Human Design Profiles
Martyr / Heretic
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Origin 1987
The 3/5 profile is one of twelve profiles in Human Design, a modern system taught by Ra Uru Hu from the early 1990s after a self-described 1987 experience in Ibiza, which layers birth chart astrology onto the I Ching's hexagrams, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life and the chakras. It combines a third line Personality Sun, fixed at birth, with a fifth line Design Earth, fixed roughly eighty eight days earlier. The third line is the Martyr, said to learn through trial and error, while the fifth line is the Heretic, described as a practical problem solver seen by others as a screen for their own expectations. The pairing is described in the teaching as a life of learning by direct experiment that is then judged, often unfairly, by an audience projecting its own hopes onto the results.
Facts
Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseDisputed as a description of persons. The one empirical test located, a University of Vienna psychology thesis, could not validate Human Design characterisations against the NEO PI-R personality inventory, and found assent to them consistent with the Barnum effect, under which generic statements are read as personally accurate. 3 Contested or Appropriated Modern UseThe I Ching of China, the chakra teaching of India, Kabbalah and astrology are drawn on here inside a scheme assembled in 1987 and offered as an instrument of psychological counselling. The four traditions it draws on are old; the arrangement that joins them is not, and none of them produced it. 2 Origins
Origin Period1987 2Tradition: Human Design (Ra Uru Hu, 1987) Origin PeriodThe Martyr / Heretic profile, one of the twelve profiles formed by pairing two of the system's six lines, belongs to the Human Design system, synthesized in 1987 out of the I Ching, the chakra teaching, Kabbalah and astrology. 2 Lines
First LineSourced to the subject's own account Second LineSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
The Profile in the Human Design Model
The 3/5 profile (Martyr / Heretic) is one of the twelve profiles of Human Design, a modern esoteric system originated in 1987 by Ra Uru Hu and presented here as a contemporary framework rather than ancient wisdom. A profile is formed from two of the six lines, a scheme the system borrows from the six lines of an I Ching hexagram and reads psychologically: the profile pairs a conscious line with an unconscious one to give an archetypal role. The 3/5 profile joins the roles named Martyr / Heretic. The line names and their meanings are Human Design's own twentieth-century reading, not a claim inherited from the Chinese classic whose six-line figures suggested the structure; they are described here as the system presents them, not as verified fact.
Human Design describes the third line, Martyr or Adaptor, as learning through direct trial and error, discovering by getting things wrong what actually works; the fifth line, Heretic or Universal, is described as a practical, crisis solving line whose fixes get projected onto by people it has not met, cast either as saviour or as scapegoat. The 3/5 profile combines the two: within the system's own teaching, the errors and adaptations the third line makes in private become, through the fifth line, material other people draw on and judge in public, so that a personal process of trial and error is read, often against the person's own wishes, as a public demonstration.
Lines Three and Five in the Chinese Commentaries
This profile pairs the third and fifth line positions of a hexagram, both of which carry settled readings in classical Yijing commentary that are unrelated to the names Human Design gives them.
What the commentaries say
The third line is the top of the lower trigram and a transitional position. The commentarial tradition characteristically reads it as difficult or perilous, poised between the lower situation and the upper and secure in neither. The fifth line is the centre of the upper trigram and conventionally the ruling position of the figure, the most favourably placed of the six.
The pairing therefore joins the least comfortable position in the traditional reading to the most authoritative one, which is a genuine contrast in the source material as well as in the modern system.
What Human Design does with it
The role names Human Design assigns to the six lines, and the reading of a profile as a personality, belong to the system and were published by Ra Uru Hu in 1987. They are not translations of the commentarial doctrine and should not be taken as a statement about Chinese tradition.
The pairing rule
Human Design uses twelve of the thirty ordered pairs of distinct lines, those separated by two or by three positions. The separations of three coincide with the Yijing's correspondences between lines one and four, two and five, three and six. This pair, separated by two, is not among them.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Disciplines That Use This
The twelve profiles read from the conscious and unconscious lines.
Sources
1. The Human Design System
Ra Uru Hu (Alan Robert Krakower), Human Design America, 1992The 3/5 profileView the Source 2. Über den Tellerrand, ein Blick ins Human Design System (HDS)
Petra Stute, Virineya Würgler and Johnny Würgler, Springer, Journal für Gynäkologische Endokrinologie/Schweiz 24 (2021), pp. 50-51, 2021p. 50: the four systems synthesised, and the use made of the synthesisView the Source 3. Persönlichkeitsdiagnostik unter dem Aspekt des Barnum-Effekts
Katharina Freistetter, Akademiker Verlag, Vienna (University of Vienna diploma thesis in psychology, 2012); ISBN 978-3-639-46969-1, 2013on the Human Design characterisations tested against the NEO PI-R
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