What is the origin of the Enneagram?
As an oral tradition that was not written down until recently, it’s hard to know its actual origins. The most likely origin is that the Enneagram is a Sufi tradition, the mystical branch of the Muslims. As such, Gurdjieff, a spiritual seeker around the turn of the twentieth century, discovered the oral tradition and brought it back to the west. There also seems to be roots in Christian mystical tradition, specifically in the stories of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Two Shock Points, making nine stories. For our purposes, the sins and the shock points are blind spots around which personality structure grows. The current oral tradition was pioneered by Oscar Ichazo and disseminated by Claudio Naranjo.
