The Esoteric Origins of the Enneagram and New Age Implications

Marcia Montenegro has spent years researching the truth about the Enneagram. She exposes the hidden dangers and occult origin of the Enneagram, and how the enemy is using it to infiltrate the Church with universalism and heretical teachings.Show more

Learn the truth about the Enneagram. It's not ancient. It's not Christian. And it's not helpful.

The Enneagram's True Essence

In the 1990s, the Enneagram star rose in the secular world, and several business companies began to use it as a tool for personality analysis. At the time, this writer found this odd since the Enneagram, technically speaking, is an occult tool. There is no objective basis for the nine numbers, their categories (such as Reformer, Helper, Achiever, Individualist, etc), or the alleged relationships between the numbers. Most importantly, the Enneagram has as its purpose a spiritual awakening.

The Enneagram purports to lead a person to not only self-understanding, but to an integration of all aspects of the self and, ultimately, to an awakening to the true Self. "Self" is capitalized because the Self is considered by the original (and most contemporary) Enneagram teachers to be divine. The nine numbers most likely originate with Ichazo's belief in the "nine divine forms" of Self, a Self which supposedly has been subverted by ego distortions. There are also the "triads," which is how "your" number is related both positively and negatively through two other numbers. The philosophy for this is directly derived from the esoteric values of Sacred Geometry and from Gnostic views of the self as sacred and pure in essence.

The website for The Enneagram Institute (http://www.enneagraminstitute.com/) openly refers to concepts from Gurdjieff and company, such as "the Work" and "inner work," to refer to mystical work on the inner self. This "Work," as expressed by Ichazo, involves transcending one's ego in order to find one's "Essence." This is fundamental in Gnostic-based, Eastern, and New Age views.

In this paradigm, one's true self is divine and perfect, but through confusion from wrong beliefs and misperceptions, one has identified with the ego, which is the false self. Thus, there is the "true Self" versus the "false self," a concept familiar to anyone who has studied Eastern religions or New Age teachings. The Enneagram Institute claims that the Enneagram will uncover the wrong view of self and lead one to realize the true Self and thus "live in Essence;" that is, to live fully in the reality of the true divine Self (the original link is no longer available due the Enneagram Institute changing their website).

The Enneagram Institute itself admits that "the philosophy behind the Enneagram contains components from mystical Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancient Greek philosophy (particularly Socrates, Plato, and the Neo-Platonists)" (https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/the-traditional-enneagram/)

The reference to Christianity undoubtedly refers to what is sometimes called "mystical" or "esoteric Christianity." This type of Christianity was often claimed by Gurdjieff and other forerunners of the New Age, and in actuality is a Gnostic (neo-Platonic) distortion of Christianity, not authentic historic Christianity. Gurdjieff, his predecessors in Theosophy,** and those who followed the various offshoots of Theosophy and related groups usually referred to themselves as Christians and believed they had discovered the "true" Christianity. Many today who follow New Age and other arcane philosophies will claim to be mystical or esoteric Christians.

The fact that the origin of the Enneagram is spiritual, that its purpose is spiritual, and that it was passed down through teachers of cryptic spiritualities, should clearly indicate that its validity as any sort of tool to understand self or truth is questionable at best.

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