It's yet one more new-age plan for living that promises to easily solve all your problems

and give you a blueprint to follow that will guarantee a successful life, all guided by

ancient wisdom. Today we're going to look at the history of the human design system and

see if it can actually deliver, or if it's just another spin the wheel and invent a new-age

mysticism. Human design is coming right up on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. The Human Design System.

Today we're going to seek out guidance in the form of a blueprint we can follow to tell us

everything we need to know about ourselves to live our best lives. At least that's a promise of

human design, part horoscope, part fortune cookie, and part yoga. Human design borrows from just

about anything and everything in the new-age movement that's trendy and that sells well. And the

result is a blueprint for living that's guaranteed to spread like wildfire through fashionable suburban

populations. In a nutshell, human design is yet another of the countless versions of numerology.

This one invented in 1987 by Canadian Alan Crackauer, a psychedelic enthusiast while he was in

Spain. Crackauer described a trip that lasted eight days and nights while in a room with his dog

Barley Baker on the island of Ivisa. He described his trip as a visitation by a high intelligence

that he called the voice, who spent that week imparting to him all of the knowledge that

constitutes human design. If this isn't a compelling foundation for a method of life guidance,

I don't know what is. Crackauer began writing self-published books describing his method,

inexplicably using the pseudonym Ra-Uru-Hu. This may have been an effort to lend his writing

credibility among its potential customer base. After all, the modern Western esotericism movement

had been sweeping the United States for more than 20 years, as it continues to today. Western

esotericism, by that time thoroughly rebranded as the New Age movement, is a counterculture trend

...