From the Occult to the Church: How the Enneagram Became Part of Christian Culture

obviously everybody's heard of it everybody has a pretty good idea of what it is marcia where did it come from where did the enneagram first break into the world where are we seeing this 1916. okay there we go 1916 104 years ago a guy named george gerjeef who was this like spiritual seeker esoteric type who was looking into different uh belief systems not the major religions but you know the more secretive kind of gnostic type things he did a diagram a nine pointed diagram that we would call the enneagram that's what it means it means a nine pointed diagram um and he claimed that this was like a picture of the universe that you could fit everything into the enneagram all the laws of the universe would fit in this everything could fit there for example he did a musical scale around the nine points he felt it could illustrate everything in reality um all the mathematical laws all the spiritual laws everything um he came up with the idea of the law of three and the law of seven and he applied it to daniel graham basically he was like playing around with it how do all the different nine points um integrate with each other or how they all fit together and he would put things in there to make it quote unquote work it had nothing to do though with uh a type or a personality or anything else that is being taught now and his followers um he had a follower named spensky now gurchief never wrote about fanny graham but his follower uspensky did write about the enneagram based on what gurjeev taught according to uspensky and uspensky was still talking about it as a spiritual kind of diagram uh now after that that was he and gurjev both died in the late 1940s somewhere around the 1960 or in the 60s this man named oscar ichazzo who had a school in chile called eureka and it's in a town called arika chile on the coast started teaching it now how did he get it um in the in the research that um i was doing uh it was it's there's no definitive history and what you find with enneagram which is true for a lot of things from the new age you find a lot of different contradictory stories yeah it's really hard to get the facts because all these people give stories um it seems like the most likely was that he ran into some followers of gurujif gurji still has followers around the world there are actually people who who are like sort of cult followers of his teachings and somehow probably uh uh ichazo came across this and he decided to kind of teach it his own way and so in his little secret occult school in eureka he was teaching the enneagram as a picture of ego fixations so he made each of the nine points an ego fixation something you get fixated your ego gets fixated ichaz's view was that your ego your outward who you seem to be outwardly your outward personality and everything was a cover-up for the real true inner essential self or the true essence in the self your essence is actually pure and untouched by anything bad or anything wrong so you have this essence in you but it's been covered up by all of these false ideas you've had about yourself by the experiences you've gone through by what other people have told you by how you've been conditioned that's the ego it's the false self this is an idea that's very common in in in union thinking and in the new age as well um even in astrology i was a professional astrologer and so the idea is that there's this pure untouched self uh and so that's what he taught so you find your ego fixation and when you understand that that's not really you then you can see this pure self at the center of who you are so it still wasn't being taught as anything person personality wise or any of the way it's really being taught today ichazo had a student at his school named claudio naranjo who was basically he was a psychiatrist but he was a spiritual seeker he went to a chisel school because he was searching for things he was searching spiritual truths after his son had died he had a crisis and he started the spiritual journey he learned the enneagram from echazo and then he took it to a very edgy place in big sur california called esalen and it was very wild place with experimental psychology people doing uh halluci hallucigen hallucigenic drugs trying to have spiritual trips with drugs like they did in the 60s etc he took it there he went there around 1970 and he claims in two videos on youtube that he got the types that we now associate with enneagram he got the types via automatic writing automatic writing is a form of spirit contact where you open yourself up and you let whatever spirit or entity use your hand to write out things and he says that's how he got these types he said he said partly his observations but mostly automatic writing and then he confirmed it through his own observations so it's very subjective first of all it's coming from um a spirit which we know is not not from god that's bad news these would be fallen angels yeah and he had these spirit guides he and ichazo both had spirit guides um in fact ichazo was very open about these um spirits he talked about metatron and the green ketub were two of the big ones and he said his group was guided by an interior master wow so he was into spirit contact as was naranjo and they both also did um drugs to have spiritual trips um there's a there's an interesting video where naranjo talks about his time um with ichazo and talks about each other it's very very it's a very revealing about the new age mindset yeah and then uh he so he starts teaching it with the types at esalen and he has a um now there's two different stories about how the jesuits got it but there was a man bob oaks who was a jesuit who learned it from naranjo and naranjo gave him permission to teach it and and naranjo said that he was the only person he gave permission to and bob oaks took it to a catholic seminary in uh chicago and taught it to some priests there uh in seminary and then it also helen palmer who was called herself a psychic at the time and i remember when she was a psychic because i was a new ager you know in the in the late 70s and into the all the 1980s and she was a known figure she uh took the enneagram and started infusing it with her new age philosophy and other people picked up on it and meanwhile the jesuit catholic use of it was being used in a very limited way like at retreat centers and things like that it was never approved of or endorsed by the catholic church and in fact i think they may have actually written something against it but i can't remember for sure i know that the catholic um a catholic journal i think it's called a catholic reporter has an article about all these um demonic beginnings the spirit contact and everything so um it was not approved of by the catholic church but these people were teaching it and some of the catholics who were also counselors a few of them did books on it but most of the books on the enneagram were new age books written by new agers the book the road back to you the first enneagram book published by an evangelical publisher ivp came out in 2016 that kind of gave the stamp of approval to the enneagram and the two authors were suzanne stabile who was mentored for many years by richard rohr and ian kron who's also a i would call him a follower of richard moore uh they both teach both have taught or spoken at richard warren's center center so basically they're disciples of richard rohr and they're the ones who wrote the first enneagram book so okay so that richard rohr there is again that richard so okay so the 2016 first enneagram book published on an evangelical christian publisher is that when the sort of explosion of the enneagram happened in the church would you say yes yes and it wasn't quite an explosion at the beginning it was kind of out there um you know the book would be looked at by some people and you'd hear now and then people giving a talk on it but it wasn't really popular or taken up i think the next year when um chris horat's book was published the sacred enneagram by zondervan that gave the enneagram another push because here's another publisher and um by the way here again um chris horitz was mentored by richard ward so now you have the first two books coming from rich roar's disciples now we have we have over 15 way over i think we're up to maybe 20 enneagram books um two just came out this this summer and it's september 15th so it's it's now it has started really exploding i would say around 2018 and then it just took off in 2019 that's when i was trying to keep up with it and i couldn't keep up with it i actually first started warning about it on facebook in 2014 wow but my first article on the enneagram which is on my website it's called the um enneagram gps gnostic path to the self which i still think is an accurate title i wrote that in 2011 elisa wow and the reason i wrote it is because that's when i saw it in the progressive church wow and so i thought okay it's in the progressive church that's a little too close for comfort yes i i need to write about it and i have been asked about it by a few people so i did my research and did my article 2011 and i thought taken care of so i'm just going to say this so i'm just going to say this you know none of us are perfect in our in our analysis and we're all learning as we go and we're just trying to take everything and compare it with scripture but i think that i had up until this point viewed the enneagram largely as something uh else that's maybe just kind of creeping in everywhere but i think that you have convinced me that this really is obviously it's a new age with occult beginnings and things like that that is coming in through the progressive church it would seem uh it's it's one way that progressive leaders such as richard rohr and ian crone and and others uh can get their ideas into the evangelical church and maybe hook some people because that was always that was always a concern that so many of these books that you see that are marketed to christians about the enneagram are written by progressive christians particularly just this this incredible influence that richard rohr has

Channel: Alisa Childers

Views: 54,006

Keywords: apologetics

Id: 1J2G0k_PaYM

Length: 13min 19sec (799 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021