History of the Enneagram

The Enneagram styles are very old. The epic poet Homer (c.750 BCE) knew the nine basic styles essentially as they are today. Homer must have known something of the relations between the types as well because he knew the critical sequence. In Homer's Iliad, the nine Enneagram types appear in their numerical order (one through nine.) In The Odyssey, Odysseus meets each of the nine in reverse numerical order.

   For ancient audiences, Homer was far more than a wondrous storyteller. His chronicles percolated with symbolic meanings; they were said to hold a sacred wisdom describing the soul's journey and the workings of the cosmos.

   George Gurdjieff (d.1949), an Armenian-Russian teacher used the Enneagram extensively as a mystical tool, although not as a personality system. For Gurdjieff, the Enneagram was "the fundamental hieroglyph of a universal language," and, he said, that for those who knew how to use it, the Enneagram made libraries useless.

   The father of the ideas of the Enneagram of personality as it is taught today is Oscar Ichazo, a philosopher and teacher initially from Bolivia. Ichazo first described the Enneagram personality types in the 1950's and '60's. For Ichazo, each type was clearly a description of a process of change and flow, and not a static set of stereotypes. He stressed that all of the styles are available to each of us, so that his ingenious version of the Enneagram is far more than a collection of personality styles.

   From Ichazo's original work come a wide array of current applications of the enneagram to business, education and psychology.