I’m in a discussion with someone about the virtues, and he initially linked them to Christianity, which got me cringing because of course they go back beyond Christianity to Socrates and Pythagoras, and (because I’ve studied the Enneagram), I’d say they go back in their hellenstic form to the Egyptians. In his defence, he knows Christianity appropriated the virtues, it’s just that Christianity is the closest frameword for the virtues to the moden mind.
I sent him the Enneagram’s list of 9 virtues and 9 vices and he asked me to explain so I spent about a couple hours this morning writing and googling, tracing them back to the Hindu/Arabic invention of the decimal system around 3000 BCE to the Egyptian Ennead (their nine deities that created the world) to Pythagoras’ connection between the numbers one to nine and their respective divine properties, and the Greek’s overarching enjoinder to study geometry, mathematics, music, and astronomy in order to approach the divine and understand reality in its purest form. This reality is outward expressing (knowledge of the divine) and inward expressing (knowledge of self). Of course, Plato continued in his footsteps with his writing on the One and the Many, and after Jesus’ time, Plotinus continued Plato’s work with neoplatonism and wrote The Enneads. I’m skipping over a lot of steps, but suffice to say the numbers one to nine have had a profound impact on hellenistic civilization, including Kabballah, which is how, in the 1940’s, one of the original Enneagram mystics, Oscar Ichazo, originally connected the nine divine properties in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life to the nine points on the Enneagram symbol. Long story short, each of the nine Enneagram types has a divine virtue and vice, although in Enneagram circles, the vices are sometimes called passions, as they’re associated with mental, emotional and instinctual habits that are so essetial to our egoic structure that they are embedded in us at a cellular level; they are the nine types’ addictive patterns.
Ichazo, however, was one of two mystics who stumbled upon the Enneagram in the 1940’s. The other one was George Gurdjieff, and he came at the Enneagram from a different route- through vast travels, eventually to Egypt and ultimately to a secretive monastery in what is now Afghanistan (although no one really knows how Ichazo found the Enneagram symbol, and it has been suggested that he somehow took it from Gurdjieff, but we don’t know that and it’s now to late to know for sure, as Ichazo died a few years ago). This led me to sending my friend the link to the Gurdjieff film, Meetings with Remarkable Men, and I started watching it a little bit this morning. This film is beautiful in its crackling sparseness. There is not much dialogue, but what is said is profound. At around 14 minutes in, young Gurdjieff is talking to his father and a priest about what he wants to do when he grows up, and it’s mentioned that his family wants him to become a priest, but he is interested in science. The priest tells him to study medicine, therefore, because “body and soul depend on one another”. Then his father adds, “Become yourself, then God and the devil don’t matter.”
I had to stop watching at that point because the impact of those words hit me. Having not gotten along with my father because he used religion against me, I changed my last name several years ago to Field (which I only use sometimes). I got the word Field from a line in a Rumi poem:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
- Rumi
When I chose that last name, it made perfect sense to me, but as the years have separated me from that thought process, I was having trouble articulating what I meant by associating myself with that field where I wanted to metaphorically meet my father. Now that I hear this line from Gurdjieff’s dad, I’m floored by how it brings me back to Rumi’s original meaning. Study the self and you will no longer be bogged down by god or the devil. I’m fascinated with this idea and will think more about it.