Enneagram and The Occult of Personality
The gnostic subversion of Christian psychology
A popular New Age trend that has made its way into modern Christianity, primarily through Evangelical psychologists and churches, is a personality model of human psyche and behavior called Enneagram. Now, for my non-Evangelical readers, you may be thinking, “why would I even care about whatever it is the Evangelicals are doing?” Well, as we have seen with other secular societal trends such as LGBT and BLM, it doesn’t just stop at mainline Protestantism.
A Pew Research Center survey in 2018 revealed that 70% of American Catholics and 67% of mainline Protestants held to at least one New Age belief, whether it be psychics, reincarnation or astrology. So this New Age phenomenon has a stronghold on Christians from across all traditions, roughly six out of ten Christians adults in America. Anyone familiar with the work that Fr. Seraphim Rose has done on the New Age, knows that it is this new religious consciousness and advancement of this gnostic form of Christianity that is preparing for the world religion of the future. Enneagram is like a Trojan horse, subverting Christian psychology with New Age spiritism.
The name Enneagram stems from ἐννέα (ennea) meaning nine and γράμμα (gramma) meaning writing, so it could be understood as a typology of nine, which as we will see evolved to represent nine interconnected personality types. However, according to leading Enneagram teacher Christopher L. Heuertz, it is more than just a model to understand personality traits.
“The Enneagram is often misunderstood as a personality tool to describe quirks and traits of people’s individuality, however the Enneagram goes much further than mere caricatures. The Enneagram is a character-structure system that illustrates the nine ways we lie to ourselves about who we think we are, nine ways we learn to come clean about the illusions we live in, and nine ways we find our way back to God.”1
Already you can see a glimpse of how this system is starting to sound a bit gnostic, but here’s where it really takes off. These nine personality types, known as “enneatypes”, are not actually positive traits, each one is considered to be a persona, a “pure untouched self”, or a mask that we wear to cover “parts of us we don’t want to see within ourselves or don’t want others to know”.2 Each number has an association with a virtue and a vice. The idea is for one to identify the mask they are wearing and thus experience a personal transformation to uncover their pure self.
Before the Enneagram became a personality tool, an Amernian esoteric philosopher of the early 20th century named George Gurdjieff, felt the 9 pointed Enneagram could illustrate all the mathematical and spiritual laws of the universe. He was basically just finding all the ways in which he could fit literally anything into the Enneagram, like some kind of schizo puzzle. It was ascribed the Enneagram of Personality in the late 1960s by Oscar Ichazo who started his Airca Institute in Chile. His disciple Claudio Naranjo helped further develop the concept. Naranjo openly admits the concept of enneatypes came to him while he was at the Arica school, through “automatic writing”. His admission is found in this video interview.
Automatic writing is a form of psychic spiritualism where a demon is channeled and uses the body of the channeler to physically write without the channeler being conscious. A more popular form of this practice can be seen with Ouija boards. Carl Jung, one of the most influential psychiatrists of the 20th century, had multiple spirit guides; one he named Philemon, who, through automatic writing, guided him with his work on the archetypes. Jung himself was a gnostic alchemist, and he wrote openly about his experience with automatic writing in his autobiography, where he states:
Philemon and the other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself.
In my fantasies I had conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I.
He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, "If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them."
It was he who taught me psychic objectivity, or the reality of the psyche. Through him the distinction was clarified between myself and the object of my thought.
He confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be used against me.3
The Enneagram’s introduction into Christianity is largely due to Richard Rohr, a perennialist Franciscan priest who’s known as one of the most famous living spiritual writers in the world. Politically, Rohr is a progressive and has publicly endorsed abortion, same-sex relationships and a queer activist organization called Soulforce.4 As one might expect, Rohr’s theology reflects his progressive ideology; he is a self-described perennialist, a spiritual philosophy that traces its roots back to Neoplatonism and was revived in the west by figures like Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts in the mid 20th century.
Rohr himself defines the Perennial tradition as “encompassing the recurring themes in all of the world’s religions and philosophies that continue to say:”
‘There is a Divine Reality underneath and inherent in the world of things, there is in the human soul a natural capacity, similarity, and longing for this Divine Reality, and the final goal of existence is union with this Divine Reality.’5
By a more simple definition, perennialism teaches that all religions of the world share the same metaphysical origin of truth, which is best described in the notion that all religions are just different paths leading to the same shared destination.
There are tons of other heresies that Rohr teaches in his book The Universal Christ. So many, that it would require a separate essay, or even a book, to address them all. But to be clear, I am not arguing that just because one of the most influential Enneagram teachers holds to a bunch of heretical views, it invalidates the Enneagram itself. Rather, his perennialism is the one view that I find most relevant to understanding that the Enneagram philosophy has always been predicated upon it, as it is the underlying spiritual philosophy of the New Age.
“How many sincere, misguided false prophets there are in the world today, each thinking he is bringing benefit to his fellow men, instead of an invitation to psychic and spiritual disaster!” -Fr. Seraphim Rose
Those who would defend Enneagram would likely not contest the reality of automatic writing, or the admission from Claudio Naranjo that the ennneatypes are a result of demonic automatic writing. But the cope is simply one of pragmatism, that despite its undeniable occult origins, enneagram just works and is effective in understanding human behaviors.
The reason that the Enneagram “works” is the same reason any other psychic practice works, because the demons understand human behavior better than humans themselves. We all know this because we are familiar with the multitude of ways they are able to tempt us in unique situations. The fact that something works, or that your experience with it has been positive, does not mean it is spiritually beneficial. It also does not take into account the probability of the person who’s experiencing the thing that “works” being deluded into thinking it works.
In Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose mentions Zen Buddhism as appearing to be the most authentic spiritual outlook, as it condemns occult practices and has a rigorous prayer life.6 However, its fundamental flaw is that it has no theological foundation and relies solely on experience, falling into the “pragmatic fallacy”, which goes as follows:7
I believe X is true.
Believing in X results in practical benefit Y.
Therefore, X is true.
If one believes something is good and true simply because it works, then how are they to distinguish between that belief and another contradictory belief in which a proponent makes the same pragmatic argument? This is why the Enneagram and other New Age practices must presuppose a perennialist worldview, just as Aldous Huxley emphasized mystical experience over metaphysics. Mere experience simply cannot discern between that of a good or evil experience, “it can only state what seems to be good because it brings ‘peace’ and ‘harmony,’ as judged by the natural powers of the mind and not by any revelation”.
When experience is emphasized above doctrine, the normal Christian safeguards which protect one against the attacks of fallen spirits are removed or neutralized, and the passiveness and “openness” which characterize the new cults literally open one up to be used by demons.8
- Blessed Fr. Seraphim Rose
The Sacred Enneagram: An Interview with Christopher L. Heuertz, Bible Gateway [website], https://www.biblegateway.com/blog/2017/09/the-sacred-enneagram-an-interview-with-christopher-l-heuertz/ (accessed 1 January 2023).
Development | Tear Off the Mask, The Enneagram in Business [website], Ginger Lapid-Bogda PhD, https://theenneagraminbusiness.com/development/development-tear-off-the-mask/ (accessed 1 January 2023).
Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, New York, Vintage, 1965, p. 183.
Richard Rohr: Letter of Endorsement for Soulforce, Aspiring Ministries [website], Kevin Silva, https://www.apprising.org/2009/06/29/richard-rohr-letter-of-endorsement-for-soulforce/ (accessed 7 January 2023).
The Perennial Tradition, The Center For Action and Contemplation [website], https://cac.org/living-school/program-details/the-perennial-tradition/ (accessed 1 January 2023).
Fr. Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, 5th ed., Platina, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood Press, 2018, p. 65
Ibid., p. 65-66
Ibid. p. 67-68
Yep. Gnosticism and writers like Gurdjieff are what got me to leave behind Orthodoxy. Good post.