Personality and Design

Meaning

Every Human Design chart is drawn from two moments, and so from two skies. The Personality is the sky at the moment of birth. The Design is the sky at an earlier moment, about three months before. It is the moment when the Sun stood exactly 88° behind its place at birth.

The tradition gives the two layers different meanings. The Personality is called the conscious side, the mind, what a person recognises and identifies with in themselves. The Design is called the unconscious side, the body, an inheritance that works on its own. Human Design says that others often see one’s Design traits more clearly than one does oneself.

Each layer has its own colour. Traditional charts print the Personality in black and the Design in red. Ulune draws the Personality in ink, the colour of the text, and the Design in a warm red. A gate coloured by both layers is striped. A channel can be defined by one layer alone, or by one gate from each, and it is just as defined either way.

Both layers count equally for the bodygraph. The centres, the type and the authority are read from all the coloured gates together, whichever layer they come from.

In practice

• The profile pairs the two Suns: the line of the Personality Sun, then the line of the Design Sun. A 2/4 has the Personality Sun in a 2nd line and the Design Sun in a 4th, as the page on profiles explains.
• The Incarnation Cross reads four gates: the Personality Sun and Earth, then the Design Sun and Earth. See Incarnation Cross.
• The Variable takes two arrows from each layer. Determination and Environment come from the Design Sun and Node. Motivation and Perspective come from the Personality Sun and Node.
• A gate in red only is read as a trait others meet but one may not notice. A gate in ink only is a trait one knows and can describe.
• Ulune’s views show the Personality alone, the Design alone, or both. In a single view, a channel whose other gate comes from the other layer is shown as not defined.

Across traditions

• Astrology reads a single moment, the birth. Traditional astrology also knew a prenatal chart, the prenatal epoch or Trutine of Hermes, which looks for a moment around conception. Human Design’s Design moment is a different idea: a fixed arc of the Sun, not a guess at conception.
• Conscious and unconscious: the pairing echoes the psychology of the twentieth century. Human Design gives each side its own sky and its own colour on the page.

Origin and history

Ra Uru Hu presented the system after an experience on Ibiza in 1987. The two layers and the 88° arc are part of the system as he taught it. He linked the Design moment to a stage in the unborn child’s development. The arc is measured in degrees of the Sun, not in days. It is often summed up as 88 days, but its length in time changes through the year.

How Ulune calculates it

Ulune takes the positions from the Swiss Ephemeris, seen from the centre of the Earth, in the tropical zodiac. It first finds the Personality Sun at the moment of birth. It then searches the past for the instant when the Sun stood exactly 88° of ecliptic longitude earlier, and solves it to the millisecond. Depending on the season, that instant falls between about 86.4 and 92 days before birth.

At each moment it casts the same 13 bodies. They are the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, the two Nodes, and the eight planets from Mercury to Pluto. The Earth is the point opposite the Sun. The Nodes are the true nodes, the South Node opposite the North, as in the birth chart. Chiron is not used. Each body’s longitude gives a gate and a line: gate 41 begins at 302°, 2° of Aquarius, each gate spans 5.625° and each line 0.9375°.

Without a birth time, Ulune casts the chart at noon and also every hour of that day. It then marks the rows, channels and keys that could differ at another hour. On the bodygraph page, the Design column stands on the left in red and the Personality column on the right in ink.

Correspondences