The Enneagram Perspective:

A typography I’ve found especially useful is the Enneagram (Any-agram) with its spectrum of nine personality styles. It’s quite comprehensive and provides a framework for pulling together many features we all share in common; it is remarkably perceptive in delineating the dimensions of nine different personality styles that we have in common with some people; and it leaves a lot of leeway for the particulars of our unique selves. With its numerous applications for personal growth, therapy, spirituality, education, business, etc., the Enneagram theory generates many helpful hypotheses.
In Greek Ennea means nine and gram means point. The word refers to a circle inscribed by nine points that is used as a symbol to arrange and depict nine personality styles. In its current formulations, the Enneagram brings together insights of perennial wisdom and findings of modern psychology. The figure itself is derived from arithmology while the nine personality styles are validated by experiential observations and, more recently, by experimental research.
Th e roots of the Enneagram are disputed. Some authors believe they have found variations of the Enneagram symbol in the sacred geometry of the Pythagorians who 4000 years ago were interested in the deeper meaning and significance of numbers. This line of mystical mathematics was passed on through Plato (who also contributed his ideas about higher and lower forms which become essence and ego or authentic self and compensating personality in the Enneagram system), Plato’s disciple Plotinus (who in the Enneads spoke of nine divine qualities manifesting in human nature), and subsequent neo-Platonists. Some believe this tradition found its way into esoteric Judaism through Philo, a Jewish neo-Platonist philosopher, where it later appears embedded in the branches of the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah. (Apparently to belong to this tradition your name had to begin with a “P”!) Variations of this symbol also appear in Islamic Sufi traditions, perhaps arriving there through the Arabian philosopher al-Ghazzali. Supposedly a group of Sufi s in the fourteenth century founded the Naqshbandi Order, known as the “Brotherhood of the Bees” (because they collected and stored knowledge) and the “Symbolists” (because they taught through symbols). This community is said to have preserved and passed on the Enneagram symbol.
Speculation has it the Enneagram found its way into esoteric Christianity through Pseudo-Dionysius, who was influenced by the neo-Platonists, through Evagrius and his catalog of logismoi and vices, and through the Franciscan mystic Ramon Llull, who distilled all philosophy and theology down to nine principles in his attempt to integrate Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions.
An Enneagram-like figure appears on the frontispiece of a textbook written in the seventeenth century by the Jesuit mathematician and student of arithmology Athanasius Kircher.
More recently George Gurdjieff , born in the 1870’s in the Caucasus region of what is now Russia, a teacher of esoteric knowledge and a contemporary of Freud, used the Enneagram to explain the laws involved in the creation and unfolding of the universe. He alludes to his acquaintance with the Enneagram in the 1920’s during his visit to Nine Lenses On The World: The Enneagram Perspective 20 the Sufi Sarmouni monastery in Afghanistan. Th is is the site of the Naqshbandi Order mentioned earlier. Quite appropriately, it is located near a great East-West trade route, where not only goods but also ideas crossed regularly.
In yet another culture and part of the globe, the Enneagram was taught by Oscar Ichazo (1976; 1982) as part of his Arica Training in South America. He found that the Enneagram (or Enneagon, as he calls the nine-sided figure) comprehensively organizes the various laws operating in the human person. So while Gurdjieff applied the Enneagram’s process to all of reality, including a rudimentary application to the human person, Ichazo made use of the Enneagram figure and dynamics to explain more fully the functioning of the human psyche. Ichazo claims to have arrived at his understanding of the Enneagram through his own independent studies and research.
Claudio Naranjo (1990; 1994), a Chilean psychiatrist, learned the tradition from Oscar Ichazo and brought the Enneagram further into Western psychology by elaborating and formulating in contemporary psychological language Ichazo’s explorations of the psyche.