William McKinley's Bardo: The Hours After Buffalo

Ra Uru Hu taught the Bardo, the structured unraveling that follows physical death, using his own passing in 2011 as the illustration his students would carry forward. William McKinley’s chart offers a rare second case worth walking through: one of the more precisely timed presidential deaths on record, an actual document filed with New York’s Bureau of Vital Statistics rather than a reporter’s estimate.

What happened in Buffalo

McKinley was shot twice on September 6, 1901, by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. He seemed to be recovering for several days before gangrene set into the wound his surgeons hadn’t been able to fully close. He died eight days later, in the early morning of September 14, 1901, at 2:15 AM local time, the third sitting president to be assassinated in under forty years.

Where transit Earth stood

In Ra’s teaching, physical death is the moment the two aspects of a design responsible for placing a person in their life, and for animating the body itself, separate from the physical form for good. What lingers for a while afterward is the personality: memory, conditioning, self-image, still present even though the vehicle it ran is gone. Ra taught that this doesn’t end all at once. It moves through a fixed, time-limited sequence, three line-positions in a row, in an order set entirely by wherever transiting Earth happened to sit, by gate and line, at the instant of death.

At 2:15 AM Eastern on September 14, 1901 (7:15 AM Greenwich time), computed directly in Maia Mechanics, Human Design Professional Software licensed from Jovian Archive, transiting Earth sat in Gate 22, line five, the line that, on the living side of the wheel, “carries a charisma people project onto, and must stay honest about what it can give.” A line-five entry opens the same three-stage sequence Ra’s own chart walked in March 2011: reunion, then vision, then time, typically closing out over roughly a day to a day and a half.

What this doesn’t reach for

Ra’s own teaching went a layer deeper for his own case, naming the specific planet exalted at the exact line his Earth held when he died. That detail lives in the Rave I’Ching itself, not in anything published here, so this piece stops at what transit Earth’s position actually was and what stage it opened, rather than filling in a layer this site doesn’t have a licensed source for.

What it leaves you with

None of this is offered so you’ll watch the sky for signs of your own ending. Ra taught the Bardo as evidence that the intelligence organizing a life doesn’t stop at the last breath, and a second worked case, in a chart with genuinely reliable data behind it, is one more place to see that argument stand on its own mechanics.

The mechanics behind this reading, the six stations and the three-stage run each death enters, sit on the Bardo cornerstone page, alongside every other case in the series.

If you’re curious what your own Moon, your own Earth, or these gates look like in your personal wheel, your free chart is there whenever you want to look.

In memory of an ICONIC Human Design,

LaVeena B. Archers, PhD