I discovered the Enneagram about 12 years ago. I had struggled with severe depression and was going through a divorce. I discovered that I was a type 6 with a 5 wing and my ex wife was a 2 with a 1 wing. The descriptions were so accurate and when I read about the different levels of development I had gone through exactly what was described. I got so enamored with it I wrote a book ( which I have now made unavailable). As I learned more a lot of the information about the origins of the Enneagram was just not true. Oscar Ichazo is the man who came up with it and he was a New Age Eastern mysticism guru of sorts. Claudio Naranjo brought it to the US and in an interview said he developed much of it through automatic writing (an occult practice). I have seen it being promoted as having Christians origins and some Churches are incorporating it into their programs. While I don't think it's harmful using it strictly to study personality it is not Christian and has no place in the Church. It teaches that children are born in "essence " and develop an ego as a defense mechanism that develops their personality as a coping mechanism. Through esoteric work and meditation one can overcome their ego and get back in essence. This is in conflict with basic Christian theology. Anyone have any thoughts or experiences they would like to share? Is it wrong to use the Enneagram strictly for personality typing? Has anyone encountered it being taught at their Church?
Oscar Ichazo is the founder of the Arica school. In the 1990’s Arica sued Hellen Palmer to stop publication of her book on the Enneagram. Intellectual copyright for the Enneagram of Personality was denied to Ichazo on the basis that he had published claims that his theories were factual and factual ideas cannot be copyrighted. (Arica v Palmer, court case, provided by Information Law Web)
The court said Ichazo had made the case for heresy but not copyright infringement. Ichazo wanted to destroy the ego. Palmer was telling people how to improve it. But the question is where did Palmer get the Enneagram from? Come to think of it, where did Ichazo get it? The following is an excerpt from the Osho website by one of Ichazo’s former students (with my notes in parenthesis) …
“Where does the Enneagram come from?
The Enneagram, as many people know, is an ancient symbol. It was brought to the attention of modern Europeans by George Gurdjieff, the Armenian mystic, who claimed it represented the laws of the universe. He used the symbol mainly in music and dance. He also asserted that every individual possessed a “chief characteristic”, but at no time did he mention nine personality types or try to relate these types to the Enneagram symbol.
Gurdjieff had visited many Sufi schools as a young man – documented in his book Meetings with Remarkable Men – so it was assumed he’d learned the symbol from them. Now it seems more likely that it was taught to him, as a boy, by his tutors, who were esoterically-inclined monks, belonging to the Greek Orthodox tradition of the Christian faith.
At this point, we find ourselves in historical regression, because the next question is: where did these monks get the symbol? They seemed to have inherited it from a group of early Christian mystics, living in Egypt, called the ‘Desert Fathers’, who may, or may not, have linked the Enneagram
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symbol to the so-called Seven Deadly Sins, adding two more for good measure, making nine in all: anger, pride, deceit, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust and sloth.
This, however, is not the beginning of the story. The Desert Fathers, being mostly Greeks, may have picked up the symbol from the teachings of Ancient Greeks like Pythagoras, Plato and Plotinus. However, even if all this is true, Oscar Ichazo denied that he got the Enneagram symbol from Gurdjieff, so there was no clear line of continuity.
So, where did he get it? For a while, all kinds of exotic rumors buzzed around the Arica School in New York. My favorite one went like this:
Oscar had undertaken a dangerous solo pilgrimage through remote areas of the Hindu Kush Mountains, in Northern Pakistan and Afghanistan, meeting with secret Sufi schools and receiving their sacred knowledge.
Actually, the truth was more mundane: he got it from his uncle’s library. In a 1996 magazine interview, Ichazo explained that when he was 12-13 years old, he inherited an esoteric library from his uncle Julio, who was a philosopher.
Since he’d been having frightening, out-of-body experiences from the age of six, Ichazo hungrily devoured these books, hoping to find reassuring answers for his paranormal states. He came across the Enneagram symbol while studying an ancient text from the Chaldean civilization, which existed around 600 BC, in what is now known as Iraq, and whose citizens appear to have been fascinated by numbers.
For example, the Chaldean system of numerology is considered to be more accurate, with more mystical depth, than Pythagorean numerology. So it makes sense that an intrinsically mathematical symbol like the Enneagram would be embraced as part of their metaphysics.
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And where, might one ask, did the Chaldeans get the symbol? Nobody knows and we cannot ask them, because in 536 BC, Cyrus the Great crushed their little realm, adding it to his ever-expanding Persian Empire.
Oscar Ichazo, the Theosophical Society and channeled revelations
Meanwhile, returning to the twentieth century, Oscar Ichazo, studying in his library, also found evidence of the symbol in the teachings of certain Sufi schools and in the more recent Theosophical movement. By the age of 18, Ichazo had joined a group of Theosophists in Buenos Aires who discussed all kinds of esoteric issues, including Gurdjieff’s secret sources and the meaning of the Enneagram symbol. Ichazo soaked up all this information like a sponge and by his mid-twenties possessed a vast store of knowledge.
As a culmination, the placing of nine ego types on the Enneagram symbol seems to have come to Ichazo through personal revelation. In other words,
he channeled it, attributing his illumination to a couple of disembodied entities: the Archangel Metatron, and a Sufi entity, the Green Qu tub. (Ichazo denied this in his Letter to the Transpersonal Community.)
This sounds bizarre, if we envisage these entities to be blond-haired angels flapping their golden wings amid white puffy clouds. But to Ichazo, these were states of consciousness. Metatron represented a function of higher mind, which gave Ichazo the blueprint of his whole Arica system, while the Green Qu tub personified surrender to divine will and receiving Baraka, the energy of divine grace.
So far, so good. But, as is often the case with mystics, problems began for Ichazo when he started to teach his knowledge to others. As long as he
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confined himself to esoteric groups in South America, things went pretty well. But, in 1970, he invited a group of Americans from the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, to participate in a three-month training in the town of Arica, Chile. This, by the way, is how Oscar’s school got its name, because it began with the training in this obscure city.
Among those who answered the call was Claudio Naranjo, a Chilean-born psychiatrist who was living and working in the United States.
Enters Claudio Naranjo
Naranjo was bearded, brainy and hungry. He was no ordinary psychiatrist. He’d trained in Gestalt Therapy with Fritz Perls, dabbled in psychedelic drugs and was obsessed with contacting the elusive “Sarmoun Brotherhood” whom Gurdjieff said possessed great secrets of human transformation.
Astonished by the range of Ichazo’s knowledge, Naranjo was convinced the Bolivian knew the whereabouts of this mysterious Sufi school. But, alas, as far as we know, Naranjo never got the brotherhood’s postcode from Oscar. (Naranjo and others taped Ichazo’s lectures. All had agreed to turn in their tapes at the end of the training but Naranjo kept his. Arica transcribed the lectures and had them copyrighted)
After the training in Chile, Ichazo flew to New York and set up his new school in the middle of Manhattan. I still remember the address: 24 West 57th. We called it ‘GHQ’, short for ‘general headquarters’, the hub of a growing network of Arica branches that spread through the US and Europe.
Meanwhile, Naranjo had returned to Berkeley, California, where he began to develop psychological profiles of the nine ego fixation points. He also began to give lectures on the subject. Oscar Ichazo was not happy about this. He’d already criticized Naranjo on several occasions for being overly intellectual and was worried that his precious Enneagram would now be distorted. As it turned out, Naranjo’s eagerness to adopt the Enneagram as his own brainchild was nothing compared to the predatory instincts of the people who attended his lectures.
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Helen Palmer, Bob Oakes, Almaas and Faisal
Among those present at Naranjo’s discourses were Helen Palmer, a Jesuit priest called Bob Oakes, Hameed Ali (who adopted the pen name A H Almaas) and Faisal Muqaddam. All of them would catch the Enneagram ball thrown to them by Naranjo and run with it, developing their own systems, writing their own books, offering their own trainings.
Later, Naranjo would complain to journalists that his precious ideas had been stolen by these people without giving him credit. How ironic! Naranjo, it seems, was incapable of seeing how he’d done exactly the same thing to Ichazo. Indeed, Naranjo even went so far as to claim that it was he, not Ichazo, who’d developed the psychological dimension of the Enneagram.
This is simply untrue. Back in 1974, when I was participating in a training at the Arica Institute in New York, we were given psychological profiles of all nine types as part of our instruction, coming directly from Ichazo. Certainly, Naranjo developed these profiles further, fleshing out the psychological aspects of each ego fixation, while Helen Palmer provided an even broader view of each type’s behavior and attitudes. But the source of all this was unquestionably Ichazo himself.
For this reason, it seems to me that Oscar could have won the court case, if he’d been a bit more street savvy. But in some ways he was his own
worst enemy. When asked by the court to describe his Enneagram theory, he replied, “It is not a theory. It is a fact.”
“Well, you can’t copyright a fact,” the court replied. Case dismissed.
In reality, of course, it was a theory. But Ichazo was so insistent on asserting the objective reality of his precious system that he ended up shooting himself in the foot.
In 1990, Naranjo published a book about the Enneagram system, titled Ennea Type Structures, consisting of a dense labyrinth of psychological
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terms, mixed thickly with Christian theology. His book didn’t do well in the marketplace for the simple reason that few people could understand what he was talking about.
It was Helen Palmer, publishing around the same time, who blew the doors to the mainstream wide open and successfully introduced the Enneagram to the general public.
Meanwhile, a Jesuit student called Don Riso had beaten everyone in the race to the book stores. He’d read Bob Oakes’ notes from Naranjo and promptly wrote his own book, titled Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self-Discovery.
With these two books, penned by Palmer and Riso, the modern Bibles of the popularized Enneagram faith were born. Each step away from Ichazo had diluted the power of the system, making it tamer and more palatable, and when an amusing book, illustrated with cartoons, titled The Enneagram Made Easy was published by two of Palmer’s students, the social sanitization process was complete.”
