Where This Comes From

The I Ching: a 3,000-year-old book of 64 pictures

The I Ching (say "ee jing") is a Chinese book. Its oldest layer, the Zhouyi, was put together around the late 800s BC, in the reign of King Xuan of Zhou (Edward Shaughnessy, cited in Wikipedia, "I Ching"). A bamboo copy in the Shanghai Museum shows it was in wide use by about 300 BC (Wikipedia, "I Ching").

The book is built from 64 figures called hexagrams. Each is a stack of six lines. A line is either broken or whole. Two kinds of line, six places, gives 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 64. That is the whole alphabet.

The order we use, 1 to 64, is called the King Wen sequence. Tradition names it for King Wen of Zhou. It pairs each hexagram with its upside-down twin (Wikipedia, "I Ching"). Human Design and the Gene Keys both number their gates and keys by this sequence. Gate 2 is hexagram 2. Gene Key 55 is hexagram 55. Same numbers, same book.

Three translations matter to us:

• James Legge, 1882. The Yi King, Sacred Books of the East, vol. XVI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882). It is in the public domain, so when Serafina quotes the old text, she quotes Legge.

• Richard Wilhelm, 1924. I Ging: Das Buch der Wandlungen (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1924; often misdated 1923). Wilhelm was a German missionary who learned the book from a Chinese scholar (De Gruyter bibliography; Folger Library catalogue).

• Cary F. Baynes, 1950. Her English of Wilhelm, with a foreword by C. G. Jung, Bollingen Series XIX (New York: Pantheon, 1950; 3rd ed. Princeton, 1967). This is the edition most Western readers know. It is still in copyright, so we name it and do not quote it.

The hexagram names you see in Serafina ("The Receptive", "Abundance") are the short titles made common by Wilhelm and Baynes. They are names, not quoted text.

Western astrology: the wheel of the birth moment

The second language is the sky at the moment you were born.

The oldest surviving birth horoscope is a Babylonian clay tablet from 410 BC. It lists where the Moon, Sun and five planets stood when a child was born (Francesca Rochberg, Babylonian Horoscopes, American Philosophical Society, 1998). The Greeks took up the method after Alexander, and the twelve-sign zodiac wheel we still draw comes from that Hellenistic period (Rochberg 1998; Wikipedia, "Hellenistic astrology").

Human Design keeps the wheel and changes the ruler. It splits the 360 degrees of the zodiac into 64 equal arcs of 5.625 degrees each, one per hexagram. The inner ring still shows the twelve signs (Jovian Archive, "The Mandala and the BodyGraph"). Where a planet sits on that wheel at your birth marks a gate.

It then does something astrology never did. It runs the chart twice: once for the moment of birth, and once for a moment about 88 days before, when the Sun stood 88 degrees of arc earlier (Jovian Archive, "Human Design Dictionary"). The first is called Personality. The second is called Design. The two together make your chart.

The planet positions are real. Serafina uses a standard astronomical ephemeris (a table of where the planets were). Two calculators given the same birth time will give the same chart. What the positions mean is the system’s claim, not astronomy’s.

The Kabbalah tree and the Hindu-Brahmin chakras

Two more old maps gave Human Design its shape.

The Tree of Life. Jewish mystics drew a diagram of ten points joined by 22 paths: 32 paths in all. The count comes from the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation), which scholars date somewhere between the 1st and 9th centuries CE, most likely around the 6th (My Jewish Learning, "Sefer Yetzirah"). The tree diagram itself became standard in the 1300s, after the Zohar (Wikipedia, "Tree of life (Kabbalah)").

Human Design’s official page says its 36 channels are "derived from the Kabbalistic Tree of Life" (Jovian Archive, "The Mandala and the BodyGraph"). We say "inspired by". Ten points and 22 paths do not map one-to-one onto nine centers and 36 channels. What carried over is the picture: energy moving between points along lines.

The chakras. Indian tantric texts describe wheels of energy along the spine. Tantric yoga, where the chakra systems were worked out, flourished from about 600 to 1300 CE, and each lineage drew its own set. The oldest numbered, named list is usually placed in the Kubjikamata Tantra, around the 10th century CE (Christopher Wallis, "The Real Story on the Chakras", hareesh.org, 2016, citing Alexis Sanderson). The familiar seven-chakra set comes from a 1577 text, the Sat-cakra-nirupana, and reached the West through Sir John Woodroffe’s The Serpent Power (1918; some records say 1919), written under the name Arthur Avalon (Wallis 2016).

Human Design’s official page says its centers are "derived from the Hindu-Brahmin chakra system" (Jovian Archive, "The Mandala and the BodyGraph"). There are nine centers, not seven. Ra Uru Hu taught that humans became nine-centered in the year 1781 (Jovian Archive, "Human Design Dictionary"). That date is his teaching alone. No historian or physician holds it.

Ra Uru Hu, Ibiza, January 1987

Human Design has one author.

He was born Robert Allan Krakower (Jovian Archive spells it Alan Robert) in Montreal, Canada, on April 9, 1948 (Jovian Archive, "About Ra Uru Hu"; International Human Design School, "Ra Uru Hu"). He earned a BA at Sir George Williams University, now Concordia, and ran an advertising agency and a TV production company in Toronto (IHDS, "Ra Uru Hu"; Jovian Archive, "About Ra Uru Hu").

In 1983 he left his family and his business and arrived on the island of Ibiza, Spain (IHDS, "Ra Uru Hu"). His own staff page says he was then "a country school teacher and self-proclaimed atheist" (Jovian Archive, "About Jovian Archive").

On the evening of January 3, 1987, he says, a Voice asked him: "Are you ready to work?" He describes eight days and nights, January 3 to 11, of writing down what became the system (IHDS, "Ra Uru Hu"; Jovian Archive, "Human Design Dictionary"). He called it terrifying. He took the name Ra Uru Hu.

What came after is on the record:

• March 1987. First reading, given to a Dutch woman (Jovian Archive, "Human Design Dictionary").

• 1989. The Rave I’Ching, his own text for all 64 gates and 384 lines, written near Frankfurt (Jovian Archive, "Human Design Dictionary").

• 1992. February 14: first public lecture, Ibiza. April: Rave I’Ching published in English and German. September: first professional tour, from Zurich (Jovian Archive, "Human Design Dictionary"). The same year, The Human Design System is published under the name Ra Uru Hu (Human Design America, 1992; cited in Wikipedia, "Human Design").

• March 12, 2011. He died at home on Ibiza (Jovian Archive; IHDS; BG5 Business Institute).

• May 2011. The Definitive Book of Human Design by Lynda Bunnell and Ra Uru Hu (Human Design America, 2011), the reference most analysts use today.

The synthesis. Jovian Archive describes the system as a joining of five things: the I Ching, Western astrology, the Kabbalah, the Hindu-Brahmin chakras, and modern physics and genetics. It also says the result "is not astrology, nor is it the I’Ching, Kabbalah, or the chakra system. It is something entirely new" (Jovian Archive, "About Human Design"). That is fair. The gate names and line texts are Ra’s own writing. They are not translations of the Chinese.

The 64 codons: what the analogy is, and is not

DNA is written in four letters: A, C, G, T. The cell reads them three at a time. Four letters, three places, gives 4 x 4 x 4 = 64 "words", called codons. The I Ching has 64 hexagrams. Human Design says the hexagrams "align with the 64 codons of the human genetic code" (Jovian Archive, "Gates and Hexagrams"). The Gene Keys group the 64 keys into "Codon Rings", each named for an amino acid (Gene Keys, "Codon Rings").

Here is what is true. The number 64 appears in both. 2 to the 6th and 4 to the 3rd are both 64. That is arithmetic.

Here is what is not shown. Molecular biology does not treat the I Ching as related to the genetic code. The idea is older than Human Design: Gunther Stent floated it in 1969 and Martin Schönberger mapped it in a 1973 German book, and different authors line up the codons with the hexagrams in different orders (Petoukhov, arXiv 1102.3596, for the history only). Nothing in your chart is read from your DNA. Serafina never says "your genes say". The codon language is a metaphor, and we use it as one.

The same goes for neutrinos. Human Design teaches that neutrinos streaming from the Sun carry information that "imprints" you at birth (Jovian Archive, "About Human Design"). Neutrinos are real, they have mass, and they pass through you by the trillions (Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 press release). Physics also calls them "nature’s most elusive elementary particles" because they almost never touch anything (same release). There is no known way for them to leave a message in a body. We keep the poetry and drop the physics claim.

BG5: the same chart, at work

Around 2006 Ra Uru Hu turned the system toward business. He called it BG5, short for Base Group 5 (BG5 Business Institute, "About Us"; Ra Uru Hu, BG5 Small Business Analysis & Engineering, Jovian Archive, 2006).

BG5 keeps the chart and changes the words. Types become five Career Types: Initiator, Express Builder, Classic Builder, Advisor and Evaluator (BG5 Business Institute, "BG5 System Introduction"). Centers become Functions, with names like Willpower, Identity and Direction, Communication and Action (BG5 Business Institute, "Career Success Code").

Its most original idea is the Penta. Ra taught that when three to five people work together, something new forms between them with its own shape. In his words: "their auras morph into a Pentic aura, and the Pentic aura dominates" (Ra Uru Hu, "The Penta", Design of Forms lecture, Jovian Archive). The Penta is drawn from the channels between the Sacral, G and Throat centers (same lecture). Twelve gates feed those channels. BG5 reads which of the twelve a small team has and which it lacks, and names the business job of each (BG5 Business Institute, "Business Success Code"). Groups larger than five are read with a method called OC16 (BG5 Business Institute, "OC16 Certification").

BG5’s own site says it draws on "almost 3 decades" of practice and a database of "almost 8 million individuals". The same page says the method "has yet to be proven in a laboratory" (BG5 Business Institute, "BG5 Success Code"). We quote both lines together, always.

Richard Rudd and the Gene Keys, 2009

The fifth language is the youngest.

Richard Rudd is a British teacher and poet with a master’s degree in metaphysics and literature from Edinburgh University (Gene Keys, "About"). He studied and taught Human Design with Ra from 1997 to 2004 (Gene Keys, "Integral Human Design"). In 2002 he began writing his own book on the 64 hexagrams. It took seven years (Gene Keys, "About"). The Gene Keys appeared in 2009 (Gene Keys Publishing, 2009; ISBN 978-0-578-03855-1), and a wider edition came from Watkins in 2013 (Watkins Publishing, 2013; ISBN 978-1-78028-542-9).

The Gene Keys are not a chart-reading method. They are a contemplation. Each of the 64 keys has three words: a Shadow (the fear pattern), a Gift (the same energy, freed) and a Siddhi (its highest form). Gene Key 55, for example: Victimisation, Freedom, Freedom. Rudd has since renamed that Siddhi "Romance" (Gene Keys, "The I Ching"). You sit with the three words. You do not get told what you are.

The keys use the same wheel as Human Design. Each key’s "Programming Partner" is the gate directly opposite it on the mandala (Richard Rudd, Gene Keys Living Library, genekeys.com; we checked all 64 pairs). So the three schools share one spine: 64 numbers, one sequence, one sky.

Fact, founder’s claim, and what critics say

Documented fact. A man born in Montreal in 1948 moved to Ibiza, took the name Ra Uru Hu, taught from 1992 to 2011, and published books that are still in print. The I Ching is real and roughly 2,800 years old at its core. DNA has 64 codons. Neutrinos exist. The chart is computed from real planetary positions. In June 2020 a court in Florence ruled that the Human Design system itself cannot be owned by copyright, only specific texts can (Human Design Italia v. Terra Nuova, cited in Wikipedia, "Human Design").

The founder’s own claim. That a Voice dictated the system over eight days in January 1987. That neutrinos imprint a person at birth and 88 days before. That type, authority and centers describe how a body is built to decide. That humans became nine-centered in 1781. None of this can be tested by anyone else. Jovian Archive does say something fair: try it for yourself, and drop it if it does not work (Jovian Archive, "What Is Human Design").

What critics say. We do not claim laboratory proof. There is none. We found no peer-reviewed study that tests Human Design’s predictions. Wikipedia calls it pseudoscientific (Wikipedia, "Human Design"), and BG5’s own site says it is unproven in a laboratory (BG5 Business Institute, "BG5 Success Code"). The best-known controlled test of astrology, which supplies the chart’s inputs, found astrologers could not match charts to people better than chance (Shawn Carlson, "A double-blind test of astrology", Nature 318 (1985): 419-425). And people rate vague, flattering descriptions as true of themselves, a finding called the Forer or Barnum effect (B. R. Forer, "The fallacy of personal validation", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 44, 1949, doi:10.1037/h0059240). Every reading system, Serafina’s included, must be measured against that. We are building the measurement, and we will publish what we find, including the parts that are weak.

So why do people still find it precise? Because it gives a shared, specific vocabulary for things most of us feel but cannot name: how you decide, where you leak energy, what a room of five people does to you. A good map does not have to be a photograph to get you home. And because the structure forces specifics. "Gate 14, Sacral, channel to Gate 2" is not a horoscope’s "you may face a challenge this week". It is a claim narrow enough to be wrong, and narrow enough to recognise yourself in when it is right.

Our citation policy

Every factual line in Serafina’s readings points to a public source you can open: a book with author and year, or a named page on a named site. We cite the systems’ own organizations (Jovian Archive, the IHDS, the BG5 Business Institute, Gene Keys) for what they teach, never as proof that it is true. We never cite private training manuals or page numbers from them. When we quote the I Ching, we quote James Legge’s 1882 translation, which belongs to everyone. When two official sources disagree, we say so.

If you find an error on this page, write to us at hello@aurealeaders.com. We will fix it and note the change here.

Sources

Last reviewed November 1, 2026.