What is the Enneagram?

The word “Enneagram” has its roots in two Greek words, “ennea” meaning nine and “gram” meaning graph. It is a nine-pointed graph that has lines connecting certain numbers. Despite what some say, the Enneagram does not appear to have come from Christian origins. Instead, it appears to come from different philosophers, evolving over time, to help us understand our humanness.

The first time a nine-pointed diagram was used was by Ramon Lull, who lived from 1232-1316. He took the concept of the seven deadly sins from the early desert fathers, Evagrius Ponticus (345-399), and added two more vices to make nine, and we see these in the modern-day Enneagram. Lull was “best known in the history of ideas as the inventor of an ‘art of finding truth’ (ars inveniendi veritatis) that was primarily intended to support the Roman Catholic faith in missionary work but was also designed to unify all branches of knowledge.”(12)

Many years later, philosopher George Gurdjieff (1872-1949) created the Enneagram symbol and combined it with the three centers of intelligence, thinking, feeling, and doing. “Gurdjieff’s basic assertion was that human life as ordinarily lived is similar to sleep; transcendence of the sleeping state required work, but, when it was achieved, an individual could reach remarkable levels of vitality and awareness.”(13) Then, a Bolivian philosopher named Oscar Ichazo (1931- 2020) put together the Enneagram symbol we are familiar with today.

From 1971-1973, one of Ichazo’s students, Claudio Naranjo, and the creator of the “Enneatypes” and the 27 different subtypes, taught two different groups of Americans about the Enneagram, who then went and taught others. In 2016, a few books were published on this topic, one of them being The Road Back to You by Suzanne Stabile and Ian Cron. From this point, the Enneagram has become widely known, and many people of different beliefs have embraced it to help them understand themselves and others.

**Excerpt from my book, Me. You. Discovering True. Pg.25-26

(12) "Ramon Llull," Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed February 17, 2024, hEps://www.britannica.com/biography/Ramon-Llull.
(13) "George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff," Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed February 17, 2024, hEps://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Ivanovitch-Gurdjieff.