The History of the Enneagram
The origins of the Enneagram represent a rich tradition of seeking self-awareness that spans time, culture, ethnicity, and ideology. Its history is a bit mysterious, and if you try to piece it together on a timeline or a geographical map - you’d have arrows pointing every which way (as in the photo above). And that’s because the modern Enneagram framework connects the wisdom of the ancients with contemporary psychology and the latest neuroscience.
I think that is unique compared to other systems - where someone downloaded wisdom but it doesn’t evolve with new information or as the science changes our understanding. It allows you to hold the system loosely, try it on for size, and use what works for you and let the rest go. (Which is probably what we should be doing with most frameworks!)
While the Enneagram is often thought of as ancient - the Enneagram as we know it today is a fairly modern invention. The 9 personality types with psychological behaviors, motivations, and attributes were developed in the 70s by Oscar Ichazo and Claudio Naranjo. Ichazo was from Bolivia and founded the Arika school in South America. He was a student of the Kabbalah and connected the Enneagram symbol to personality types. Ichazo taught in Chile in the 60s, and one of his students was a Chilean-born psychiatrist named Claudio Naranjo who brought his ideas back to the US and started teaching them in California, further developing the types using his training as a psychologist and building on the teachings of Gurdjieff.
The modern Enneagram integrates archetypal work by Carl Jung and Karen Horney’s model on the ways people protect themselves and overcome their core fear of life. Each model attempts to explain that while people are different, there are striking similarities on the journey of being human.
What makes the Enneagram particularly interesting to me is that it is this really old map. A map to not only to understand yourself but also a description of the nature of change and growth that is governed by natural laws. You can see traces of its teachings as early as classical Greek mathematicians and philosophers - in Homer’s Odyssey where Odysseus visits 9 different lands with specific energies and paradoxes that correlate in order to the 9 types, or to Pythagoras and the mathematical patterns of 3/7/9 that also show up as significant elements in many myths and philosophy that take us to 800 BCE. The law of one, the law of three, and the law of 7 were used as far back as ancient Egypt to understand the nature of the universe and the process for change.
But then there are these 3 separate threads around 1290 CE, where you can see the 9 types emerge in theological thought - converging around the concepts of virtues and vices in Sufism, Judaism, and medieval Christianity. This teaching was passed down orally from generation to generation - and during this time it spread across the globe because of the trade routes that were opening up.
But the modern Enneagram symbol as a process model can be attributed to G.I. Gurdjieff around 1920. He was a Greek Orthodox Christian who grew up in Turkey and traveled widely - pursuing his interest in consciousness and personal development. He was an eccentric fellow - who was using it as a process and categorization system to understand and explore how the universe functions as a whole - how things manifest and change and develop over time. He authored a philosophy called the 4th way and kept his teaching close to the vest, revealing bits and pieces to his following, called Seekers after Truth.
In the 70s, the Enneagram was brought into the modern psychological tradition in the US by Naranjo and widely seen as a descriptive model of how humans function. The 9 types were fleshed out and psychological terms were added to the framework to help translate the wisdom.
I think it is important to acknowledge that this wisdom originated in the middle east and that the psychological types that we know and use today were developed largely by South Americans. The history is complex, and a lot of people don’t understand that this wasn’t developed by the church or the prominent (mostly white) teachers that you see today.
The Enneagram became popularized in the 90s when a couple of books were published that made the teaching accessible to laypeople. And now there are hundreds of books on the topic - which can make it overwhelming for new people to figure out where to start. The integration journey outlined through the Enneagram is nuanced and complex. It can be intimidating at first.
This is why I like using the iEQ9 test - it can act as a shortcut to figuring out your Enneagram type, which really is the first step to unlocking the wisdom of the Enneagram and starting your journey to integration. The nice thing about it is that it has a 95% accuracy rate and uses psychometric principles and adaptive software to help objectively discern what are largely unconscious patterns for you. And this allows you to access the insight the Enneagram can offer - a chance to see what drives you at a deeper level than ever before. You can contact me for information on how to take the test.
Hopefully, this brief history gives you a sense of how what began as a spiritual practice of self-transformation through self-observation became one of the most astute psychological systems of modern times. For more information on the Enneagram system, check out my Enneagram 101 page here.
Note: I sourced this information through Russ Hudson’s work (including Personality Types), Richard Rohr’s book The Enneagram, A Christian Perspective, and Dirk Cloete’s Integrative Enneagram training materials.
