Part of the Human Design Atlas
The Foundations of Human Design
The rest of the atlas describes the parts of a chart. These pages describe the system itself: the diagram it is drawn on, the wheel it is calculated from, the four older traditions and the modern science it draws on, what defined and open centers mean, how the emotional wave moves, the big life cycles of the Saturn Return, Uranus Opposition and Chiron Return, what happens when two charts meet, the story of how it arrived in 1987, and a glossary of every term you will meet. Read them in order and the rest of the Knowledge Base becomes easy to follow.
All 24 Foundations
What Is Human Design
A map of how you are built to make decisions and meet the world, calculated from your birth time and offered as an experiment rather than a belief.
Human Design is a system for understanding how you, specifically, are built to operate.
Read the full page →The BodyGraph
The diagram at the heart of Human Design, with nine Centers, 36 Channels and 64 Gates, and how to read what is coloured in and what is left white.
The BodyGraph is the picture you get when you generate a Human Design chart.
Read the full page →The Rave Mandala
The wheel that Human Design charts are calculated from, with the zodiac on the inside, the 64 hexagrams on the outside, and the BodyGraph in the middle.
The Rave Mandala is the wheel behind every Human Design chart.
Read the full page →Personality and Design
The black and red columns on a chart, why Human Design runs two calculations, and what the conscious and unconscious sides of you each contribute.
Every Human Design chart carries two columns of planetary data.
Read the full page →The I Ching in Human Design
How the 64 hexagrams of the Chinese Book of Changes became the 64 Gates, and why their six-line structure matters more than their ancient text.
The I Ching, or Book of Changes, is one of the oldest books in the world: a Chinese text built around 64 figures called hexagrams, each a stack of six lines that are either solid or broken.
Read the full page →Astrology in Human Design
What Human Design takes from Western astrology, what it leaves behind, and why a Human Design chart and a birth chart give different answers from the same birth time.
Human Design and Western astrology start from the same raw material: the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets and lunar Nodes at the moment of birth, measured on a 360 degree wheel divided into twelve signs.
Read the full page →The Kabbalah Tree of Life
The Jewish mystical diagram of connected spheres that gave Human Design the idea of Channels, the pathways carrying energy between the Centers.
The Tree of Life is the central diagram of the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition within Judaism whose key text is the Zohar.
Read the full page →The Chakra System and the Nine Centers
How the seven chakras of Hindu tradition became the nine Centers of the BodyGraph, and what Human Design means when it says we changed in 1781.
The chakra system comes from the Hindu and yogic traditions of India.
Read the full page →Neutrinos and the Imprint
The particle stream that Human Design says carries the imprint at birth, and how physics has since caught up with what Ra described in 1987.
Neutrinos are among the most common particles in the universe.
Read the full page →Crystals of Consciousness and the Magnetic Monopole
The passenger, the vehicle and the driver: Human Design's account of the three parts that make up a person and why the mind is meant to ride, not steer.
Underneath the chart, Human Design carries a story about what a person is made of.
Read the full page →The Nine-Centered Being
Human Design's account of a change in the human form dated to 1781, why it says the mind was built for an older kind of human, and what 2027 is about.
Human Design teaches that the kind of human being alive today is not quite the kind that was alive three hundred years ago.
Read the full page →Defined, Undefined and Open Centers
What separates a defined center from an undefined one, why a completely open center is its own condition, how conditioning and amplification actually work, and the not-self question that tends to show up in each open center.
Every Human Design chart divides its nine centers into two basic states: coloured in, or left white.
Read the full page →The Emotional Wave
Why the Solar Plexus never tells the truth in the present moment, the three named wave patterns that carry it (tribal, individual and collective), and what an open or undefined Solar Plexus does with someone else's wave.
The Solar Plexus is the one center in Human Design that never gives a straight answer in the present moment.
Read the full page →Circuitry
How the 36 Channels group into circuits and three circuit families, Individual, Collective and Tribal, and what each family says about the way you connect with people.
Look at a BodyGraph with all 36 Channels drawn in and it resembles a circuit board.
Read the full page →What Is an Incarnation Cross
The four gates that give your life its overarching theme, how the Design side is calculated, why crosses split into three angles, why the same gates produce numbered variants, and how to find and live your own.
Every incarnation cross starts from the same four points on a chart: the Sun and Earth positions calculated for your birth, and the same two points calculated again for a moment roughly three months earlier.
Read the full page →The Four Quarters
The four quarters of the Rave Mandala, their themes and gate groupings, and how the quarter your Personality Sun falls in colours your incarnation cross.
The 64 gates of the Rave Mandala are not only a wheel of individual themes.
Read the full page →The Sixteen Godheads
The sixteen Faces of the Godhead around the Rave Mandala, four in each quarter, each covering four gates, and how the gate of your Personality Sun names the one you carry.
The Faces of the Godhead are sixteen themes that divide the Rave Mandala, the wheel every Human Design chart is calculated from.
Read the full page →The Four Connection Types
The four ways a Channel can form between two people's charts, Electromagnetic, Companionship, Dominance and Compromise, with a plain example of each and how to spot them by comparing two BodyGraphs.
Every Human Design chart is drawn on its own, but the moment two people spend time together, their two BodyGraphs behave as if they were laid on top of each other.
Read the full page →The Saturn Return
What happens around your twenty eighth to thirtieth birthday when Saturn returns to its birth position, why Human Design treats it as the first of three life stages, and how it ties to a profile's lines maturing.
Saturn takes about twenty nine and a half years to complete one orbit of the Sun, so somewhere around your twenty eighth to thirtieth birthday it returns to almost exactly the place it held when you were born.
Read the full page →The Uranus Opposition
The midlife turn between roughly ages thirty eight and forty four, when Uranus reaches the exact opposite point from its birth position and the Nodes change over for the second half of life.
Uranus takes about eighty four years to complete one orbit of the Sun, almost exactly the length of a full modern lifespan.
Read the full page →The Chiron Return
The third of Human Design's three life stage markers, landing around age fifty, when a sixth line profile comes down off the roof and every profile's earlier lessons become available to live from.
Chiron's orbit around the Sun is unusually irregular, so unlike the tidier cycles of the other bodies Human Design uses, it takes somewhere between forty nine and fifty one years to return to the position it held at your birth.
Read the full page →The Experiment of Strategy and Authority
Why Human Design calls itself an experiment, what deconditioning means, and what the not-self themes are telling you when they show up.
Everything else in the Knowledge Base describes your mechanics.
Read the full page →Ra Uru Hu and the Origin of Human Design
Who Ra Uru Hu was, what happened on Ibiza in January 1987, and how the system went from an eight-day encounter to a worldwide body of teaching.
Human Design has a single founder and a precise birthday.
Read the full page →Human Design Glossary
Every term you will meet in a Human Design chart or reading, explained in a sentence or two and linked to its full page.
Human Design has its own vocabulary, and a first chart can feel like reading a language you half know.
Read the full page →Created by Peter Low, Human Design Practitioner. Part of the Human Design atlas.