← Going Deeper: Intermediate Astrology · lesson 36/38
Held lightly, please: what follows describes a modern system — invented in 1987, not excavated from antiquity — and, like all of this course, it's offered as a mirror for reflection, not a set of proven facts about you.
Every so often somebody tries to weave several symbolic systems into one. The boldest recent attempt is the Human Design tradition, begun in 1987 by Robert Alan Krakower — who wrote as Ra Uru Hu — after an intense visionary experience on Ibiza. He deliberately fused astrology, the Chinese I Ching, the Kabbalah's tree of life and the chakra system into a single map of how a person's energy is built. Whatever you make of its origin story, the machinery is genuinely ingenious — and it runs on the same birth data as any chart.
A natal chart is cast for one moment: your birth. A Human Design chart is cast for two. The first is birth — called the personality, the side of you that you know. The second is a moment roughly 88 days before birth — precisely, when the Sun sat 88 degrees earlier along the zodiac — called the design, standing for what was built before you arrived: the side of you others see but you don't. Both sets of planets are plotted onto one diagram, the conscious and the pre-conscious side by side.
Now the I Ching enters. The zodiac wheel is divided into 64 segments called gates, one for each I Ching hexagram, each just five and five-eighths degrees wide. Every planet, in both of your two moments, lands in some gate and "activates" it. Where a sign is a broad country, a gate is a village — the system reads the sky at a much finer grain, and each gate carries a theme inherited from its hexagram's old imagery.
The gates feed a body-shaped diagram of nine energy centres — a modern expansion of the seven chakras — for pressure, mind, will, emotion, instinct, and so on. Specific pairs of gates form 36 channels between the centres, and here's the elegant bit: when both ends of a channel are activated by your planets, the channel completes and the two centres it joins become defined — coloured in. Defined centres are read as energy that works the same way in you all your life; open centres as places where you soak up and amplify whatever the people around you are carrying. The pattern of coloured and white shapes is the chart's whole story at a glance.
From which centres are defined and how they connect, the tradition sorts people into five Types — Generators and Manifesting Generators (the sustainable builders, the large majority of people), Manifestors (the initiators), Projectors (the guides who see systems clearly), and the rare Reflectors (nothing defined, mirrors of their surroundings). Each Type comes with a Strategy — a suggested way of engaging the world, like a Generator's "respond rather than chase" — and everyone gets an inner Authority, a decision-style: gut response, emotional clarity over time, and so on. A Profile, taken from the line numbers of the two Suns, adds a final flavour.
Our version has grown well past a diagram and a paragraph. A reading now arrives as a spoken overview plus a set of detail sections, each on its own tab:
Underneath those sit the workings: the 64-gate mandala showing where each gate lives on the zodiac, an activation table giving the exact longitude every gate was read from, and an appendix ranking what each planet contributes. Nothing in those is written by a language model — they're the arithmetic, printed so you can check it.
The PDF is deliberately fuller than the web page. It carries the same reading plus a primer on how the chart is built, a plain-English introduction to each section, and the complete workings — the idea being that you could open it in a year, having forgotten every term in it, and still follow the argument without going back online.
This is the part we think nobody else does, and it falls out of having two moments instead of one.
Every chart on Viastaro can be run through a trait engine: a keyword vocabulary scored against the chart's symbolism and weighted by how prominent each planet is. Because an embodied energy chart is built from two charts, we can run that same calculation twice — once on the birth moment, once on the 88°-earlier one — and compare the results. Three things fall out:
Themes in both charts. The best-evidenced material in the whole reading, and broadly the part of you that both you and the people around you would name if asked. The interesting column here isn't the score, it's the shift: how far a theme moved between the two moments, as a percentage. Where the two diverge most is where a bit of deliberate attention tends to repay the most — sometimes by helping other people see a difference you already feel, sometimes by recognising one that's visible to them and not to you. If you're honest you probably already have an inkling which is which, because these are usually the areas where friction shows up. We sort the list by the size of that shift regardless of direction, so the big movements both ways stay at the top.
Themes only in the birth chart. Clear to you, and missed by others — their blind spot about you. Parts of your make-up people tend not to register, or quietly set aside because they don't seem to fit the rest. You can point gently at the ones that matter to you, but expect limited success, and try not to let something this obvious to you curdle into anger when it's invisible to everyone else. It isn't a fault in them and it isn't a fault in you.
Themes only in the 88°-earlier chart. The harder one. Borrowing Jung's word, this behaves like shadow material: things that read clearly from outside while you're the last to know, and the ones you're most likely to deny needing to own at all. Take them slowly. They're not a to-do list, going at them head-on rarely works, and mostly it's enough to notice you might be bringing one into a room without meaning to.
One thing worth knowing before you read the tables: the shared list will almost always carry bigger numbers, because two charts' worth of evidence is stacked in it. A smaller figure in one of the single-chart lists isn't a sign it matters less — that gap is arithmetic, not meaning. It's a notably high number in a single-chart list that's worth dwelling on.
And the usual caveat, which matters more here than anywhere else in the reading: none of this is measured or tested, and none of it is evidence about what any actual person thinks of you. It's a tally against a vocabulary we wrote. Hold it up as a mirror, test it against your own experience over a few weeks, and put down whatever doesn't fit.
Astrology at least is ancient; Human Design is younger than the compact disc, and no part of it is scientifically established. That isn't a reason to sneer — it's a reason to hold it the right way: as a beautifully engineered reflective instrument, a set of questions about where your energy is consistent and where you're porous to other people. Many people find its vocabulary surprisingly freeing; that's what a good mirror does. At Viastaro we're building our own independently drawn and written take on this territory — we call it the embodied energy chart — using the same public mechanics described here, in our own images and our own words.
The idea I keep from this tradition is the distinction between energy that is yours — steady, reliable, lifelong — and energy that is weather, picked up from whoever is in the room. Whether or not a diagram can truly sort one from the other, the question itself is worth carrying around: "is this feeling mine, or did I catch it?" Some days, just asking is the whole reading.