Line

Meaning

Every gate in Human Design is one of the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. A hexagram is a stack of six lines, each whole or broken. Human Design keeps the six places and gives each one a theme. A line is one of those places: the finer shade of the gate’s theme.

The lines are counted from the bottom up, as in the I Ching. Line 1 is the lowest, line 6 the top. A planet’s position is written gate, then line: 34.2 is gate 34, line 2. With 64 gates of six lines each, the wheel holds 384 lines in all.

The six places carry six names, the same in every gate:

• Line 1, the Investigator: a need for solid foundations, met by study.
• Line 2, the Hermit: natural talent that ripens in private until others call it out.
• Line 3, the Martyr: learning by trial and error.
• Line 4, the Opportunist: a life that works through its network of friends.
• Line 5, the Heretic: a field of projection, where others expect practical solutions.
• Line 6, the Role Model: three phases, from experiment to observation to example.

In practice

The hexagram falls into two trigrams of three lines. The lower trigram, lines 1 to 3, is read as the personal half, turned inwards. The upper trigram, lines 4 to 6, is read as the transpersonal half, turned towards others. Human Design sees each upper line as an echo of the lower line in the same position.

That echo makes three harmonic pairs: lines 1 and 4, 2 and 5, 3 and 6. The first and fourth are foundations, inner and shared. The second and fifth are both seen by others, one for its gift, the other for its solutions. The third and sixth both experiment, the sixth only in its first phase.

A line matters most in two places. In any activated gate, it colours the theme: the same gate reads one way on line 1, another on line 5. In the two Suns, it becomes the profile, the first number from the Personality Sun, the second from the Design Sun.

Origin and history

In the I Ching, a line’s place has always counted. The Great Appendix, in James Legge’s translation of 1882, finds the first line hard to know and the top one easy. They are the beginning and the end. Classical commentary read the fifth place as the ruler’s and the fourth as the minister’s, beside it. Richard Wilhelm’s translation of 1924 names each line by its place, from “at the beginning” to “at the top”.

Ra Uru Hu, who founded Human Design in 1987, kept these six places and wrote his own texts for all 384 lines. The names Investigator, Hermit, Martyr, Opportunist, Heretic and Role Model come from his system.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune finds the line from the ecliptic longitude of each planet and each Node, at birth and at the Design moment. The wheel starts with gate 41 at 302°, or 2° Aquarius. Each gate spans 5.625°, and each line a sixth of it, 0.9375°, or 0°56′15″.

Ulune subtracts 302° from the longitude and wraps it into 0–360°. Divided by 5.625° and rounded down, it gives the gate’s place in the wheel. The remainder, divided by 0.9375° and rounded down, plus one, gives the line. Line 1 is the first slice of each gate in the direction of the zodiac, line 6 the last. A longitude exactly on a boundary starts the next line.

A line is small. The Sun crosses one in a little under a day, the Moon in under two hours. Below the line, Ulune counts six colours, six tones and five bases for the arrows. That finer count always agrees with the line. The Earth stands exactly 192 lines from the Sun, so it always shares the Sun’s line.

Without a birth time, the chart is cast at noon and again every hour of the day. A line that changes in that span is marked ~.

Correspondences