Type

Meaning

Type is the first thing Human Design reads in a bodygraph. It sums up, in one word, how a person’s energy is said to work and how it meets the world. Everything else in the chart, the profile, the gates and the channels, is read through it.

There are five types. The Manifestor is built to initiate. The Generator has steady energy that responds to life. The Manifesting Generator responds, then moves fast. The Projector is made to guide. The Reflector mirrors its surroundings.

The type does not come from one planet or one gate. It comes from the shape of the whole bodygraph: which centres are defined, coloured because a complete channel reaches them, and how they connect. Two questions settle it. Is the Sacral, the centre of steady life force, defined? And does a motor reach the Throat, the centre of speech and action, through defined channels? The motors are the Sacral, the Heart, the Solar Plexus and the Root.

• No defined centre at all: Reflector.
• A defined Sacral and a motor joined to the Throat: Manifesting Generator.
• A defined Sacral, with no motor joined to the Throat: Generator.
• An undefined Sacral, with a motor joined to the Throat: Manifestor.
• An undefined Sacral and no motor joined to the Throat: Projector.

Each type carries a strategy, a simple way of engaging with life. It also has two feelings that serve as signposts: the signature when things flow, the not-self theme when they do not. Human Design presents type, strategy and authority together as the practical core of the system, to be tried in daily life rather than believed.

The tradition also describes an aura for each type, the way others feel its energy. The Manifestor’s is closed and pushes outward; both kinds of Generator have an open, enveloping one. The Projector’s is focused and penetrating, the Reflector’s sampling.

In practice

Teachers usually suggest starting with type and strategy alone, for months or longer, and watching what changes. A Generator might notice which offers light them up. A Projector might notice which advice is actually used. A Manifestor might notice how much smoother things go after a word of warning. The signature and the not-self theme then act as a running check: more satisfaction, peace, success or surprise; less frustration, anger, bitterness or disappointment.

Type is not a ranking. The tradition sees each one as needed by the others, and no type as better placed in life.

Origin and history

The types come from the system Ra Uru Hu said he received on Ibiza in 1987. He set it out with Lynda Bunnell in The Definitive Book of Human Design (2011). That book describes four types, with the Manifesting Generator as a kind of Generator; many later teachers, and Ulune, list five.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune casts the Personality and the Design, colours their gates, defines each channel whose two gates are both coloured and the centres it joins. It then tests in this order. No defined centre gives Reflector. A defined Sacral with a path of defined channels from the Throat to any motor gives Manifesting Generator. A defined Sacral alone gives Generator, such a path alone Manifestor, and anything else Projector. The type sets the strategy and, for Reflectors, the authority. Without a birth time, the chart is cast at noon and at every hour of the day. The type is marked ~ if another hour gives another.

Correspondences

The shares are those given by Jovian Archive, the publisher of Ra Uru Hu’s work.