“Histoire de Jour”

"What's your soup du jour today?" "Cream of tomato, just like every day."

Yuval Harari notes that while it’s difficult to get 20 baboons to coordinate any organized effort that would produce a widespread effect, homo sapiens has been successful in creating narratives that have allowed our species to organize large-scale efforts to subdue and exploit every inch of the universe that we can reach. Propaganda for the superiority of the human race.. If 20 baboons had been able to listen to a convincing narrative and organize themselves, ”The Planet of the Apes'' might be our reality.

In the history of religions, creating and propagating a supernatural narrative spearheaded the seemingly invincible superiority of monotheism. Stories of the resurrection of Jesus follow Moses’s Exodus, which scholarship has shown to be rabbinic creation after the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple. Then about 600 years after Jesus, the Prophet was visited by the Archangel Gabriel and set the course for the world to experience a more militant version of monotheism. In another part of the world, stories about the Enlightenment of the Buddha touch on another side of the human psyche that propelled the practice of meditation to legitimacy. 

There are many narratives in the political sphere from Mao Zedong’s Long March to Lincoln’s studying law by candlelight; they also help solidify support of large numbers of people to secure a common goal.

The Origin of the Enneagram

As one of  Dr. Claudio Naranjo’s first students when he introduced the system organized as a nine-pointed diagram that he’d learned from Oscar Ichazo, I’ve had a long standing interest in what’s become known as the Western transmission of the Enneagram. Though I’ve written about it before, recently I’ve become fascinated by competing narratives about its esoteric roots. There is really very little difference here from the phenomenon that Harari describes. The proponents of particular styles of enneagram work have crafted creation narratives to take their products to the marketplace. At least one side effect of enlightening mankind is to separate you from your money.

This brand of histoire de jour is at best self-serving, pieced together from bits and pieces of hearsay evidence, and in some cases, outright fraud. 

Here is a preposterous statement on the first page of Helen Palmer’s website for her Narrative Tradition.

With a history of centuries, the Enneagram is arguably the oldest human development system on the planet.  During the past decade, the system has undergone a renewal of scholarly attention within the context of current personality typologies. 

In the interest of the scholarly attention that Ms. Palmer lauds, here’s the clear, distinct, identifiable historical beginning of the Narrative tradition of the Enneagram. The history of centuries condensed into something a bit shy of 50 years. I was present, voila!

In the late Spring of 1975,. I found myself in a large living room of a non-descript house on Berkeley’s Arlington. Kathy Speeth had organized a series of nine evening presentations about the Enneagram for the “therapeutic” community. In attendance 15 or so therapists who are interested in the Enneagram but not members of Naranjo’s SAT group. Among them was Helen Palmer, who had been hearing about the Enneagram from Claudio’s students in her own practice of psychic readings.

I remember these conversations quite clearly. They were a departure from the usual work of Naranjo's SAT group. Speeth and Bob Ochs had asked me to be on a ‘panel’ of Seven’s, ego ‘Plan’ as both Ichazo and Naranjo referred to the point “Gluttony.” This was the first time several people of the same fixation spoke in front of a group and answered questions (the identical format of Narrative Tradition). There was at least one evening for each of the 9 major fixations.

Naranjo directed the sessions, laying a foundation with descriptions of the 9 points. In itself this was not unusual, but his comments were definitely tailored for an audience of trained psychologists, and not the more conversational tone aimed at a student’s personal work that he normally used. The authentic tone of self observation may have been present, but I felt that the obligation of explanation (perhaps performance) distorted the feeling of each point.

Other enneagram enthusiasts proffer other histoires and sources. For example:

• Egyptian Gnosis, apparently because in Heliopolis, the center of worship of the Ennead, there were nine deities of ancient Egyptian Mythology about which we know next to nothing. 

• Some proponents of the system trace the variations of the Enneagram symbol to the sacred geometry of Pythagorean mathematicians and mystical mathematics, but Pythagoras left no clear teachings though apparently he once went to Heliopolis with its nine gods, or something.

• Plotinus’s Enneads. There! A use of the Greek word for 9. However we have to credit a dude named Porphyry for the somewhat artificial division of Plotinus’s writings into six groups of nine. Thus I think that connecting the Enneagram with neo-Platonic thought is a stretch too far.

• Adam and the Kabbalistic Trees--leave no stone unturned, and rope in Jewish seekers.

• The Secret Teachings of Jesus (via the Desert Fathers)--sure why not, but far more persuasive is the Jesuit connection. The frontispiece of the Arithmologia by the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher(1601–1680), published in 1665, shows a figure not identical but somewhat similar to the Enneagram.

• “Originally created in 1915 by philosopher George Gurdjieff.” This historian sources G. I Gurdjeiff and the Naqshbandi Sufi order a little more than 100 years ago. However there is absolutely zero evidence in the voluminous writings of Gurdjieff that he ever used the Enneagram in the way the Naranjo, Ichazo et al use it. Zero.

• I am particularly fond of the story that a book fell from a shelf in the esoteric library of Ocsar Ichazo’s uncle in Bolivia and opened to a page with the 9 pointed diagram.

• Claudio Naranjo claims his source of the teaching were mystical experiences in the Arican desert. He claims the historic origins of the Enneagram are esoteric gnosticism and occultism from channeled material gained from automatic writing and then verified through observation.

While I am persuaded by Professor Harari’s embrace of history as a means of coordinating mass human efforts. I am equally suspicious of lesser enterprises employing the same methodology. These people are selling snake oil. They are using the “histoire de jour” like a fine French restaurant getting rid of yesterday’s leftovers for a profit.

“Something is missing” is a constant storyline running through all these narratives. We lose our connection with the divine and have to reconnect, and in most cases, are unable to complete the circuit without some assistance that costs money. It is one answer to a felt experience of the human condition, but it is just the most accepted answer. There are others, but their popularizers were not as adept as the ones that captured humankind’s attention.

At best these histoires are "Cream of tomato, just like every day." But probably they’re closer to yesterday’s leftovers..