for a Generator.

Authority

The school's name for how a type is advised to decide, taken from the first defined centre in a fixed order.

Definition

How many separate groups the defined centres form: none, single, split, triple split or quadruple split.

Profile

The line of the Personality Sun over the line of the Design Sun, as in 4/6, each line with a name from Investigator to Role Model.

Incarnation cross

A name the school gives to the four Sun and Earth gates of both sets, with an angle: Right Angle, Juxtaposition or Left Angle. 192 names in all.

Circuit

The group a channel belongs to in the school's scheme: Individual, Collective or Tribal, each divided further. We print the names only.

Wheel

The ring of 64 gates round the zodiac, starting with gate 41 at 2° Aquarius. Ra Uru Hu's arrangement: Shao Yong's circle of hexagrams, rotated. Not an I Ching teaching.