Ra Uru Hu

Alan Robert Krakower was born on 9 April 1948 in Montreal, the fourth child of an upper middle class family. He grew up around music and the arts and carried an interest in self expression through much of his working life, which was spent in advertising, magazine publishing and, for a time, running a successful advertising agency and television production company in Toronto. None of it, by his own account, pointed toward what came next.

In 1983 he left Canada and travelled, eventually settling on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where he worked for several years as a teacher. In January 1987 he had what he described as a sudden and unexpected mystical experience, followed by an encounter with an intelligence he called simply The Voice. The encounter lasted eight days and nights, during which, he said, he was given the material that became known as the Human Design System, along with instruction to change his name to Ra Uru Hu.

He devoted the following twenty five years to teaching what he had received, building a school, training teachers, and expanding the material into books, courses and a body of terminology now used across a worldwide practitioner community. He died in March 2011, having remained the system's central authority for its entire first generation.

Human Design presents itself as a synthesis of four older systems: the sixty four hexagrams of the I Ching, Western astrology, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and a scheme of nine energy centers drawn loosely from the chakras and modern biochemistry. From a birth time and place it generates a diagram its practitioners call a BodyGraph, sorting people into a small number of aura Types (Generator, Manifestor, Projector and Reflector are the terms in widest use) and assigning each a recommended decision making Strategy and inner Authority.

Ra Uru Hu presented the material as received rather than devised, and his own account of The Voice is the system's founding narrative in the way a revelation narrative founds a new religious movement, a framing his students have generally kept. The system has no standing in the natural or behavioral sciences: its diagnostic claims have not been tested against clinical or psychometric evidence, and practitioners and skeptics alike generally place it alongside astrology as a symbolic and self reflective practice rather than an empirically supported one. The atlas describes the system and its founder; it does not instruct in its use, and the specific proprietary terminology his school built around the BodyGraph is not reproduced here beyond what is needed to identify the system.