Origins of the Enneagram

I was 24 years old when I walked into a bookstore in Los Gatos, California and bought my first book about the Enneagram. I had never heard of the personality system, but the symbol on the cover intrigued me.

The timing could not have been better. Just months before, I learned that my live-in boyfriend was stealing money from me. The Florida vacation, the fancy dinners, and the expensive gifts were all being funded by money heisted from my own bank account.

I may have stumbled across the Enneagram by accident, but it became the best tool to help me understand what had happened. This ancient personality system is like the Rosetta Stone of human nature. It gave me a context and translation for what was otherwise mystifying behavior.

Why would a person steal from his girlfriend to take her on a vacation? The Enneagram offered an explanation.

What is the Enneagram and where does it come from?

The Enneagram is a system of human personality that helps to explain why people behave the way they do. It suggests that your experience in life is dictated largely by where your attention goes. The system is complex, but in its simplest terms, it outlines nine distinct habits of attention and how they influence behavior.

The information the Enneagram offered me was tremendously valuable, but as I learned more, I became curious about its roots. Who invented it? Where did it come from?

I quickly discovered that – it’s complicated. The origins of the Enneagram can’t be summarized in a sentence or two. To learn the history of the Enneagram, you enter a world of sacred geometry, esoteric mystery schools, ancient Greece, and Sufi wisdom.

To unravel the mystery of the Enneagram, I needed a guide, so I spoke with Enneagram educator Stephanie Davis.

Davis has been working with the system for over 30 years. She’s been certified with Helen Palmer/David Daniels, Eli Jaxon-Bear, and Tom Condon, and she’s trained with Russ Hudson and Don Riso. If you don’t recognize those names, don’t worry – it’s enough to know that they’re a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the Enneagram community.

But perhaps most intriguing, Davis was a member of one of Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth (SAT) groups. These groups were the starting point from which the Enneagram leaked out to become available to a larger audience.

Davis got right to the point. “There are many layers in understanding the Enneagram. There is the symbol as a geometric shape – a circle, a triangle, and a hexad which is derived through sacred geometry, probably dating back to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. But that’s just the symbol. No one was using the word “Enneagram” at that time.”

“In the 1900s, the Russian philosopher Gurdieff is the first person we know of who discussed movement and flow as part of the shape. It is not clear where he got this information, but we know he traveled extensively and studied in esoteric schools in the East. The symbol of the Enneagram is described as a schematic of perpetual motion, and I think of this as the ‘process Enneagram’.”

The Enneagram symbol – a universal map for any journey

If you’re familiar with Enneagram, you probably understand it as a personality assessment, much like the Myers and Briggs personality system or the Big Five. But aside from the nine types, there’s wisdom coming from the geometry and flow within the Enneagram symbol itself.

So much wisdom, in fact, that P.D. Oespensky, a Gurdieff scholar and author of In Search of the Miraculous declared that all knowledge can be included in the Enneagram. “For the man who is able to make use of it, the Enneagram makes books and libraries entirely unnecessary,” he wrote.

Davis offers a clearer explanation. “What he meant was that the Enneagram is a process map that you can lay different topics onto, and if you get the correct placement and flow of information on the symbol, you can have complete knowledge of the body of information. It’s profound when you really think about it.”

In other words, the Enneagram is both a noun and a verb. It’s a universal methodology you can apply to almost any body of knowledge.

When Enneagram met human psychology

What happened next is fascinating. Bolivian-born spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo was introduced to Gurdieff’s concepts, including the dynamic Enneagram, in the 1950s. He studied with a diverse group who brought their knowledge of Zen Buddhism, Kabbalah and other Eastern philosophies to the Enneagram.

Independently, Ichazo had studied Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, and may also have been influenced by early Christian teachings. His knowledge base was vast.

“It was Ichazo who decided to lay the topic of human psychology onto the process map of the Enneagram,” Davis explains. “He developed the “Enneagram of Personality” which is what most of us think of when we hear the word ‘Enneagram.’”

“However, he didn’t focus on personality profiles as much as passions, virtues, and ego development. And it is important to remember that the use of Enneagram was just a small part of what Ichazo was teaching in his Arica school in Chile.”

Putting meat on the Enneagram’s bones

From the deserts of the Far East to the hills of Chile, the roots of the Enneagram were already proving to be deep and expansive.

Our next stop is the San Francisco Bay Area, where Ichazo’s student Claudio Naranjo taught as early as the 1970s. Davis was a member of one of his subsequent SAT groups, so I was eager to hear about her experience with him.

“Those SAT groups were intense! Naranjo didn’t teach the Enneagram directly–he never said “here’s an Enneagram seminar.” He used the Enneagram as a tool for his broader teachings. He would break us into type groups a lot and use the system that way as we mined our shadow side and things like that.

Naranjo, a trained psychiatrist, learned about the Enneagram from Ichazo.

“He put meat on the bones of the framework. If Ichazo is the father of the Enneagram, Naranjo is the mother. Ichazo planted the seed and Naranjo birthed, if you will, the psychological descriptions of the nine types. Based on his own training, his influences, and his experience, he fleshed out the nine personality styles and then the 27 subtype descriptions,” Davis explains.

From here, I knew the story well, as it is part of Enneagram lore. Naranjo’s small, exclusive SAT groups from the 1970s, much like the one Stephanie was in later, were supposed to keep the information secret.

But the secret leaked out, and more and more people began learning about the Enneagram – but the paths went in a few different directions.

Different lineages, same landing place

One place the Enneagram went is to the Jesuit community. Robert Ochs, a Jesuit, learned about the Enneagram from Ichazo and Naranjo’s work. He spread the information and, by the late 1980s, the Enneagram had become entrenched within the Jesuit community.  Don Riso, a Jesuit seminarian, got the bare-bones notes and spent years in independent research and study, exploring how to apply the skeleton frame to more practical applications.

In 1987, Riso published a book, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. This is the first of many books he authored on the Enneagram – and the book I picked up in the Los Gatos bookstore.

A year later, in 1988, Helen Palmer, an intuition teacher studying the work of Naranjo, published The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and Others in Your Life. Palmer’s work is part of the ‘Narrative Tradition’ lineage of the Enneagram. Davis explains what that means. “Helen applied Naranjo’s concepts to the narrative style she used in her intuition training to develop a more narrative-focused Enneagram. This was based on people sharing their experience to illustrate their Enneagram type.”

Impressively, while both the Jesuit lineage and the Narrative Tradition lineage had different development paths, they landed in much the same place when it came to describing a high-level overview of the nine personality types.

Enneagram in the 21st century

In 2013, Beatrice Chestnut wrote the highly influential book The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge. This book uses the teachings of Naranjo and gives us the first published descriptions, in detail, of the 27 subtype personality profiles.

I asked Chestnut about what inspired her to write The Complete Enneagram.

“I never set out to study the subtypes, but in 2004 when Claudio Naranjo presented on the topic at the International Enneagram Conference, I was really surprised by the way he described the 27 personality profiles. He added so much more detail and information to what I had heard described before.”

“Naranjo and his associates at that conference helped me see that I was a self-preservation Type 2, which I never knew before. This was tremendously useful information – it was like I got a whole new angle into my own mind. When I learned my subtype, I went on a mission to learn everything I could about Naranjo’s approach.  I wanted everyone to have access to this subtype teaching because it helped me so much. I’m a researcher, so I pointed my analytical skills at finding and analyzing every piece of information I could find that Naranjo had said or written about the subtypes. This was the basis for my book.”

In the end, what did the Enneagram teach me about my boyfriend?

It turns out, many things. As I studied the system, I learned about wingsarrowssubtypes and more. Eventually I found the Enneagram levels of development, the high and low side of each of the nine habits of attention. During this study, I found my boyfriend.

He was likely a very unhealthy Type 3 Achiever, obsessively focused on image and playing a role. He wanted to look like the “perfect boyfriend”: someone who would buy his girlfriend a Dalmatian puppy, take her to Disney World and treat her to nice dinners. The fact he didn’t have the money to do that became part of the web of deceit that unhealthy Type 3s can build.

The Enneagram offered me a path to healing, as it has for many others. Perhaps this is why the fact there is no clear answer to where the Enneagram came from has never bothered me.

What’s more exciting is the future. As Helen Palmer wrote in the foreword to Ginger Lapid-Bogda’s book Bringing Out the Best in Yourself at Work, “The Enneagram is arguably the oldest human development system on the planet, and like all authentic maps of consciousness, it finds new life in the conceptual world of each succeeding generation.”

Its roots may be mysterious, but the Enneagram seems to have its moment for every generation. And that means we can look forward to many new spins on this fascinating – and ancient – personality system.

Now you know the roots of this fascinating personality system, why not try it out for yourself? Take the Enneagram test here to discover your type in minutes, and gain valuable insights for life.

Lynn Roulo is an Enneagram instructor and Kundalini Yoga teacher who teaches a unique combination of the two systems, combining the physical benefits of Kundalini Yoga with the psychological growth tools of the Enneagram. She has written two books combining the two systems. Headstart for Happiness, her first book is an introduction to the systems. The Nine Keys, her second book, focuses on the two systems in intimate relationships. Learn more about Lynn and her work here at LynnRoulo.com.

Foundation of Enneagram – R Hudson & J Dibbs

Here are just a few highlights from this insightful audio session with Russ:

  • (6:30) — Meaning of Enneagram Symbol
  • (7:57) — Russ’ introduction to the Enneagram
  • (12:32) — Mystical traditions from around the world
  • (15:28) — The Law of 3
  • (16:00) — Systems of 9
  • (19:50) — Desert Fathers and ancient Egypt
  • (21:47) — Meditation and art of presence
  • (22:51) — The Passions
  • (25:20) — The synthesis of the modern Enneagram

https://youtu.be/MowhgwPPXh4

_______________________________________________

History of the Enneagram

I was 24 years old when I walked into a bookstore in Los Gatos, California, and bought my first book about the Enneagram. I had never heard of the personality system, but the symbol on the cover intrigued me.

The timing could not have been better. Just months before, I learned that my live-in boyfriend was stealing money from me. The Florida vacation, the fancy dinners, and the expensive gifts were all being funded by money heisted from my own bank account.

I may have stumbled across the Enneagram by accident, but it became the best tool to help me understand what had happened. This ancient personality system is like the Rosetta Stone of human nature. It gave me a context and translation for what was otherwise mystifying behavior.

Why would a person steal from his girlfriend to take her on a vacation? The Enneagram offered an explanation.

What is the Enneagram and where does it come from?

The Enneagram is a system of human personality that helps to explain why people behave the way they do. It suggests that your experience in life is dictated largely by where your attention goes. The system is complex, but in its simplest terms, it outlines nine distinct habits of attention and how they influence behavior.

The information the Enneagram offered me was tremendously valuable, but as I learned more, I became curious about its roots. Who invented it? Where did it come from?

I quickly discovered that – it’s complicated. The origins of the Enneagram can’t be summarized in a sentence or two. To learn the history of the Enneagram, you enter a world of sacred geometry, esoteric mystery schools, ancient Greece, and Sufi wisdom.

To unravel the mystery of the Enneagram, I needed a guide, so I spoke with Enneagram educator Stephanie Davis.

Davis has been working with the system for over 30 years. She’s been certified with Helen Palmer/David Daniels, Eli Jaxon-Bear, and Tom Condon, and she’s trained with Russ Hudson and Don Riso. If you don’t recognize those names, don’t worry – it’s enough to know that they’re a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the Enneagram community.

But perhaps most intriguing, Davis was a member of one of Claudio Naranjo’s Seekers After Truth (SAT) groups. These groups were the starting point from which the Enneagram leaked out to become available to a larger audience.

Davis got right to the point. “There are many layers in understanding the Enneagram. There is the symbol as a geometric shape – a circle, a triangle, and a hexad which is derived through sacred geometry, probably dating back to the Greek philosopher Pythagoras. But that’s just the symbol. No one was using the word “Enneagram” at that time.”

“In the 1900s, the Russian philosopher Gurdieff is the first person we know of who discussed movement and flow as part of the shape. It is not clear where he got this information, but we know he traveled extensively and studied in esoteric schools in the East. The symbol of the Enneagram is described as a schematic of perpetual motion, and I think of this as the ‘process Enneagram’.”

The Enneagram symbol – a universal map for any journey

If you’re familiar with Enneagram, you probably understand it as a personality assessment, much like the Myers and Briggs personality system or the Big Five. But aside from the nine types, there’s wisdom coming from the geometry and flow within the Enneagram symbol itself.

So much wisdom, in fact, that P.D. Oespensky, a Gurdieff scholar and author of In Search of the Miraculous declared that all knowledge can be included in the Enneagram. “For the man who is able to make use of it, the Enneagram makes books and libraries entirely unnecessary,” he wrote.

Davis offers a clearer explanation. “What he meant was that the Enneagram is a process map that you can lay different topics onto, and if you get the correct placement and flow of information on the symbol, you can have complete knowledge of the body of information. It’s profound when you really think about it.”

In other words, the Enneagram is both a noun and a verb. It’s a universal methodology you can apply to almost any body of knowledge.

When Enneagram met human psychology

What happened next is fascinating. Bolivian-born spiritual teacher Oscar Ichazo was introduced to Gurdieff’s concepts, including the dynamic Enneagram, in the 1950s. He studied with a diverse group who brought their knowledge of Zen Buddhism, Kabbalah and other Eastern philosophies to the Enneagram.

Independently, Ichazo had studied Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, and may also have been influenced by early Christian teachings. His knowledge base was vast.

“It was Ichazo who decided to lay the topic of human psychology onto the process map of the Enneagram,” Davis explains. “He developed the “Enneagram of Personality” which is what most of us think of when we hear the word ‘Enneagram.’”

“However, he didn’t focus on personality profiles as much as passions, virtues, and ego development. And it is important to remember that the use of Enneagram was just a small part of what Ichazo was teaching in his Arica school in Chile.”

Putting meat on the Enneagram’s bones

From the deserts of the Far East to the hills of Chile, the roots of the Enneagram were already proving to be deep and expansive.

Our next stop is the San Francisco Bay Area, where Ichazo’s student Claudio Naranjo taught as early as the 1970s. Davis was a member of one of his subsequent SAT groups, so I was eager to hear about her experience with him.

“Those SAT groups were intense! Naranjo didn’t teach the Enneagram directly–he never said “here’s an Enneagram seminar.” He used the Enneagram as a tool for his broader teachings. He would break us into type groups a lot and use the system that way as we mined our shadow side and things like that.

Naranjo, a trained psychiatrist, learned about the Enneagram from Ichazo.

“He put meat on the bones of the framework. If Ichazo is the father of the Enneagram, Naranjo is the mother. Ichazo planted the seed and Naranjo birthed, if you will, the psychological descriptions of the nine types. Based on his own training, his influences, and his experience, he fleshed out the nine personality styles and then the 27 subtype descriptions,” Davis explains.

From here, I knew the story well, as it is part of Enneagram lore. Naranjo’s small, exclusive SAT groups from the 1970s, much like the one Stephanie was in later, were supposed to keep the information secret.

But the secret leaked out, and more and more people began learning about the Enneagram – but the paths went in a few different directions.

Different lineages, same landing place

One place the Enneagram went is to the Jesuit community. Robert Ochs, a Jesuit, learned about the Enneagram from Ichazo and Naranjo’s work. He spread the information and, by the late 1980s, the Enneagram had become entrenched within the Jesuit community.  Don Riso, a Jesuit seminarian, got the bare-bones notes and spent years in independent research and study, exploring how to apply the skeleton frame to more practical applications.

In 1987, Riso published a book, Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery. This is the first of many books he authored on the Enneagram – and the book I picked up in the Los Gatos bookstore.

A year later, in 1988, Helen Palmer, an intuition teacher studying the work of Naranjo, published The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and Others in Your Life. Palmer’s work is part of the ‘Narrative Tradition’ lineage of the Enneagram. Davis explains what that means. “Helen applied Naranjo’s concepts to the narrative style she used in her intuition training to develop a more narrative-focused Enneagram. This was based on people sharing their experience to illustrate their Enneagram type.”

Impressively, while both the Jesuit lineage and the Narrative Tradition lineage had different development paths, they landed in much the same place when it came to describing a high-level overview of the nine personality types.

Enneagram in the 21st century

In 2013, Beatrice Chestnut wrote the highly influential book The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge. This book uses the teachings of Naranjo and gives us the first published descriptions, in detail, of the 27 subtype personality profiles.

I asked Chestnut about what inspired her to write The Complete Enneagram.

“I never set out to study the subtypes, but in 2004 when Claudio Naranjo presented on the topic at the International Enneagram Conference, I was really surprised by the way he described the 27 personality profiles. He added so much more detail and information to what I had heard described before.”

“Naranjo and his associates at that conference helped me see that I was a self-preservation Type 2, which I never knew before. This was tremendously useful information – it was like I got a whole new angle into my own mind. When I learned my subtype, I went on a mission to learn everything I could about Naranjo’s approach.  I wanted everyone to have access to this subtype teaching because it helped me so much. I’m a researcher, so I pointed my analytical skills at finding and analyzing every piece of information I could find that Naranjo had said or written about the subtypes. This was the basis for my book.”

In the end, what did the Enneagram teach me about my boyfriend?

It turns out, many things. As I studied the system, I learned about wingsarrowssubtypes and more. Eventually I found the Enneagram levels of development, the high and low side of each of the nine habits of attention. During this study, I found my boyfriend.

He was likely a very unhealthy Type 3 Achiever, obsessively focused on image and playing a role. He wanted to look like the “perfect boyfriend”: someone who would buy his girlfriend a Dalmatian puppy, take her to Disney World and treat her to nice dinners. The fact he didn’t have the money to do that became part of the web of deceit that unhealthy Type 3s can build.

The Enneagram offered me a path to healing, as it has for many others. Perhaps this is why the fact there is no clear answer to where the Enneagram came from has never bothered me.

What’s more exciting is the future. As Helen Palmer wrote in the foreword to Ginger Lapid-Bogda’s book Bringing Out the Best in Yourself at Work, “The Enneagram is arguably the oldest human development system on the planet, and like all authentic maps of consciousness, it finds new life in the conceptual world of each succeeding generation.”

Its roots may be mysterious, but the Enneagram seems to have its moment for every generation. And that means we can look forward to many new spins on this fascinating – and ancient – personality system.

Now you know the roots of this fascinating personality system, why not try it out for yourself? Take the Enneagram test here to discover your type in minutes, and gain valuable insights for life.

LYNN ROULO
Lynn Roulo is an Enneagram instructor and Kundalini Yoga teacher who teaches a unique combination of the two systems, combining the physical benefits of Kundalini Yoga with the psychological growth tools of the Enneagram. She has written two books combining the two systems. Headstart for Happiness, her first book is an introduction to the systems. The Nine Keys, her second book, focuses on the two systems in intimate relationships. Learn more about Lynn and her work here at LynnRoulo.com.

History of the Enneagram

The Traditional Enneagram

Overview

The Enneagram of Personality Types is a modern synthesis of a number of ancient wisdom traditions, but the person who originally put the system together was Oscar Ichazo. Ichazo was born in Bolivia and raised there and in Peru, but as a young man, moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina to learn from a school of inner work he had encountered. Thereafter, he journeyed in Asia gathering other knowledge before returning to South America to begin putting together a systematic approach to all he had learned.

After many years of developing his ideas, he created the Arica School as a vehicle for transmitting the knowledge that he had received, teaching in Chile in the late 1960’s and early 70’s, before moving to the United States where he resided until his passing in 2020. In 1970, When Ichazo was still living in South America, a group of Americans, including noted psychologists and writers Claudio Naranjo and John Lilly, went to Arica, Chile to study with Ichazo and to experience firsthand the methods for attaining self-realization that he had developed.

This group spent several weeks with Ichazo, learning the basics of his system and engaged in the practices he taught them. The Arica school, like any serious system of inner work, is a vast, interwoven, and sometimes complex body of teachings on psychology, cosmology, metaphysics, spirituality, and so forth, combined with various practices to bring about transformations of human consciousness. (Neither Don Riso nor Russ Hudson was affiliated with this school, and therefore cannot describe it with any justice, but those seeking to learn more about it can do so through Arica publications1).

Among the highlights for many of the participants was a system of teachings based on the ancient symbol of the Enneagram. The Enneagram symbol has roots in antiquity and can be traced back at least as far as the works of Pythagoras. 2 The symbol was reintroduced to the modern world by George Gurdjieff, the founder of a highly influential inner work school. Gurdjieff taught the symbol primarily through a series of sacred dances or movements, designed to give the participant a direct, felt sense of the meaning of symbol and the processes it represents. What Gurdjieff clearly did not teach was a system of types associated with the symbol. Gurdjieff did reveal to advanced students what he called their chief feature. The chief feature is the lynchpin of a person’s ego structure—the basic characteristic that defines them. Gurdjieff generally used colorful language to describe a person’s chief feature, often using the Sufi tradition of telling the person what kind of idiot they were. People could be round idiots, square idiots, subjective hopeless idiots, squirming idiots, and so forth. But Gurdjieff never taught anything about a system of understanding character related to the Enneagram symbol.

For these and other reasons, many early Enneagram enthusiasts have mistakenly attributed the system of the nine types to Gurdjieff or to the Sufis because of Gurdjieff’s use of some Sufi techniques. This has led to the widespread and erroneous belief that the Enneagram system has been handed down from the Sufis or from some other ancient school as an ongoing “oral tradition.” While it is true that Ichazo drew on his knowledge of a number of such traditions, the actual combination of those traditions connected with the Enneagram symbol is purely his creation. Thus, the “Traditional Enneagram” only goes back to the 1960’s when Ichazo was first teaching it, although the philosophy behind the Enneagram contains components from mystical Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancient Greek philosophy (particularly Socrates, Plato, and the Neo-Platonists)—all traditions that stretch back into antiquity.

In Personality Types (11-26), we offered a more extensive history of the system, but here, we want to look at the basics of the Enneagram system developed by Ichazo. 3

Ichazo actually taught Aricans a system of 108 Enneagrams (or “Enneagons,” in his terminology), but the Enneagram movement in America has been based on the first few, and primarily on four of them. These are called the Enneagram of the Passions, the Enneagram of the Virtues, the Enneagram of the Fixations, the Enneagram of the Holy Ideas.

To grasp the significance of these diagrams and the relationship between them, we must remember that the system was designed primarily to help elucidate the relationship between Essence and personality, or ego. In Ichazo’s own words:

“We have to distinguish between a man as he is in essence, and as he is in ego or personality. In essence, every person is perfect, fearless, and in a loving unity with the entire cosmos; there is no conflict within the person between head, heart, and stomach or between the person and others. Then something happens: the ego begins to develop, karma accumulates, there is a transition from objectivity to subjectivity; man falls from essence into personality.” (Interviews with Ichazo, page 9)

Thus, Ichazo saw the Enneagram as a way of examining specifics about the structure of the human soul and particularly about the ways in which actual soul qualities of Essence become distorted, or contracted into states of ego. In developing his Enneagram theories, he drew upon a recurrent theme in Western mystical and philosophical tradition—the idea of nine divine forms. This idea was discussed by Plato as the Divine Forms or Platonic Solids, qualities of existence that are essential, that cannot be broken down into constituent parts. This idea was further developed in the third century of our era by the Neo-Platonic philosophers, particularly Plotinus in his central work, The Enneads.

These ideas found their way from Greece and Asia Minor southward through Syria and eventually to Egypt. There, it was embraced by early Christian mystics known as the Desert Fathers who focused on studying the loss of the Divine Forms in ego consciousness. The particular ways in which these Divine forms became distorted came to be known as the Seven Deadly Sins: anger, pride, envy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and sloth. How the original nine forms, in the course of their travels from Greece to Egypt over the course of a century, became reduced to seven deadly sins remains a mystery.

Another key influence Ichazo employed in developing these ideas comes from mystical Judaism, and particularly from the teachings of the Kabbala. Central to Kabbala is a diagram called Tree of Life (Etz Hayim in Hebrew). The Tree of Life is a said to be a map showing the particular patterns and laws by which God created the manifest universe. The diagram is composed of 10 spheres (Sefirot) connected by 22 paths in particular ways. Most significantly, Ichazo must have been aware of the Kabbalistic teaching that all human souls are “sparks” that arise out of these spheres or emanations from the Kabbalistic Tree. (The first sphere, Keter, is reserved for the Messiah, leaving nine other spheres for the rest of us.) In the traditional teachings of the Kabbala, for instance, each of the great patriarchs of the Bible were said to be embodiments of the different spheres of the Tree. 4 This teaching suggests that there are different kinds of souls—different emanations or facets of the Divine Unity.

Ichazo’s brilliant work was in discovering how these Divine Forms and their corresponding distortions connected with the Enneagram symbol and with the three Centers of human intelligence, Thinking, Feeling, and Instinct. He called the higher, essential qualities of the human mind the Holy Ideas, in accordance with western mystical tradition. Each Holy Idea also has a corresponding Virtue. The Virtues are essential qualities of the heart experienced by human beings when they are abiding in Essence. As a person loses awareness and presence, falling away from Essence into the trance of the personality, the loss of awareness of the Holy Idea becomes a person’s Ego-fixation, and the loss of contact with the Virtue causes the person’s characteristic Passion. While everyone has the capacity to embody all of the Holy Ideas and Virtues, one pair of them is central to the soul’s identity, so the loss if it is felt most acutely, and the person’s ego is most preoccupied with recreating it, although in a futile, self-defeating way. See the diagram below.

Relationship between Higher Essence Qualities and Ego Distortions

Relationship between Higher Essence Qualities and Ego Distortions

The Virtues, Passions, Holy Ideas, and Fixations

Thus, the Passions and Ego-fixations represent the ways that spiritual qualities become contracted into ego states. There are, according to Ichazo’s theory, nine main ways that we lose our center and become distorted in our thinking, feeling, and doing, and are thus the nine ways that we forget our connection with the Divine. (The Passions can also be thought of as our untamed animal nature before it is transformed by contact from higher influences—awareness and Grace.)

Because of this particular relationship between the higher qualities of the soul and their corresponding ego distortions, a person could, by using presence and awareness to recognize the pattern of their distortion—their characteristic passion and ego-fixation—come to recognize the quality of Essence that had been obscured. By remembering or contemplating the higher quality, balance could be restored, thus accelerating the person’s awareness of themselves as Essence. Knowing one’s “type” was a way to direct one’s inner work to facilitate the transformative process.

The Virtues describe the expansive, non-dual qualities of Essence experienced in a direct, felt way by a person abiding in their true nature. The Virtues are the natural expression of the awakened heart. We do not try to force ourselves to be “virtuous”—rather, as we relax and become more present and awake, seeing through the fear and desire of the ego self, these qualities naturally manifest themselves in the human soul.

“An essential individual will be in contact with these [Virtues] constantly, simply by living in his body. But the subjective individual, the ego, loses touch with these Virtues. Then the personality tries to compensate by developing passions.” (Interviews with Oscar Ichazopage 19).

The Passions represent an underlying emotional response to reality created by the loss of contact with our Essential nature, with the ground of our Being, with our true identity as Spirit or Essence. The underlying hurt, shame, and grief that this loss entails are enormous, and our ego is compelled to come up with a particular way of emotionally coping with the loss. This temporarily effective, but ultimately misguided coping strategy is the Passion. But because the Passion is a distortion of an inherent, essential Virtue, recognizing the Passion can help us to restore the Virtue.5

In a related way, the Virtue of each type can also be seen as an antidote to its Passion and as a focal point for the type’s positive traits. By recalling the Virtue in a state of presence, the Passion can be gradually transformed. The restoration of the virtue and the transformation of the passion is an extremely important part of the spiritual use of the Enneagram.

The Holy Ideas represent specific non-dual perspectives of Essence—particular ways of knowing and recognizing the unity of Being. They are what naturally arises in a clear, quiet mind when a person is present and awake, seeing reality as it actually is. The loss of a Holy Idea leads to a particular ego-delusion about the self or reality, called the type’s Ego-fixation. Through the ego-fixation, the person is trying to restore the balance and freedom of the Holy Idea, but from the dualistic perspective of ego, cannot. Again, understanding the perspective of our type’s Holy Idea functions as an antidote to the ego-fixation. The non-dual perspective of our true nature is restored as we see through the particular delusions of our type.6

                                       Oscar Ichazo's Enneagram of the Virtues

                                       Oscar Ichazo’s Enneagram of the Virtues

                                    Oscar Ichazo's Enneagram of the Passions

                                    Oscar Ichazo’s Enneagram of the Passions

                                   Oscar Ichazo's Enneagram of the Holy Ideas

                                   Oscar Ichazo’s Enneagram of the Holy Ideas

                               Oscar Ichazo's Enneagram of the Ego-Fixations

                               Oscar Ichazo’s Enneagram of the Ego-Fixations

Footnotes

  1. We particularly recommend Interviews with Oscar Ichazo, Arica Press, 1982. It gives readers a feel for Ichazo’s overall philosophy and explains in simple language his orientation and use of Enneagrams, or “Enneagons,” as he calls them.

  2. Ichazo has called the Enneagram the “Ninth Seal of Pythagoras,” see Goldberg, 1993.

  3. We do not claim to be representatives of Ichazo’s teachings, but rather wish to offer our own interpretation of a few of them based on our own work with the system over the last few decades.

  4. See Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree, by Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, Weiser 1974. On page he provides the relationship between the sefirot and the patriarchs. See also Howard Addison’s The Enneagram and Kabbala, Jewish Lights Press, 1998.

  5. For a more extensive discussion of the Passions, see Character and Neurosis, Claudio Naranjo, Gateways, 1994.

       6.  For a full treatment of the Holy Ideas, see Facets of Unity, A.H. Almaas, Diamond Books, 1998.


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History

Who Invented the Enneagram?

Stemming from the Greek words ennea (nine) and grammos (a written or drawn symbol), the Enneagram is borne out of ancient wisdom tradition. It has its roots in several religions including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It can be traced to the Christian desert monk Evagrius Ponticus (399), whose teaching formed the seven deadly Vices or sins, as well as to the desert mothers and fathers of the fourth century, who used it for spiritual counseling. This ancient personality typing system is now interwoven with modern psychology and known to spiritual directors, retreat leaders, clergy, and lay people as a helpful aid to spiritual formation and transformation. In the last century, various individuals have rediscovered a powerful teaching paradigm, which conveys a clear vision of how humans function known as the Enneagram. Originally introduced as a human development system by philosopher and teacher George Gurdjieff in 1915, the Enneagram and its matrix of dynamic connecting lines became the basis for inquiry into the evolution of consciousness. Gurdjieff’s teaching focused on the nine-pointed figure and the chief feature of each ‘type’.

In the late 1960s, a Chilean named Oscar Ichazo positioned nine personality types around the Enneagram diagram. He continued the works of Evagrius and other medievalists including Origen, on the seven Vices and mapped these onto Gurdjieff’s nine-pointed figure, elaborating on the definitions of the chief features of each type.

One of Ichazo’s pupils was Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean MD, psychiatrist, and scholar of the Centre for Studies of Personality, and part of the early Gestalt therapy community. He had a broad range of knowledge and expertise in spirituality and psychological human development. Naranjo produced the diagram, which connected Enneatypes to current personality theory, and along with psychologists in Berkeley, CA, integrated the Enneagram with emerging developments in modern psychology. Translating the personality types into psychological language, he refined and expanded descriptions of the types, as well as the sub-types, thus facilitating the path of conscious development.

In the early 1970s, Helen Palmer, a student of Naranjo, began teaching Enneagram panel workshops in the Narrative Tradition, integrating spirituality, psychology, and somatics. In the 1980s, she published The Enneagram: Understanding Yourself and the Others in Your Life, and together with Stanford psychiatrist David Daniels, MD, co-founded the Enneagram Professional Training Program grounded in the Narrative Tradition.

Soon after, Claudio Naranjo, MD, and other psychologists in Berkeley, CA, integrated the Enneagram with emerging developments in modern psychology. Since the 1970s, the Enneagram has been developed as a modern psychological system by Claudio Naranjo, MD, and other psychologists in California, including Helen Palmer and David Daniels, MD. Loyola University in Chicago was also an early center of Enneagram work.

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