The truth about the Enneagram that turned my blood cold...
Why I'm renouncing the Enneagram (kicking and screaming) after realising I'd been so. very. deceived.
Hi, friends. Since writing this essay and watching it explode far beyond what I ever expected, I have received a lot of pushback from Christians who have urged me to read their linked resources on why I have misrepresented the history of the Enneagram. I want you to know that I am committed to accurate and factual research on this topic, and so I have gone down an even deeper rabbit hole to discover if my cited sources are not, in fact, accurate. What I have found has indeed been a conflict of historical accounts, but nothing (even my reading of first-hand sources) actually negates the substance of my argument here. If anything, it further confirms it. That said, I just wanted to let you know that I will be working on a follow-up essay where I dissect the conflicting accounts of the Enneagram’s history and the questions that this poses to the Church at large regarding Biblical discernment; but I am doing so prayerfully and so will be taking my time with it. It may well be a few months before I publish on this topic again, but I wanted to address this issue of “conflicting historical accounts” so that anyone who feels that I’ve presented my argument in bad faith can rest assured that my research has not stopped here, and I’ve yet to learn anything which would cause me to retract this essay. God bless, and peace be with you.
“Okay, but, like, how many elements of our Western Christian traditions have paralleled pagan1 practices? We can’t live in fear of everything just because it was once similar to what pagans did. Satan tries to hi-jack everything!”
Already, I knew in my spirit that I was making a weak argument. I could hear the soft, gentle voice of my Creator in the back of my head, as the words – dripping with prideful indignation – came tumbling out of my mouth.
My mom had texted me, very gently and very humbly, asking if she could call:
“Hey honey, you free for a chat? I’ve just had a check in my spirit about something for a while, and I wanted to share it with you.”
It’s a good job that my mom is a veteran at withstanding my initial stubbornness because when I realised that this phone call was about her reservations regarding the Enneagram, I put my boxing gloves on…
I still remember where I was when I first learned about the Enneagram. I’d been back for a visit in the U.S. for a friend’s wedding, driving down the long interstate which links central California to the Mojave Desert. When you think of a classic American road trip through the Wild West, you think of this highway: three and a half hours of farmlands which turn into mountains which turn into wide, open, desert skies.
This was a familiar road: the same road I’d travelled as me, my mom, and my brother fled an abusive situation and found ourselves displaced; the same road I took to see my high school sweetheart on his weekends home from college; the same road I drove to find respite with my old music-teachers-turned-godparents. It was this road that saw me through my first heartbreak when things ended between my boyfriend and I. It was on this road that I contemplated where my life was headed, having graduated high school to find myself virtually homeless. This road was where I blasted the entire catalogue of Bob Dylan, a gift from my school principal, as I sobbed away my past and stared blankly into my future.
Years later, these same golden mountains and desert skies reached out to greet me like old friends. Once again, I was headed south – but this time with a few years between me and the forlorn 18-year-old girl whose tears had once soaked her Nissan’s interior. Little did I know, of course, that I was just as impressionable and easily influenced as that heartbroken girl had been. The years had done little to spare me from my hopeless, romantic need to find selective beauty in the individuality of my feelings. And the Enneagram was the perfect match to set a fire to the fuel of my heart.
It was a Christian podcast that first introduced me to the ins and outs of the Enneagram: a group of women, both Protestant and Catholic, would join together to discuss various topics relating to God’s Kingdom, and one week, they had a certified Christian Enneagram Coach join them to talk them through the entire thing. This was a 2-hour-episode, and the hosts later shared that it was one of their most-streamed episodes of all time.
This coach explained, in great depth, the concept, structure, and purpose of the Enneagram before going on to describe each Enneagram Type in detail. This tool was incredibly robust and profoundly accurate.
There were 9 main personality Types, all said to reflect various aspects of God’s image. What I liked most about it was the way in which, according to this Enneagram Coach, you could pinpoint your behaviours as rooted in “core motivators” or “desires” which then often correlated with “core sins” or “struggles.” What was more, you could anticipate how your Type would behave based on where you were on a sliding scale of “healthy” vs. “unhealthy.”2
The goal, according to this podcast, was to identify what motivates each of us, what areas of sin we most struggle with, how those struggles and motivations manifest into behaviours, and how, ultimately, we can use this knowledge to lean into Scripture and allow ourselves to be uniquely and acutely sanctified by Christ in those specific areas of our lives. Alongside this personal journey of sanctification, we could also grow in compassion for our neighbour (and therefore build unity within the Church) because the Enneagram provided useful, succinct language which could help bridge gaps created by misunderstandings. Put simply, the Enneagram enabled me to not only explain how my own brain functioned but to comprehend the different ways in which other brains functioned.
After listening to a description of each Type (and the various “wings” which could be associated with them based on whether you fell into the Head, Heart, or Gut Triad), I immediately identified with the Enneagram 4 Wing 3 (the “artist” or “individualist” as its often called, with a subtle leaning towards the “achiever” – strongly situated in the Heart Triad) because it put eerily accurate language to things which I’d struggled with for my entire life: namely, a hunger for beauty that was so consuming that it turned into an envy – almost an inability to appreciate the art of others because I was so desperate to (in the words of C.S. Lewis) “be united” with3 the beauty myself.
So there I was, driving down this sunny California highway on my way to be a bridesmaid in my friend’s wedding, and suddenly I’m hit with this framework that instantly put language to things I’ve never been able to describe, both in myself and those around me. I had a new-found compassion for attributes in my loved ones which had previously irritated me. I had a deeper sense of belonging, clarity, and delight in my own individuality, loving the way God seemingly had made me “tick.”
Using this tool was going to be so healing…
I’ve used the Enneagram for almost 10 years, sometimes quite intentionally but often flippantly as I make light-hearted, self-deprecating jokes about “what a 4 I am.” Often, when I’d use it more robustly, it would be in the context of my marriage, where I’d encourage my “Enneagram 9”4 husband to pay more attention to his own feelings, coaching him (from a total place of love) to use his voice and make his feelings known so that I could be more sensitive to his needs.
But my interaction with the Enneagram goes much deeper than that.
I’ve sat through lectures from major, well-known Christian Enneagram Coaches. I’ve followed dozens of Enneagram Instagram accounts over the years, reading their pieces and articles to glean further insights into my Type and the Types of my friends and family. I’ve introduced it as a tool to dozens and dozens of people over the years, from work colleagues to church friends to family members. So fluent and literate had I become that over time, I would almost subconsciously be able to “Type” someone based on a few major, obvious characteristics.
And truly, I never saw a problem with this. What could possibly be wrong with a tool which enhances our understanding and compassion for ourselves and one another? And most importantly, as that Christian Enneagram Coach had taught me during that long drive all those years ago, this tool was designed to point us back to Christ, showing us how we each reflect an element of His image but still must lean on Him in our inherent, broken sin nature.
I mean it when I say that I would have carried on using this tool for many years if God hadn’t forcibly brought my attention to the fact that, despite its foundations from MY experience of originating in a Christian ethos, the actual history of the Enneagram was not only dark but objectively, unapologetically demonic…
I think God knew that the only person who wouldn’t back down from an intellectual argument with me on this topic would be my mother. She has always been the Lorelai to my Rory.5 My stubbornness and intellect don’t faze her – she’s known those traits in me since I was a petulant 2-year-old. And boy was I being a 2-year-old (with a big vocabulary) on that phone call.
To every perfectly valid question that she’d ask me, such as “Shouldn’t we be wary of anything that encourages us to root our identities in something other than Christ?” I would respond with a sense of exasperation.
Of course, I thought, but we can’t be so legalistic as to think that outside knowledge, such as science or psychology, are to be completely feared. And the Enneagram DOES point us back to Christ.
I understood her argument, but I didn’t agree with it. From my perspective, the Enneagram had only served to give me understanding which lead to compassion for both myself and others. Or at least, that’s what I said in the heat of the moment.
But my obedient mother would not relent:
“I’ve been researching this, Christina. Do you know the actual history of the Enneagram?”
Truthfully, I hadn’t researched it deeply. I was aware that some Christians had argued that the Enneagram wasn’t a wise tool to employ, and others had said it linked to New Age practices, but I live in a country where pagan and Christian traditions have mirrored each other in some degree for millennia (my explanation for this always being that Satan will mimic God wherever he can in his tactics of deception), so this vague knowledge of the Enneagram’s origins didn’t bother me. Again, I argued, the fruit of this tool was compassion and understanding – at least in my experience.
Never mind that my mom pushed back by saying “Can’t Christ teach us compassion and understanding?”
Never mind that I’d learned to be wary of the argument “judge something by its fruit,” after seeing how this exact argument has been used to defend abusive church cultures like that of Mars Hill and Hillsong. “But look at the fruit!” we would say as pastors abused people behind closed doors.
Truly, we do not always discern the entirety of the “fruit” which yields from any given situation; yet we rely so heavily on our partial perceptions of said “fruit” when deeming something to be right or wrong.
I was losing this argument, not because I couldn’t continue fighting it but because I couldn’t discredit the validity of my mom’s questions. By God’s mercy, the same Spirit which raised Christ from the dead lives in me, and that Spirit knows when the Truth is uncomfortably forcing me to face my Lord and repent.
“You have a platform, Christina. People read your work. You could talk about this. If the Church is being deceived by something demonic, you could be a voice to share the truth.”
I scoffed.
I doubted very much that I’d be writing a piece renouncing a tool I’d been faithfully and enjoyably using for 10 years. But I promised her, at the very least, that I would get off the phone and do my own research. I wouldn’t dismiss her concerns out of hand.
And that, as they say, was that.
The history of the Enneagram
I started off by reading the History page on the official Enneagram Institute website.6 Whilst plunging you into a narrative centred around a few primary players in the Enneagram’s development – George Gurdjieff and Oscar Ichazo, (plus a brief mention of Claudio Naranjo, who we’ll discuss more later) – the article clarifies that “the philosophy behind the Enneagram contains components from mystical Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancient Greek philosophy (particularly Socrates, Plato, and the Neo-Platonists)—all traditions that stretch back into antiquity.”
Right, so at first glance, this smorgasbord of traditional influences didn’t give me great cause for alarm. The more we study philosophy, the more we see how much our modern culture has subtle influences from many areas, secular and mystic alike.
George Gurdjieff was said to be the figure who really started to zone in on the Enneagram as a concept in his teachings, drawing from a host of philosophical antiquity; but it wasn’t until the 1960’s that Oscar Ichazo developed the Enneagram as a tool for discerning our identities, connecting the 9-pointed Enneagram shape and philosophical concepts with actual personality types to a certain extent.
The Enneagram Institute’s web page doesn’t necessarily hide that Ichazo and Gurdjieff engaged in Occult practices, but it doesn’t exactly focus on this fact either. For that information, I had to dig a little deeper. (In fact, every name associated with the Enneagram’s development seemed to reveal said person to be a committed Occultist – no committed Christians in sight).
I realised that if the Enneagram truly did have so demonic a history as my mom claimed, there would be other Christians writing about this topic (despite the fact that none had crossed my path in 10 years). So I read what the Gospel Coalition7 had to say, and it was here that my defence of the Enneagram started to dwindle.
Their article focuses in on a third major player in the Enneagram’s history: Claudio Naranjo – yes, you guessed it, another Occultist. In the 1970’s Naranjo was essentially the guy to “finish the job” by evolving the Enneagram into the system of the 9 basic personality Types that we now use today. Only THEN do we start to see this tool spreading to Christian circles, predominantly Catholic communities, where it was promoted by Jesuits, Franciscan Friars, and Benedictine Nuns.
The Gospel Coalition then, very helpfully, speed us along to how the Enneagram found its popularity in modern day Evangelicalism, giving some interesting and accurate explanations for why Christians like myself have found it so helpful.
Comparing it to how people might look to astrological signs or the Myers Briggs personality test, the article states: “In each case, individuals wanted a simple way to both convey information about their personality to others and also to identify personality traits of other people… Evangelicals who favour the Enneagram tend to be younger and either do not know or downplay its history.”
Ain’t THAT the truth.
Ultimately, following a succinct but clear history of the Enneagram, the Gospel Coalition take a measured approach at answering the question “Should Christians be using the Enneagram?” stating: “Despite its origin story, there may be enough of the Enneagram that remains useful (or at least non-harmful). If that’s the case, we should leave the issue up to the conscience of the individual Christian.”
I appreciated this conclusion, but at this point, the prevailing influence of the Occult in this tool that I so faithfully used was weighing heavily on my mind. I am a Christian writer who longs to be discerning and obedient to Christ. Heck, I literally host a podcast where we’re reading The Screwtape Letters together, and my last episode specifically zoned in on how Satan uses the most subtle of tactics to deceive us.
I couldn’t let this go.
So I decided to look through the cited sources in the Gospel Coalition’s article, at which point I found a statement8 from the U.S. Bishops' Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices (i.e. the U.S. Catholic Church) which struck the final nail in the coffin.
They went further to not only explain why the Enneagram has no root in scientific evidence (a valid argument to make from a purely pragmatic, intellectual standpoint – and another reason why I wish us Evangelicals wouldn’t shy away from science so much), but they also detail the exact event which took place to spawn the Enneagram as we know it today. And friends, this story is enough to warrant a complete rejection of the Enneagram from any faction of Christian thought or belief:
Ichazo claimed to have discovered the personality type meaning of the enneagram while in some kind of ecstatic state or trance under the influence of some spirit or angelic being: the Archangel Gabriel, the “Green Qu’Tub,” or Metatron, the prince of the archangels (the accounts vary). The training offered at Ichazo’s Arica Institute includes preparation for and means of contacting various higher beings, such as Metatron, with whom Ichazo himself has been in contact. One of the aims of training offered at Ichazo’s Arica Institute is to put the advanced student into contact with an interior master, the “Green Qu’Tub,” which is expected to occur at some point in their development.
So let’s just break this down very, very bluntly: Satan (or one of his demons) in fact spoke directly to Oscar Ichazo, a practicing Occultist (whose goal was to contact and converse with an “interior master” — not the Holy Spirit), and the Enneagram as a tool for defining human identity was born.
The final character in this history, Claudio Naranjo, became a student of Ichazo’s in Chile, and a blog post9 (whose validity I admittedly can’t verify, but it was linked in the citations of the Gospel Coalition’s statement) details Naranjo’s experiences working under Ichazo:
Naranjo was left with the impression that Ichazo’s background was enormous, his “bag of tricks” incredible. He had apparently received training in every esoteric system imaginable. His knowledge of chakra yoga, for instance, impressed Naranjo… On the third day of yoga work, Naranjo went into one of the most impressive explosions he’s ever experienced. He describes this as streams of electricity running through him, with cosmic visions producing tears and laughter… After 10 minutes of this, he wanted to stop because he couldn’t handle it… According to Naranjo, Ichazo would diagnose a person in about 1 hour… In basically 8 hours of talking, Ichazo told Naranjo almost everything about Naranjo’s personality without asking any questions or knowing anything about Naranjo.
Naranjo was the one to finalise the Enneagram as we know it today, and in this YouTube video from 2010, he states that his teacher, Ichazo, claims to have learned about the connection between the Enneagram and our personalities from “an ancient source,” potentially “Sumerian” or “Babylonian.”10
“We know that to not be true,” the interviewer in the video says.
Oh, do we now?
If you watch the video, Naranjo explains that Ichazo’s story changes from learning the wisdom of the Enneagram from a “Babylonian” source to simply that of an “ancient, higher power.” As Christians, of course, we know that the same ancient powers which ruled as princes over Babylon still walk the earth today.
But the most unnerving part of this story is yet to unfold. At around the 03:30 time stamp, Naranjo explains the difference between Ichazo’s source of wisdom compared to his (Naranjo’s) source of wisdom as he solidified the Enneagram into the 9 Types which we now use:
“It came through my own observations, but mostly from automatic writing.”
“Automatic writing?” one of the interviewers asked, confused.
“Yeah!… It came to me through automatic writing,” Naranjo confirms.
“What did?” the interviewers press.
“The specific information about enneatypes,” he says, mater-of-factly.
Pardon my crass pun here, friends, but the writing on the wall speaks for itself.
If the same Spirit which raised Christ from the dead lives in you, as it does in me, then I rest my case. However loyal you may be to the Enneagram (as I have been for 10 years), there is no piece of its history which serves to do anything but turn my blood cold.
Make no mistake, a demon gave these men the inspiration for the wisdom of the Enneagram. Wisdom that could enable one man to tell another everything about his personality without spending even 24 hours with him. Wisdom that is not rooted in traditional, practiced psychology (an important fact that the Catholic church AND the Gospel Coalition point out and that us intellectuals should care about). No, this was a secret wisdom. A “hidden” wisdom. Not dissimilar to the “hidden” wisdom that Satan promised Eve if she simply ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Despite the Christian sources from which I first discovered the Enneagram, it is not of Christ. And it never has been.
I texted my mom back after pouring over this research: “I am convinced.”
As soon as I released my grip, surrendered my pride, and accepted that my discernment was not always to be trusted, so many truths which I’d wilfully ignored started falling into place at rapid speed. I realised all of the ways in which the fruits of this tool had not, in fact, been purely good. And then the grief started to flood in: I had introduced the Enneagram – a philosophy with its origins rooted firmly in the demonic – to so many people. Church members. Colleagues. Friends.
I could only repent and trust in God’s mercy to redeem this.
Meer hours ago, I’d scoffed at my mom’s suggestion that I write about this topic for my audience. Now, it’s all I want to do. Because unlike Satan, God does not reveal truth to us for it to remain secret, hidden knowledge.11 All that is good, all that is true, all that is lovely12 thrives not in the darkness but in light. So as an act of sheer repentance and obedience to the Lord I serve, I want to conclude by sharing with you all of the reasons that I now see a Satanic agenda in even the so-called positive “fruits” of this psychological tool.
The hidden, Satanic agenda of the Enneagram
1) It’s the same old strategy with a different name.
Demonic wisdom works best when its effects are slow, subtle, and undetected, and its aim is almost always two-fold: to sever our intimacy with (and trust of) God and to corrupt our sense of self as His creation.
“Did God really say that?”13 was Satan’s first ever question of humanity. His goal isn’t overtly to steer us in the OPPOSITE direction of God (that tactic would be too obvious) but to guide us on a cleverly disguised detour (while fracturing our total trust in the Lord).
“God knows that when you eat from [the tree of the knowledge of good and evil] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”14
Satan tricks us into believing that we will become closer to God through methods which bypass God as our first, last, and only source of wisdom. What’s more, he tempts us with truths about our own identity, playing us against our own self-centred, individualistic egos. The Enneagram, in every way, mimics this same tactic whilst promising insight, empathy, and connection (to ourselves, God, and others).
2) It distorts our understanding of ourselves.
When I first discovered the Enneagram, I fell in love with the way that it gave me language to describe myself (both the deep longings of my heart and the deep struggles I face). But the longer I used it, the more I found myself dwelling in an Enneagram-4-centric view of myself, looking more to this tool than to Scripture to understand my identity (and the identity of others). I would never have admitted this, but it’s undoubtedly the truth. I felt at home in my 4-ness, proud of my individuality and creativity for its own sake and not necessarily always because it reflected the image of God in me.
What’s more, it would cause me to pigeon-hole myself and others into boxes, thereby ignoring any parts of myself that “didn’t fit” my Type. The negative effects of this were twofold: firstly, I wouldn’t fully acknowledge positive aspects of my own personality if they weren’t associated with my Type. I remember often thinking that I identified with the more academic, introverted traits of a Type 5, but I assumed that I must not truly be that intellectual because not only was I a 4 but I was in a completely different Enneagram triad; similarly, I would only focus on my “core sins” within my Type (mine being jealousy), meaning I paid less attention to any other sins which didn’t fit into this Type — pride notwithstanding because pride freaks me out and I try to be hyper aware of it in myself (and surprise surprise, I still fail).
While most Christian Enneagram Coaches fully encourage people to see themselves as MORE than their Type, acknowledging that we all have some elements of all 9 Types, the reality is that we like to categorise things – even if what we’re categorising is, well, ourselves.
I knew full well that it was ridiculous to assume that my gifts couldn’t extend beyond my Type, just as it was ridiculous to ignore my capacity to commit every type of sin. But did this knowledge stop me from zoning in on only those positive and negative parts of myself as magnified by the Type 4w3 description? No. No it did not.
The Enneagram, by virtue of what it is, encourages us to do this. By focusing on a few prominent features within our personalities, we ignore the deep, complex tapestry that is Imago Dei.15 We contain multitudes, both of beauty and of sin, and when we “Type” ourselves, we draw the curtain on all of that which the demonic realm hopes we will ignore – namely, that we are both beautifully created children defined by Him and ALSO we can commit many a sin which Satan would prefer flies under our radar.
3) It distorts, not clarifies, our true understanding of others.
Over the years, the Enneagram became a fun way that I could classify people within moments of getting to know them. Before long, this tool become my predominant and eventually subconscious method which I’d use to understand others. Not all the time, mind you, but more often than I’d like to admit because I’d consistently find myself “stumped” by friends who never clearly fell into one clear Type category (proof that I was spending way too much time depending on this tool).
And while I’ve praised the Enneagram for its accuracy and its robust yet simple employment of clear language, it is this simplicity which, in fact, enabled me to take a reductionist rather than a complex view of my fellow human beings. It becomes easy to dismiss someone for a particularly frustrating aspect of their personality because “They’re just being a 2.”
But even though this deprecation is often light-hearted (I’ve frequently made “I’m such a 4” jokes when I get hyper emotional), the reality is that classifying others in such a way does more to shut them down than it does to open them up — even though the Christian Enneagram Coaches (and myself, mere days ago) would say the exact opposite. We make judgments (often accurate ones because Satan isn’t an idiot) about others based on solid patterns in their personality, but in doing so, we are using language to tell people who they are in a way which inherently bypasses God’s role as the CORE of their identity. We’re also saying that past performance inherently dictates future performance: that God’s redemptive power cannot have a profound impact on altering and sanctifying one’s personality.
In the way that the Enneagram was presented to me, I was told that it was literally designed to have the opposite effect. But when you breakdown the cognitive process that it bids us to employ, we see that it’s literally impossible for this tool to point us to Christ FIRST and open us UP to deeper understanding. Which leads me to my final point…
4) It creates a neurological “detour,” adding “extra steps” that we must take before reaching Christ on our quest for truth.
For all the usefulness of this “simple framework” and its “clear language,” I reflect back on my years absorbing content on the Enneagram and rarely did I see God brought in as the INITIAL source for defining who we are. Often, His role would come in at the end:
“You get overly jealous and emotional? That’s the Enneagram 4 in you. Your personality as an ‘individualist’ longs to be seen and heard as unique, deep, and different. Your goal, then, is to remind yourself that you are seen and uniquely loved by God.”
On the surface, this really doesn’t seem problematic at ALL. The formula appears to be simple: “You’re struggling with something? Here’s a truth from Scripture to help.”
But that’s not actually the formula that is taking place. The true mental journey that the Enneagram wants to take you on, is, in fact, something more like this: “You’re struggling with something? Look first to better understand yourself and WHY you do this thing as defined by your OWN wisdom under the Enneagram (and if Satan is lucky, you’ll get distracted and stay stuck in this self-actualisation step for a long, long time, because sometimes detours can take you away from your final destination), and THEN look to Christ to tend to this ‘core wound’ in you.”
Some people argue that the main issue with the Enneagram is that it puts our focus back onto ourselves rather than on Christ, and while I agree with this, I don’t find it a particularly compelling argument. Because the reverse argument would then be “Don’t try to understand yourself at all. Just look to Jesus all the time.”
What does that even mean? Self-awareness is what helps us recognise our faults and repent. Self-awareness is what helps us grow. The more I understand about God, the more He teaches me about myself. God declares that we are not simply filthy things deserving of no tenderness or understanding. Quite the opposite. He loved us so much that He sacrificed His Son for us. To that truth alone, we must look first to understand the core of our identity. But I digress.
Learning how to understand our own mind is not inherently bad. There is so much healing and truth to be found by unearthing our stories, memories, core motivators, and core struggles. Heck, I literally teach a course where I empower Christian writers to tell their unique stories.
But the problem, I believe, with the Enneagram, is that it encourages you to look first to ITS framework – and by extension YOUR limited wisdom of YOURSELF – to understand your identity, and THEN to Christ to help you.
This may seem utterly pedantic — a subtle, minute, hair-splitting distinction. But I literally just recorded an entire podcast episode in which C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape reminds us that “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one.”16
I am a relatively shrewd and Biblically literate Christian. It would require a VERY subtle and minute shift in truth to trick me for 10 years as I have thus been deceived. And indeed, the Enneagram, in all its subtle demonic detours cloaked as invitations into intimacy with Christ and others, has resulted in a knee-jerk mental response where I look first to myself (and my own understanding of self) as defined by the ENNEAGRAM before looking to Christ, not only to root myself in HIS definition of my identity but also, quite simply, to be nearer to Him as my ultimate source of wisdom of all that is good, all that is true, all that is lovely about myself and every other human on this planet.
A little wisdom from C.S. Lewis
If you will do me this final indulgence, I’m going to tell you a story about C.S. Lewis. I’ve been working on an article for Harper Collins about Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, the autobiography which details his conversion to the Christian faith, and I truly believe that it was the Lord’s divine timing that this truth about the Enneagram should be revealed to me at an exact time where I’m studying a book which magnifies, on a deep philosophical level, why the Enneagram is a lie.
The way we arrive at an idea has the power to lead us closer to or further away from God. And I think that all too often, we neglect the power that intellectual argument, philosophical logic, and the subtle, finite distinction can play in our relationship with Christ.
The religious vein of Lewis’ early life is shaped almost entirely by the reality of his thoughts and how those thoughts could be explained by the philosophies at his disposal. He transitioned from agnostic indifference to devout Christian to curious pagan to arrogant atheist, and finally, reluctantly, back to theism and ultimately Christianity again. Lewis defines himself as one of the most “reluctant converts” there ever was. But the crescendo of his autobiography, in which he describes the moment that he finally bends the knee, is prefaced with a long, internal, philosophical debate that was categorised by the power of the subtle, minute distinction.
Before I share with you this incredible (and somewhat difficult to understand) excerpt, I must preface it by explaining that Lewis’ entire story is underpinned by an experience of what he calls “Joy” (with a capital J, not to be confused with the joy we all know). This “Joy” was a sudden sense of deep longing that would overtake him unawares, once while staring at the toy garden that his brother had made with greenery from the actual garden, once while reading a book by George MacDonald, and so on. Each time, his entire being was overcome with a longing for an object of which he knew not. The feeling itself was so intense that it brought both euphoria and grief, and for years, the experience of that longing he called Joy was itself the object of his desire – so pleasurable was the feeling even while it brought him a deep sorrow – for almost as soon as this feeling would arrive, it would disappear again, leaving a hunger for the hunger in its wake. Lewis went to great lengths, chasing most bodily indulgences, in an attempt to find a scenario which would reawaken that sensation of Joy within him.
Once Lewis attended Oxford and began conversing with many of the literary and philosophical giants of the 20th Century, he found himself traveling down an intellectual road which saw him, eventually, understanding a finite distinction which was essential for fixing his ultimate gaze on Christ:
The next Move [from God against me on the chessboard] was intellectual, and consolidated the first Move. I read in Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity his theory of ‘Enjoyment’ and ‘Contemplation’. These are technical terms in Alexander’s philosophy; ‘Enjoyment’ has nothing to do with pleasure, nor ‘Contemplation’ with the contemplative life. When you see a table you ‘enjoy’ the act of seeing and ‘contemplate’ the table. Later, if you took up Optics and thought about Seeing itself, you would be contemplating the seeing and enjoying the thought. In bereavement you contemplate the beloved and the beloved’s death and, in Alexander’s sense, ‘enjoy’ the loneliness and grief; but a psychologist, if he were considering you as a case of melancholia, would be contemplating your grief and enjoying psychology. We do not ‘think a thought’ in the same sense in which we ‘think that Herodotus is unreliable’. When we think a thought, ‘thought’ is a cognate accusative (like ‘blow’ in ‘strike a blow’). We enjoy the thought (that Herodotus is unreliable) and, in so doing, contemplate the unreliability of Herodotus.
I accepted this distinction at once and have ever since regarded it as an indispensable tool of thought. A moment later its consequences – for me quite catastrophic – began to appear. It seemed to be self-evident that one essential property of love, hate, fear, hope, or desire was attention to their object. To cease thinking about or attending to the woman is, so far, to cease loving; to cease thinking about or attending to the dreaded thing is, so far, to cease being afraid. But to attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object. In other words the enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment; for in hope we look to hope’s object and we interrupt this by (so to speak) turning round to look at the hope itself. Of course the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity, but they are distinct and incompatible… The surest way of spoiling a pleasure was to start examining your satisfaction. But if so, it followed that all introspection is in one respect misleading. In introspection we try to look ‘inside ourselves’ and see what is going on. But nearly everything that was going on a moment before is stopped by the very act of our turning to look at it. Unfortunately, this does not mean that introspection finds nothing. On the contrary, it finds precisely what is left behind by the suspension of all our normal activities; and what is left behind is mainly mental images and physical sensations. The great error is to mistake this mere sediment or track or by-product for the activities themselves… This discovery flashed a new light back on my whole life. I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say ‘This is it,’ had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed. All that such watching and waiting ever could find would be either an image… or a quiver in the diaphragm… I knew now that they were merely the mental track left by the passage of Joy – not the wave but the wave’s imprint on the sand. The inherent dialectic of desire itself had in a way already shown me this; for all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, ‘It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?’17
What Lewis is describing here is essentially the difference between experiencing something vs THINKING about experiencing something. Truthfully, I’ve read this passage many times and still find it difficult to comprehend, but I believe with my whole heart that the Holy Spirit provided me just enough wisdom to understand how this concept – which served as an integral argument in pulling Lewis over the line into theism again – explains what happens in our minds when we use the Enneagram as a tool to define our identity.
For Lewis, what he mistook as a desire for Joy was in fact a road to a false end. Joy was, in truth, not the desired but the desire FOR only one thing. He realised, once nothing else could satisfy this longing, that Joy was in fact pointing to God Himself. Joy was not what Lewis needed: Joy was proof of his need for the God who made him.
Essentially, we mistake the “contemplated” for the “enjoyed.” In other words, we resort to the Enneagram as our first port of call when making sense of the human identity, mistakingly seeing it as the source of identity itself, when in truth, it is but a cheap counterfeit (all work of Satan is) of the true source of “enjoyed” identity: a product which can only result in “contemplating” the Great I Am, the Living God, the Alpha and Omega who was, and is, and is to come. No matter how deeply we attempt to contemplate our own identity, any wisdom we may glean is a mere “imprint in the sand” when our contemplation does not fix on the One in whom we live and breathe and find our being.
The Enneagram takes our eyes off of the God in whose image we are made and gets us contemplating how we experience that image through tools which do not point us to Him in the first but rather the last instance. Unfortunately, like Lewis’ desire for Joy, the moment you fixate on the desire and not on the thing desired, you lose. In similar terms, the moment we look to ourselves (as the Enneagram encourages us to do) to find our identity and not to the Author who is the true source of that identity, we are left with only this answer: “It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?”
Pardon my greed, but I prefer the real deal, not the imprint in the sand. And God, in His kindness, offers it to me in the form of Himself.
Why I’m renouncing the Enneagram
Anything of demonic wisdom is a half truth. And for some reason, the Enneagram has managed to fly under the radar of the Christian world for most of us, myself included, despite the fact that it shares its origins with the likes of horoscopes and tarot cards. Its scary accuracy is proof to me that it is rooted in SOME form of spiritual wisdom, but whose? Am I really willing to play with wisdom which has openly revealed itself to be coming from a source OTHER than Christ?
Remember, Satan tempted Jesus in the desert with his knowledge of Scripture.18 The whole point is that he knows how to play the game. And we’re not as smart as we think we are. I’ve been deeply humbled, recently, by what an ignorant fool I can be.
This isn’t me trying to be legalistic. By no means. I still believe that Christians who innocently use this tool with no understanding for its origins (like I did) are mercifully protected by a good God who loves us and will shield us, in our ignorance, from much of the enemy’s schemes.
But when we know better, should we not do better? For no other reason than that God has proven Himself to be trustworthy, good, and having our best interests at heart? Why exchange the truth about God for a lie?19 Why trade the real deal for a cheap counterfeit, no matter how useful and accurate it may be? Do we really want to use a tool that takes us on a detour from discovering our wholeness in anything or anyone other than Him? Will anything but His truth really satisfy our deepest desire to be fully known, seen, and loved? I think not.
And while there are a lot of Christians out here talking about this20, there aren’t enough. Far too many of us have been quite innocently deceived, but now that God has mercifully opened my eyes, as someone who literally podcasts about the schemes of Screwtape, I can’t NOT speak up.
The U.S. Catholic Church sums up their conclusion on the Enneagram perfectly:
An examination of the origins of enneagram teaching reveals that it does not have credibility as an instrument of scientific psychology and that the philosophical and religious ideas of its creators are out of keeping with basic elements of Christian faith on several points. Consequently, the attempt to adapt the enneagram to Christianity as a tool for personal spiritual development shows little promise of providing substantial benefit to the Christian community.
I urge you to replace the half-truths about our identity in the Enneagram with the whole-truths about our identity in Christ. I urge you to look to Christ for the insight and compassion you need to understand yourself and love your neighbour. I urge you to view yourself as a whole person who can reflect MANY facets of the image of God just as you can be susceptible to MANY facets of sin – not just the ones associated with your Type.
Ultimately, I encourage you to know that whatever wisdom Satan can offer us – no matter how beautifully or usefully presented – it will ultimately see us in bondage. Truly, when I am honest with myself now, I realise how much I had allowed the Enneagram to infiltrate my basic understanding of human identity. And that’s terrifying. Especially because I’d been happily believing that I was honouring the Church better by using this tool for 10 whole years.
I don’t share this with you to fear-monger you OR to flaunt my “enlightenment” (remember, I accepted this revelation kicking and screaming against my oh-so-patient mamma), or to shame you for your ignorance (if it weren’t for my mom’s determination, I too would be just as ignorant this very second). I share it because I have a platform, and God saw fit to reveal this truth to me now, so I am going to be obedient by telling you what I know:
The Enneagram is demonic. That is a heavy, dramatic statement, but do your own research (you can start with all my links in the footnotes) and you’ll find, like I did, that it’s true.
Resist the devil and he will flee, my friend. We are more than “Types” on a chart, no matter how useful, detailed, and robust that chart may be. We are Imago Dei, and it is for freedom that Christ has set us free.21
All my love,
P.S. If this essay has convicted you, PLEASE share it. I wrote it for the sole purpose of making the truth known to as much of the Church as God grants.
In this context, I’m using the word “pagan” for its similar definition as was used in the Old Testament – any ritual, religious traditions which were designed and practiced outside the command of Yahweh. While Paganism does also encompass a specific religion as we now know it, I wanted to clarify that I am using the more broad definition of the word here.
“Healthy,” in this context, would be defined as how much work you’d done on both a psychological and spiritual level to not only acknowledge and work on your negative behaviours but also to root yourself in Christ.
“We do not want merely to see beauty…. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it… to bathe in it.” C.S. Lewis. The Weight of Glory. Pg 42. Harper Collins. (1976).
Because I don’t want to encourage you to actually study the Enneagram, I’ll just add here for the sake of context that the Enneagram 9 is known as the “peacemaker,” and their core motivators are said to be a desire for peace – even at the expense of keeping their own thoughts and feelings unexpressed.
A Gilmore Girls reference. If you know, you know.
Time stamp 01:33 on the video
It is a common pattern that spiritual revelations, like that of the Enneagram, are revealed to “spiritual seekers,” (often Occultists) who believe that the “higher being” (demon) revealed this wisdom to them as a form of deep, secret knowledge which not everyone has access to. This form of revelation is not in keeping with the way that God communicates with us. Even when He would communicate to us through a specific person, like Moses or the prophets, the goal was always immediately for His message to be shared with His people – not for it to remain within a secret, elite group.
Latin for “in the image of God.”
C.S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters. Pg 61.Harper Collins. (1942)
C.S. Lewis. Surprised by Joy. Pp 265-268. Harper Collins.
“They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.” Romans 1:25
I’ve since discovered YouTube videos that show Alisa Childers and Jackie Hill Perry speaking out against the Enneagram.
Thanks for writing about this — I’ve been trying to tell Christians this for years and no one wants to hear it.
The entire problem with the occult is that it WORKS (which is why me & my wife were deeply involved in the occult/witchcraft/energywork until the Lord came and got us), and often works very well with great accuracy
Posted your article on one such recent comment thread here:
https://thesundaybestco.substack.com/p/why-you-secretly-never-spend-time/comment/94871010?utm_source=activity_item#comment-94997457?utm_source=activity_item
Praise God for dealing with this.
Here's one more for you (coming from an ex-New Ager):
The Enneagram symbol fits all the criteria for a manifestation circle (like the pentagram), as well as functioning like sacred geometry (which is often used with crystals or candles and also underpins astrology natal charts). The number 9 also figures pominently in many rituals and spells.
In other words: it actively puts people in bondage to the enemy in more ways than just taking their eyes off Christ. Those who use this walk right into divination through a cleverly disguised back door.