Where Did the Enneagram Come From?
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The Enneagram is a personality typing system that weaves together ancient traditions and modern learning to teach us how to embrace the best of ourselves, and how to shift the things we want to change. It helps us take things less personally and it gives us language for why we do the things we do.
The Enneagram’s early origins
The Enneagram symbol, the nine-pointed star, is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. It’s unclear where the Enneagram first came about, but there’s a common belief that it dates back to antiquity and the sacred geometry of the Pythagorians. Some say there are Sufi roots.
But the modern Enneagram symbol, which is a nine-pointed star in a circle has been around since 1915 and was created by a mystic spiritual teacher, a Russian Armenian man named George Gurdjieff.
He discovered the Enneagram while traveling around the world: Tibet, Iran, India, and other places. He didn’t talk about what he learned where, but he brought together a bunch of ideas that we use in Enneagram work today.
He essentially said that we’ve all become machines doing things without question and we need to wake up from the sleep that we’re in. He recognized that the unhealthy patterns of our personality have buried the essence of who we really are.
To overcome this, we need to use all three centers of our intelligence, not just our head, but also our heart and body at the same time. This is part of what he called ‘the fourth way.’
But he didn’t come up with the typing system that explains the nine core personality types. That came a few decades later in the 1960s by a man named Oscar Ichazo in Chile (who was Bolivian).
Ichazo studied Gurdjieff and used his work to develop the nine personality types. He took inspiration from many ancient sources to create his typing system, including Pythagoras, an ancient Greek who also heavily influenced the Stoics.
Beatrice Chestnut, author of The Complete Enneagram, said Ichazo was also “Influenced by Aristotle” and that his “process was designed to bring about human transformation according to methods based on science, reason, and rationality.”
The modern Enneagram
In the 1970s, one of his students, a psychiatrist and Gestalt therapist named Claudio Naranjo, took the Enneagram to the next level by bringing psychology to the typing system, giving us the modern Enneagram, a tradition that continues to evolve today.
The school I trained with was co-founded by David Daniels, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medical School for more than 30 years. Daniel J. Siege, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA and founding co-director of their Mindful Awareness Research Center, has been studying Enneagram personality patterns and contemporary science for a decade and has a book coming out soon. So it’s a tool that researchers take seriously.
Like Stoicism, the Enneagram helps us respond mindfully to what life throws at us, rather than letting our personality type’s core motivation drive the show. And it's also a tool to help us understand and live better with others.
We all know on some level that other people think differently than we do, but it wasn’t until I started studying the Enneagram that I realized how different we all are. It came as kind of a shock to me. And was also the greatest gift because I became more compassionate when I truly understood that not everyone sees the world the same way.