I Ching essentials

I Ching vs Human Design: Gates and Hexagrams

Human Design and the I Ching share the same 64 hexagrams: Human Design reads them as 64 gates set around the zodiac wheel and activated by the planets at your birth, while a Plum Blossom birth hexagram is cast from your birth date on the Chinese lunar calendar, with no planets involved. Each gate keeps its hexagram's number and six lines; a birth hexagram is read as one figure with a changing line.

Both systems speak the language of the hexagrams, so readers of one often wonder about the other. This page sets them side by side for two kinds of reader: people who know their Human Design chart and want to know what a birth hexagram adds, and I Ching readers curious about what Human Design did with the book. It describes each system on its own terms and does not rank them.

Where Human Design comes from

Human Design was introduced by Ra Uru Hu, born Alan Robert Krakower in Canada, after an experience he described as taking place on Ibiza in January 1987.

Its central chart, the BodyGraph, has nine centers, 64 gates and 36 channels. Human Design describes the nine centers as a development of the older seven-chakra model. The 64 gates are where the I Ching comes in.

How the 64 gates map to the 64 hexagrams

The mapping is one to one, and it keeps the numbers. Each of the 64 gates carries the number of the I Ching hexagram with the same number, and in Ra Uru Hu's Rave I'Ching its traditional name as well, next to a gate title of Human Design's own: Gate 41 is Hexagram 41, Decrease, and also the Gate of Contraction. Each gate has six lines, as a hexagram does.

What Human Design changed is where the circle sits. Its Rave Mandala follows the circular arrangement of the 64 hexagrams attributed to Shao Yong, the Song dynasty scholar also credited with the Plum Blossom method, and lays it on the 360 degrees of the zodiac wheel: 5.625 degrees to a gate, 0.9375 degrees to a line, starting with Gate 41 near 2 degrees of Aquarius. That circle runs in the binary Early Heaven order rather than the King Wen numbering, which is why the gate sequence looks unordered next to the hexagram numbers.

So if you know your gates, you already know the names of hexagrams. Your Gate 41 and Hexagram 41 are the same six-line figure, read inside two different frameworks.

What each system reads from your birth

A Human Design chart is calculated twice from an ephemeris, a table of planetary positions, using the time and place of birth. The Personality side uses the moment of birth. The Design side uses the moment the Sun stood 88 degrees of solar arc earlier, roughly three months, 86 to 92 days, before birth. Thirteen points are read on each side: the Sun, the Earth, the Moon, the Moon's North and South Nodes, and the eight planets from Mercury to Pluto. That makes 26 activations, and each one falls on a gate and on one of its six lines.

A Plum Blossom birth hexagram uses no ephemeris and no planets. It takes four numbers from the Chinese lunar calendar: the year branch, the lunar month, the lunar day and the hour branch. Two sums and three remainders give one Primary Hexagram, one Changing Line, and the Resultant Hexagram that appears when that line flips. The result is a single figure in motion rather than a map of many.

If you want to cast yours, the guide on how to calculate your birth hexagram by hand walks through it with your own birth date.

The two systems side by side

What a birth hexagram adds for a Human Design reader

A birth hexagram does not replace anything in your chart. It is a different reading of the same 64 figures, and three things about it may be new to you.

It is read on its own. In a BodyGraph, a gate is one node among centers and channels; a birth hexagram is read as a single figure, upper and lower trigram together, with its judgment, its image and its six line texts.

It moves. The Changing Line turns your Primary Hexagram into a Resultant Hexagram, so the reading has a direction: who you are, the edge you are growing along, and who you are becoming.

It starts from the date. Your birth date alone gives a triad, marked approximate because the hour sets the lower trigram and the changing line; a birth time and a birthplace sharpen it.

Your birth hexagram may share a number with one of your gates, or with none of them. The two are calculated in unrelated ways, so a match neither confirms nor contradicts either reading.

What Human Design did with the I Ching

For a reader who comes from the I Ching, the first change is the wheel. The book's traditional order is the King Wen sequence, which sets the hexagrams in pairs, each beside its inverse or, for the eight that read the same upside down, its opposite. Human Design keeps the hexagrams and their lines but places them on the Early Heaven circle, aligned to the zodiac, so that a hexagram becomes a stretch of the sky.

The second change is what a line is for. In the I Ching a line is read through its line text, and a changing line is the one in motion. In Human Design a line is also a span of 0.9375 degrees, a place a planet can occupy.

The third is everything built around the hexagrams. Type, Strategy and Authority are Human Design's own layer and have no counterpart in the I Ching text. Human Design also associates the 64 gates with the 64 codons of the genetic code; that association is a teaching of the system, not an established scientific finding.

Common questions

Find your own birth hexagram

Cast it by hand with the step-by-step guide, or let the Birth Hexagram Calculator do the arithmetic. The Birth Hexagram Triad explains what the three parts mean once you have them, and the Plum Blossom oracle page covers where the method comes from.

Take it with you - or keep it in the browser. Your choice.