The Glossary

The Human Design Glossary

Every field guards itself with vocabulary, and Human Design has more than most. This page is the toll-free crossing: the terms the site uses, each in plain language, each linking deeper when you want more than a sentence.

What are the parts of the chart called?

Activation

One planet’s position written onto the bodygraph. Every chart carries 26 activations: thirteen planets on the personality side and the same thirteen on the design side, each marking one gate at one line.

Bodygraph

The chart’s central figure: nine centers joined by thirty-six channels, drawn on a human silhouette. It is the map the sky gets written onto.

Center

One of the nine hubs of the bodygraph, each with its own theme, from the pressure of the Root to the inspiration of the Head. Defined centers are consistent in you; open centers take the world in. The nine centers →

Channel

A fixed pair of gates joining two centers. When both of its gates are active in a chart, from either side, the channel defines and both of its centers switch on. The thirty-six channels →

Gate

One of 64 positions on the wheel, each belonging to one center and one hexagram of the I Ching. A planet sitting in a gate activates it. The sixty-four gates →

Hanging gate

One gate of a channel active without its partner: a consistent theme in you that instinctively looks for its other half in other people. The chemistry it makes is called electromagnetic.

Hexagram

The six-line I Ching figure behind each gate, read from the bottom up. Its six lines are the six ways a gate can express, which is where line numbers come from.

Line

The second number in an activation like 34.2: which of a gate’s six faces a planet is lighting. The two Sun lines of a chart make the profile.

Mandala

The Rave Mandala: the wheel of the zodiac wrapped in the ring of 64 gates. A chart is the mandala photographed at two moments, birth and 88 degrees of Sun before it.

Programming partner

The gate exactly opposite a gate in the wheel. The Sun and Earth always sit in programming partners, which is why chart themes arrive as balanced pairs.

What are the words for how a person is built?

Aura

Human Design’s word for the energetic presence a body carries. Each type is described as having its own kind of aura, which is why each type has its own strategy: the strategies are aura mechanics, not etiquette.

Authority

The part of your design that is built to make decisions, chosen by a fixed hierarchy of centers. It is the chart’s answer to the question of how, not what, to decide. The inner authorities →

Definition

Which centers are fixed in a chart and how they group: one connected circuit, or two, three or four separate islands that other people bridge. Reflectors have none, by design. Definition →

Not-self

The tradition’s name for how living against your design feels: frustration for Generators, anger for Manifestors, bitterness for Projectors, disappointment for Reflectors. Not a diagnosis; a compass pointing home.

Profile

The two Sun lines of a chart, personality over design, written like 4/6. It describes the costume your purpose wears: how you learn, relate and are seen. The twelve profiles →

Signature

The feeling of a design running as built: satisfaction for Generators and Manifesting Generators, success for Projectors, peace for Manifestors, surprise for Reflectors. The signature is the confirmation; the not-self is the correction.

Strategy

The one practical instruction each type carries for meeting life: respond, inform, wait for the invitation, or wait a lunar cycle. Everything else in the chart is detail; this is the practice. The five types →

Type

The chart’s broadest category, computed from how the centers connect: Generator, Manifesting Generator, Projector, Manifestor or Reflector. The five types →

Variables

The four small arrows drawn beside the head on detailed charts: an advanced layer describing digestion, environment, motivation and perspective, read from the colors and tones beneath the lines.

Wave

The Solar Plexus’s natural rhythm: emotion rising and falling on its own schedule, unrelated to events. For emotional authorities, clarity is whatever is still true after the whole wave has passed. Emotional Authority →

What are the words for the sky, and for living it?

Conditioning

Everything you learned to be through your open centers: the tastes, urgencies and ambitions of the people around you, absorbed and amplified until they felt like yours. Not damage; information. The practice is telling it apart from you.

Deconditioning

The slow return to your own design after years of living the conditioning. The tradition gives it seven years; honestly, it is gradual, uneven and lifelong, and it starts the day the chart shows you something you recognize.

Design

The red side of the chart, calculated from the sky when the Sun sat exactly 88 degrees before your birth Sun, about three months early. The body’s inheritance: unconscious, running on its own, often plainer to others than to you.

Personality

The black side of the chart, calculated from the moment of birth: the part of your imprint you recognize as yourself, the you that you would describe.

Openness

Everything white in a chart: the centers and gates the sky left unfixed in you. Where you take others in and feel them amplified, and, over time, where your deepest wisdom about people grows.

Incarnation cross

The life theme woven from the four Sun and Earth gates of a chart, named like a title. It describes a trajectory, not a destiny, and it is read together with the profile. The incarnation crosses →

Rave New Year

The Human Design year begins when the Sun enters Gate 41, around January 22, not on January 1. It is the wheel’s own calendar, and the reason late January often feels like the real reset. Gate 41 →

Transit

Where the planets are right now, read on the same wheel as a birth chart. Transits are the weather your fixed design moves through; they color days without changing who you are. Today’s transits →