Note from Helen Palmer

The synopsis you will read below comes from "Hidden in Plain Sight" - a paper on Enneagram origins that first appeared in the July 2009 issue of the IEA Journal. That initial print run contained substantial errata - and so a corrected re-print has been arranged for the upcoming July 2011 Journal for IEA members.

Ginny and I are grateful to the IEA for the care they have shown in bringing our history research forward, including its 100+ item annotated bibliography. The history project has been more than a dozen years in the making, and will appear as a first chapter in the forthcoming book: The Inner Observer: Where Neuroscience, the Enneagram and Spiritual Practice Meet.

We welcome your comments and invite an open dialogue with other researchers who are willing to share their data as we have done. Please remember that this version of "Hidden" condenses the full text that will appear in the upcoming IEA Journal, including Suzanne Dion’s very convincing rendering of the diagrams as 3-dimensional Platonic solids, rather than 2-dimensional flats.

We see “Hidden in Plain Sight” as a beginning – not an end – of the scholarly support that the Enneagram deserves.

There are some key points to consider in reading the précis:

1. That Archaic peoples lived in a geocentric Universe rather than today’s heliocentric perspective in which the earth rotates around the sun.
2. That Archaic peoples simply did not see the outermost planets that require a telescopic lens.
3. That Archaic peoples may well have functioned in a more reflective state of mind than we do.

Best wishes to you all,
Helen Palmer

Hidden in Plain Sight
Observations on the Origins of the Enneagram
By Virginia Wiltse, PhD, and Helen Palmer, MA
First published in The Enneagram Journal of the International Enneagram Association
Excerpted from revised 2011 edition

The search for Enneagram origins has produced many insights but few substantial answers. Where did the diagram come from? Why just nine types? Why a star-shaped diagram with a gap at the bottom? And why this specific order of the types around the star? Answering these questions required a trail leading further back in time than the meticulous observations of a fourth-century monk Evagrius of Pontus, who codified nine distinct personality barriers that impede the experience of prayer and meditation. The authors use numeric clues left in the work of Evagrius, to piece together a puzzle that moves through centuries and crosses cultures to reveal both the diagram and the template of archetypal personalities that illuminate the Enneatypes.

Background

Evagrius spent his life in Asia Minor and Egypt, the very places where Pythagoras received his own advanced training. He grew up in the region of Pontus in Cappadocia, what is today modern Turkey. There, the Babylonian Magi were esteemed for their astronomical abilities and their communities thrived through the fifth century of the Common Era. Among the Pythagorean precepts that were embraced by early Christian teachers was this: “by contemplating the order and beauty of heaven the soul can begin to absorb its wondrous harmonies which reflect the nature of God himself." Evagrius explicitly espoused this belief.

In recent years Evagrius has attracted the attention of the Enneagram community as it became clear that his map of eight thoughts that act as impediments to prayer match eight of the nine cognitive/emotional habits associated with the Enneagram personality styles. Furthermore, there are at least two places where Evagrius alludes to nine logismoi or habits of mind. In his treatise On the Vices Opposed to the Virtues he lists nine pairs: gluttony and abstinence (Type Seven), fornication and chastity (Type Eight), avarice and freedom from possessions (Type Five), sadness and joy (Type Four), anger and patience (Type One), acedia and perseverance (Type Nine), vainglory and freedom from vainglory (Type Three), jealousy and freedom from jealousy, pride and humility (Type Two).

One way to transmit sacred teachings was by veiling them in symbolism or hiding them in metaphors. Like the spiritual lineage that preceded him, Evagrius argued that the physical reality of the manifest world displayed in the heavens, is a metaphor that reveals divine secrets.

The authors contend that some of the secrets Evagrius felt “should not be learnt by everyone” are encrypted in the Prologue of his Chapters on Prayer. We demonstrate via numerical and geometrical symbols, that he points us to the origins of the Enneagram diagram. A diagram that can be directly verified by anyone who looks skyward to witness the dramatic interactions of the sun, the moon with its twin nodes, and the five wandering planets following their paths. This contemplation of the heavens opened a portal for Evagrius and for other ancient people that enabled them to participate in a greater reality.

The significance of 153

Evagrius cited 153 as a symbolic number drawn from the Gospel of John (21:11) and its allusion to the miraculous catch of 153 fish. He was not alone among the early Christian scholars who recognized 153 as a number of interest. Saints Jerome and Augustine, contemporaries of Evagrius, also advanced interpretations of its meaning and so did Saint Gregory the Great somewhat later. The specificity of the number seemed to signal to these scholars that it had symbolic importance.

When Evagrius explored 153 as a symbolic number, he approached it from the point of view of one who found spiritual significance in sacred geometry. He cited the number’s varied meanings, including the triangle and hexagon implied within it, figures emblematic of the Trinity and boundaries of the cosmos: . . . in dividing my saying[s] on prayer into 153, I am catering for you a ‘fish-[dinner]’ from the gospels, to delight you with a symbolic number in which you will find both a triangular and a hexagonal form.[These} signify both: reverent knowledge of the Trinity; and the boundaries of the orderly arrangement of the universe. In citing the triangle and the hexagon in reference to 153, the sum of which is nine, Evagrius has provided two geometric shapes inherent in the tetractys, the sacred symbol of the Pythagoreans.

But the symbol also represented something more significant: “Now the whole figure: circle, triangle, hexagon, and the 10 points comprise in toto UNITY and demonstrates the oneness of things.” Evagrius opened his treatise on how to pray by inviting his reader to look behind the symbols of number and geometric shape. Fragments from the work of Iamblichus indicate that, for Pythagoras, the number Nine, the ennead, was considered “the greatest of the numbers within the decad” for “everything circles around within it.” The ennead, according to Iamblichus, was known as the number that “brings completion.”

Time and its markers in the sky

In exploring the number Nine and its relationship to the passage of time, two intriguing models emerge. The first of these derives from the lunar cycle. It was the oldest timekeeper for ancient people and was originally based on the number Nine, indicative of the moon’s three phases: waxing, full and waning. For ancient skywatchers, observing the path of the moon’s changing shape was the easiest way to map the sky and determine the pathways followed by the sun and other wandering planets. The moon takes just over 27 days to complete the circuit of the zodiac, moving to a different place in the sky each night – a little more than 13 degrees – until it makes its way back to the place where it started. The 27 lunar mansions refer to the nightly positions of the moon as it completes a full cycle. The diagram below represents the complete lunar cycle of 27 days with the 28th indicating the day when the moon is not visible. Important religious and sacred rituals were coordinated with the lunar cycle in antiquity, and this continues to be the case today. The lunar calendar is used to set the dates for Passover, Easter and Ramadan, a reminder of its past religious significance.

The complete lunar cycle included 27 days when the moon was visible plus a 28th day when it was not visible.		One cannot help but notice that a gap at the bottom representing the “dark of the moon” resembles the gap at the bottom of our familiar diagram.

Dividing the lunar diagram (Fig. 2) into three Triads marks the Head, Heart and Body-based Types (moons 1-9, moons 10-18 and moons 19-27). Since there are three sets of three in each Triad, the Lines of the Process Enneagram (Fig. 3) can be drawn by connecting the mid-moon of each set to its corresponding stress or security point. For example, try connecting moon 2 to moon 11 for the 1 – 4 line in the Process Enneagram. Or try connecting moons 26 and 17 for the 8 – 5 line. The cyclical rotation of 27 moons marked in the diagram also suggests that each of the nine Types constellate around three sub-phases (Subtypes) to total of 27 (or 28 elements including the gap) for a complete cycle.

The geometric dance of the planets: The Enneagram of Harmony

In addition to the lunar cycle, there is another outstanding celestial model that drew attention to the number Nine in the ancient world. From the geocentric perspective of standing on the earth and looking skyward, there are nine moving elements visible without the aid of a telescope – the five moving planets are called “wanderers” Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and Mercury, plus the luminaries of the sun and moon. The moon is unique in the sky because it is the only element that changes shape as it travels. Its half-full, full and half-empty phases prompted ancient people to consider it as a triune entity. The worldwide stories of creation are rooted in the movements of five planets, two luminaries and two lunar nodes. They are nine immortal beings who tread a darkened stage at night illuminated by a curtain of stars.

As they watched the sky, ancient people marked when and where the planets came together and when they separated. The interactions of the nine celestial bodies visible to the naked eye were memorized in an oral tradition that has continued to our time. As De Santillana and Von Dechend proposed in their study on archaic astronomy and myth, “the main source of myth is astronomy”. While there are many geometric relationships among the planets that give rise to different figures and different myths, we will look at one that reflects the Enneagram.

An enneagon of three interlocking equilateral triangles is formed by conjunctions (the apparent touching of two planets in the same part of the sky) of just two planets Jupiter and Saturn, as charted over a 60-year period. In the diagram at the right (fig. 6) the inner triangle illustrates the figure made during a cycle when Jupiter and Saturn meet at the same point in the sky three times during a 20-year cycle, thus creating an equilateral triangle. The two other triangles are formed, one in each of the next two 20-year cycles, as Jupiter and Saturn seem to follow each other against the backdrop of the fixed stars. This phenomenon was observed and charted by ancient astronomers. There is scholarly evidence that the star followed by the Babylonian Magi to Bethlehem, was a triple conjunction (or triple meeting) of Saturn and Jupiter.
		The enneagon produced by the Jupiter-Saturn transits over 60 years.

Planetary archetypes and their personalities

Nearly a century ago, scholars hypothesized that Egyptian Christian ascetics, Evagrius among them, had adapted the pagan list of vices associated with the Greek planetary gods and made that list acceptable to Christian orthodoxy as a litany of capital sins. By the time of Evagrius, the visible planets had been named for the gods of the Greeks: Kronus (Saturn), Helius (Sun), Selene (Moon), Ares (Mars), Hermes (Mercury), Zeus (Jupiter), and Aphrodite (Venus). One does not have to venture too deeply into Greek mythology to notice that the vices of the Greek planetary gods mirror Evagrius’s eight thoughts and, the familiar Enneagram Personality Types as well. If creation stories did indeed originate with astronomy, we will find resonance between the personalities of these gods and the astronomical characteristics of the planets in the heavens. We provide here only the briefest of comparisons illustrating how the astronomy of the planets and the vices of the Greek planetary gods compare to the Enneagram types and the descriptions in Evagrius’s Praktikos (fig 12.)

Myth, astronomy and family dynamics

Mythology also seems to confirm particular relationships that are relevant to both the Enneagram and the two diagrams that surfaced in exploring the tetractys. The nine-pointed diagrams composed of three, closed equilateral triangles, is patterned on the enneagon created by the 60-year Jupiter-Saturn cycle through the heavens. We believe that this diagram is reflected in the myth that describes the Golden Age of the Greek gods and that it represents a “harmonious” Enneagram.

During the mythological Golden Age, men “lived like gods without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief.” Saturn/Kronus oversaw this age in which humans and gods alike lived in peace. In the Golden Age myth, there was a familial relationship between Saturn, Venus and the Sun. Saturn ruled the heavens and was responsible for the birth of Venus who sprang from the foam in the ocean. Hyperion, the father of the Sun, was Saturn’s brother and assisted him in overcoming the oppressive sky-god Ouranus, the first ruler of the universe, and bringing about the Golden Age. If we were to relate the mythology of the planetary gods to the Enneagram, this family story would link Types Five (Saturn), Eight (Venus) and Two (Sun).

Another family group, in the background in this story involves Jupiter, Saturn’s son, and Jupiter’s own two sons Mars and Mercury. This planetary triad would link Enneagram Types Seven (Jupiter), One (Mars) and Four (Mercury). The Moon triad of Types Nine (Selene), Three (Artemis) and Six (Hera) forms the third grouping. That diagram is reflected in the figure at right (fig. 13). The Enneagram of the Golden Age of the Jupiter-Saturn transits might be called the Enneagram of Human Harmony. In the “Enneagram of Human Harmony” all three centers of human experience (head, heart and gut) are represented for each type.

The diagram reflected at left (figure 14) is patterned on the lunar cycle and has the gap at the bottom. It is the familiar one that is known as the “process Enneagram.” It also presumes the presence of the lunar triad, emblematic of continuity and change. From the perspective of ancient astronomers, the process Enneagram reflects the relationships among Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, the “outer” or superior planets, so called because their orbits lay outside the orbit of the Earth. The diagram also reflects the relationship between Venus and Mercury, which were considered to be inferior planets because their orbits around the Sun lay inside the orbit of the Earth. Venus and Mercury also orbit the Sun more quickly than the Earth. Thus, astronomically, they stood in special relationship to the Sun.

Evagrius referenced the superior and inferior planets in the Kephalia Gnostica noting: “The fact that some of them are united to the interior of the shadow of the earth, others outside of it, and others to the separating limit, provides information concerning their orders and concerning the government which has been confided to them by God.” Evagrius clearly believed that the heavenly bodies were intended by God to serve in an instructional capacity. We believe that this second diagram reflects the aftermath of what is known in Greek myth as the “War of the Titans.” According to Hesiod, war broke out when Saturn resisted handing over power to his son Jupiter. This precipitated a rupture in the heavens and the severing of certain Golden Age alliances. Jupiter and Saturn became locked in battle with each other.

Once Jupiter prevailed, he relegated Saturn and the other defeated gods to the netherworld. The Sun, which had once been on the side of Saturn, was intimidated by Jupiter’s lightning bolts and abandoned Saturn. In the underworld where Saturn was imprisoned, there was no contact with the Sun.

If this summary seems reminiscent of early speculation on the history of the Enneagram diagram, it is not by accident. George Gurdjieff acknowledged that he found sources that informed his own theories about the Enneagram in the monasteries of Asia Minor – the very places where the teaching of Evagrius crossed paths with other world traditions.

The Prologue to the Chapters on Prayer directs attention to another side of Evagrius, a Christian monk who was also a Pythagorean, with all the cross-cultural wisdom that the term implies. He reveals himself to be a contemplative who recognized that the spiritual life could be advanced by looking to the heavens and considering the very structure of God’s creation as a symbolic macrocosm that is mirrored in the microcosm of human dynamics and the human aspiration for spiritual advancement. In the Prologue to the Chapters on Prayer, Evagrius used numbers to express “the decipherable orderliness of creation,” and as a metaphor through which he could share the sacred secrets of the heavens.

Two Enneagram diagrams are encrypted among the Pythagorean symbols in the Prologue to the Chapters on Prayer. One reminds us of harmony and balance and what we as human beings might attain to. The other draws a dynamic map of interactions among archetypal forces, and speaks to us of ordinary life as we must face it en route to spiritual maturity. If we combine these diagrams with Evagrian insights on the quieting of the passions, on the dynamic and inter-related nature of thoughts and emotions, on the importance of self-observation, and on the core issue of relaxing (converting) vice to virtue, we have a fairly accurate fourth-century model for our 21st century curriculum at Enneagram Studies in the Narrative Tradition.